Stasis and Plague

Southern Political Science Association

Stasis and Plague: Thucydides on the Dissolution of SocietyAuthor(s): Clifford OrwinReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Politics, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Nov., 1988), pp. 831-847Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Southern Political Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2131381 .

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Stasis and Plague: Thucydides on the Dissolution of Society

Clifford Orwin University of Toronto

We think of Thucydides as an analyst of war and so primarily of international politics. He is equally concerned, however, with the consequences of war for domestic politics, and there is one aspect of his treatment of the latter which remains unsurpassed in the whole history of political thought-his analysis of the disintegration of society under unbearable stress. Here I attempt a detailed interpretation and comparison of his treatments of two phenomena, the stasis or civil strife bred by the war which raged throughout the Hellenic world, and the more local but no less lethal plague of Athens. Stasis displays the consequences of the radical "politicization" of life; the plague, those of its depoliticization. As the extremes between which all normal politics lies, these help us to grasp its conditions and limits.

Vhen we read Thucydides it is usually with our minds on foreign policy. His subject is a war; domestic affairs figure in his work only insofar as they affect the course of war or are affected by it. Yet it is above all as an analyst of this interaction that he speaks so directly to our own unquiet century. In the words of Czeslaw Milosz (1983, p. 81): "People always live within a certain order and are unable to visualize a time when that order might cease to exist. The sudden crumbling of all current notions and criteria is a rare occurrence and is characteristic of only the most stormy periods in history. . . . In general . . . the Nineteenth Century did not experience the rapid and violent changes of the next century, whose only possible analogy may be the time of the Peloponnesian War, as we know it from Thucydides."

Ours is not the first troubled epoch to find Thucydides timely. That of Catiline and Caesar was one, and that of Cromwell and Hobbes another. Hobbes was of course Thucydides' greatest admirer among political phi- losophers, as well as his greatest English translator. Without suggesting that Thucydides followed anything like Hobbes's resolutive-compositive method, we may say that he foreshadows the political masterpiece of that

I wish to thank the John M. Olin Center for the Study of the Theory and Practice of Democ- racy at the University of Chicago, and its co-directors, Allan Bloom and Nathan Tarcov; the Earhart Foundation; the National Endowment for the Humanities; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial and other support of this project. I am indebted to my referees for helpful criticism.

JOURNAL OF POLITICS, Vol. 50, No. 4, November 1988 C 1988 by the University of Texas Press



832 Clifford Orwin

method, Hobbes's presentation of the state of nature. At the same time, as I will argue, his sounding of the lowest political depths, while unique among classical treatments of politics, and seemingly uniquely modern among them, shares the crucial features of classical thought which offer an alternative to modernity.

Thucydides provides not one but two accounts of the breakdown of civil society. These, his treatments of the plague of Athens (2 47-58)' and of the stasis or civil strife which swept much of the Greek world during the war (3 82-83 2), are among the best known of his passages but also, oddly enough, among the least commented upon.3 While the critics may have felt that such horrors spoke for themselves, they also may have shied away from Thu- cydides' analyses as intense to the point of opacity. The passage on stasis is of a density which strains the limits of language (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Thucydides, chaps. 31-33; but cf. Macleod, 1979, pp. 60-66), and that on the effects of the plague, briefer but no less compressed. Having exam- ined them in turn, I will attempt what I believe to be the first systematic comparison of the two.

STASIS

Stasis is a pervasive theme of classical political philosophy (cf. Plato, Re- public 545a-569c; Aristotle, Politics, 1301a19-1321b3).' No other Greek thinker provides, however, an account of the descent into anarchy or worse which may accompany stasis at its most bitter, and so none accords this abyss the importance that it enjoys in Thucydides. In his presentation, the worst seems to achieve a bearing on the guidance of political life which in theirs is reserved for the best. It is thus that he most anticipates Hobbes and modern treatments of politics generally, and this is the place to begin in assessing the implications of his approach.

Thucydides' thematic statement on stasis follows his account of a particular instance of it, that at Kerkyra (Latin Corcyra, modern Corfu) during the fifth year of the war (3 70-81, cf. Kagan, 1974, pp. 175-81; Wilson, 1987,

II cite Thucydides according to the standard form: book, chapter (i.e., paragraph), and, when necessary, sentence (e.g., 3 82.2); except where otherwise noted, I follow the Greek text of Bodin, Romilly, and Weil (1963-1972). Translations are my own. As the passage on stasis is notoriously difficult and renderings of it vary widely, the reader may wish to consult, in addition to the versions to be found in translations of the whole of Thucydides, the efforts of Gomme (1956, pp. 383-85), Grene (1965, pp. 9-12), and Pouncey (1980, p. 33 and n. 5 [pp. 171-72]).

21 follow most scholars, ancient and modern, in rejecting 3 84 as spurious. 3I know of no schematic treatment of Thucydides' presentation of the political consequences

of the plague. English-speaking political scientists are fortunate that the five best treatments of stasis are in English: Strauss (1964, pp. 146-47), Edmunds (1975), Macleod (1979), Cogan (1981, pp. 149-54), and Connor (1984, pp. 95-105). I have learned from all five; overall my approach to Thucydides owes most to Strauss, although my errors are mine alone.

4For a provocative recent treatment of Aristotle's discussion, see Davis (1986).



Stasis and Plague: Thucydides on the Dissolution of Society 833

pp. 87-106). That account, a masterpiece of Thucydidean narrative (cf. Con- nor, 1984, pp. 95-100) begins with disagreement between the few and the many over Kerkyra's allegiance in the war, leading to perversion of the laws of the city, both sacred and profane, in the service of factional ends, then to a bloody oligarchic coup d'etat, and finally to open and desperate class warfare spurred by the intervention of fleets from both Sparta and Athens. Following an attempt at conciliation by the decent (if naive) Athenian commander Nikostratos and a brilliant holding action by his small Athenian squadron against a much larger Spartan one, the ascendancy of Athens assures that of the Kerkyraian democrats, and these, with the complicity of Nikostratos' successor on the scene, proceed by means of treachery and sacrilege to the slaughter of the oligarchs.

It is these events which evoke Thucydides' longest comment on any aspect of the war (3 82-83), a comment unique as well in echoing his statement at the outset of the work that its purpose is to chart the enduring contours of politics (cf. 3 82.2 with 1 22.4 and 3 82.1 (ekinjthj) with 1 1. 2 (kinesis [Stahl, 1966, pp. 117-18 and n. 42]). Thucydides does not doubt that stasis is a per- manent blot on human life, to which men are subject by their very nature and so until such time as nature relents. He is not then suggesting that by reading him we will learn how to avoid it.

For Thucydides the war which is his comprehensive theme is related to the excesses of stasis as a quasi-necessary condition; such excesses while rare in peacetime are next to normal in wartime. He here inverts the tendency of today's liberals, who holding that peace is the natural condition of men because men are naturally peaceable, are likely to ascribe war to what they call extremism, rather than extremism to war. Thucydides, for his part, sees no need to invoke domestic pathology to explain the prevalence of war among states, but he does stress how the rigors of war aggravate domestic pathology. At 2 17, for instance, he notes an ominous pronouncement of the Del- phic oracle to the Athenians: "Better the Pelasgian ground left unworked." The Athenians had in fact left this otherwise prime property vacant, but wartime crowding of the city now compelled them to build on it. In commenting on the forebodings thus aroused, Thucydides vindicates the truth of the oracle, but not as we might expect. Most Athenians naturally took the warning to mean that evils would result from the occupation of the ground.

"And in my opinion the oracle came to pass in the sense opposite to the received one. For the misfortunes of the city did not arise from the illegal occupation, but the necessity of the occupation from the war, and the oracle, although without specifying this, foresaw that no good would attend the day when this lot came to be occupied" (2 17).

The transgression was ominous with a view not to its consequences but to that of which it was a consequence; not for any evil which it entailed but as a symptom of the evil which entailed it (Strauss, 1964, p. 178). A pious society



834 Clifford Orwin

is a fortunate society, but not so much fortunate because it is pious as pious because it is fortunate. This prepares us for Thucydides' statement on the conditions of stasis: "In times of peace neither side had the excuse or the willingness to call in the two great powers, but when the war was on, al- liances were easily obtained by those on both sides who, plotting a new order of things, sought through calling in outsiders both to harm their opponents and to acquire power for themselves. . .. In times of peace and prosperity both cities and individuals have minds of a better cast, from not falling subject to unwelcome necessities. But war, filching away the easy provision of the everyday, is a violent teacher, which brings most men's tempers level with their fortunes" (3 82.1,2).

As Thucydides differs from our liberals, so does he from our conservatives, for whom the worst evils of society are symptoms of moral or religious decay. For him the decline of piety and the other virtues is a symptom of the worst evils of society, evils which nothing in most people, and surely not their piety, can withstand. Men are not an evil but a wretched lot; they are play- things of the moment. Accordingly, what stands between most cities and their disintegration is not a sound regime or civic education: these, Thucydi- des knows, are not the real glue of many real societies. Rather lhe stresses the rhythm of daily life-the whir and hum of the insistent, recurrent needs of the body. For as long as these are smoothly greased, most men will put up with the status quo, or at any rate not seek to overturn it at the risk of their lives and fortunes. This may sound surprisingly modern, as if Thucydides accepted the primacy of economics over politics or of prosperity over virtue. In a sense, he does, for he sees that most men lack virtue in adversity and that few care for the body politic half so much as they care for their own. Unlike most modern thinkers, however, he does not promote prosperity as a reliable hedge against stasis: prosperity, presupposing as it does peace, is for that very reason wholly unreliable. Thucydides moreover regards prosperous societies as no less inclined to war by their wealth than poor ones are by their poverty (cf. 3 45 with 8 24 and 40). His final preference is therefore indeed for that rare regime which rests on moderation rather than prosperity, of which I will say more below.

The most celebrated aspect of Thucydides' presentation of stasis is his discussion of the debasement of language. "And they scrambled, in their judg- ments, the usual evaluations of actions as expressed by the words for them" (3 82.4).5 With no offense to the shade of Orwell, newspeak is a discovery of

5Cf. Hobbes's translation (1975, p. 222): "The received value of names imposed for significa- tion of things was changed into arbitrary." On the proper construction of this difficult and con- troversial sentence see most recently Hogan (1980), Proctor (1980, p. 204), and Wilson (1982). Hogan, noting (p. 139) that "scholars have usually taken this as an assertion that the political partisans changed the meanings of the words they used, and by this is understood the denotations of the words, their referents," goes on to propose that not only might a mindless daring




Thucydides. Indeed he presents it in an even more terrifying light: not as something imposed from above, but as altogether spontaneous, an authentic voice from out of the political whirlwind. Not Moscow, but Beirut and Belfast, and lately "Khalistan," are world leaders in newspeak in this Thu- cydidean sense.6

As I have suggested, Thucydides presents the effects of stasis in terms of transposition or inversion (Edmunds, 1975): "A mindless daring was held to be the courage of a loyal comrade, caution bred of forethought an excuse for cowardice, good sense a cloak of unmanliness, and an intelligent grasp of all sides of a question inability to act on any."

The suggestion here as to the structure of virtue implicitly foreshadows Aristotle's (Nicomachean Ethics 2 5-9) while offering some useful rigor to our own vague notion of "extremism" as the root political evil. "Extremism" in a strict sense indeed defines the mentality of stasis. The excess of a dis- position comes to be admired in place of its mean, and the mean, to be de- spised as the deficiency of this excess. Having supplanted the mean as the standard, however, the extreme continuously feeds upon itself: it enjoins a striving for ever fresher extremes, a frenzied struggle to exceed one's rivals at excess itself.

Thus was the way opened to the equation of rage with manliness and of brutality with trustworthiness. And so too the premium now placed on plotting and the foiling of plots, while he who contrived to avoid the necessity for either, i.e., to restore a situation of tolerable trust between the parties, was reviled as disloyal and cowardly: "In a word, to thwart him who intended evil was praised, and likewise to suggest [it] to him who was contemplating none." The distinction between foiling and fostering transgression has dis- solved; there is no community of lawful men warding off the attempts of the lawless, but a general recourse to lawlessness with no distinction made between defending and assailing.

have come to be considered comradely courage, and caution bred of forethought an excuse for cowardice, but that the first of these qualities might have come to be praised, and the third to be blamed, under their usual names. This I find unpersuasive and unsupported by Thucydides' elaboration of his meaning. Wilson, rejecting Hogan's suggestion, rejects also the usual render- ing of this sentence as something like "words changed their meaning," which phrasing implies precisely that irrational daring became a term of praise and prudent hesitation one of blame. Whatever the proper meaning of "meaning," what scholars have meant and readers have read by "words changed their meaning" is a change in "tbe denotations of words, their referents," and, as Thucydides proceeds to make clear, such is what in fact occurred-with some necessary qualifications (cf. Strauss, 1964, p. 147, n. 8).

6For an opposing view see Muri (1969), who interprets Thucydides as decrying the manipulation of words by leaders and cliques and likens the degradation of language described to that of German under National Socialism. Certainly Thucydides does decry such manipulation (cf. 3 82.7, discussed below), but presents it as only one aspect of the problem, and not the main one.



836 Clifford Orwin

Thucydides now proceeds to note in short order the collapse of the three fundamental Greek institutions: kinship, human law, and divine law.

And so even the bond of kinship became more extraneous (alliotroteron) than that of faction, because of the greater readiness of the latter to dare no matter what. For such asso- ciations aimed not at advantage' within the established laws, but at self-aggrandizement in defiance of them, and the faith of the members in one another drew its strength not so much from the divine law [sc. of oaths] as from their common complicity in lawlessness. Fair words on the part of opponents were greeted with precautionary deeds by those who had the upper hand, rather than with magnanimity (gennaiotiti). To avenge oneself on someone counted for more than to avoid harm to oneself in the first place. Oaths of reconciliation, if any there were, were sworn by the two parties only because they were mo- mentarily at a loss, and were otherwise powerless. When opportunity offered, he who first made bold to seize it and to take his opponent off his guard held it sweeter thus to avenge himself by imposing on the other's trust than to do so openly, calculating not only the safety of this course, but that by prevailing through treachery he carried off the prize for intelligence (3 82.6-7).

I will comment on the collapse of each institution in turn. First, kinship. It makes excuses ('I can't do that to him"), faction none; stopping short was out of fashion and so too were excuses to do so. Again it must be stressed that this is a symptom, not a cause of stasis, and Thucydides, in his narrative of events at Kerkyra, has already suggested that it is a routine one: "Death thus raged in all its forms, and, as tends to happen at such a time, there was no length to which matters did not go. Father killed son, and men were dragged from the altars or slain at them, and some were even walled up in the temple of Dionysus and died there" (3 80.5).

Not that such developments are any less dire for being routine. For standing by one's philoi, one's "dear ones"-originally, one's kin, later one's friends-was the true north of the Greek moral compass (cf. Plato, Republic 332a-b). Its collapse represents the dissolution of the living bedrock of life as usual in the Greek city (cf. Connor, 1984, p. 99). Politically, of course, the attachment to one's own is ambiguous: treatments as varied as Perikles' funeral oration (2 35-46) and the Republic itself (461e-465c) reprove it as the foremost barrier to political community, the primal spring of corruption and injustice. (And the more so in that even its dignity rivals that of the public: as the late Mayor Daley once admonished critics of his nepotism, a father has an obligation to give his sons a good start in life.) Here in Thucydides, however, the blood tie appears in a different light: there are worse things than devotion to family, namely devotion to party, the effectual truth of such political zeal as overwhelms attachment to the family.

Thucydides proceeds in the passage cited from the decay of subpolitical restraints to that of political ones. The erosion of law is identical with that of

Reading, with Dionysius, Valla, Stahl, and Poppo, ophelidi (dative of purpose and so parallel to pleonexidi at the end of the sentence) for ophelids (genitive) of the manuscript accepted by Weil and Romilly.




the public realm, or, if one prefers, of the common good, where this notion is seen for what it at least mostly is: something the nub of which consists not in some lofty substantive good transcending those available to men privately, but merely in keeping the struggle for private good within reasonable bounds. By hedging these bounds with evils-the punishments that the laws inflict upon transgressors-the common good enforces upon the citizens a salutary (and shaky) moderation. By restricting the advantage of each the laws serve that of all; the greatest good that laws do, they do simply by being laws. Unfor- tunately this truth appears for all to see only with the breakdown of law.

And from human laws Thucydides proceeds to the divine. However necessary to a decent society, piety, like kinship, figures here only as a promi- nent victim of stasis, not as any sort of bulwark against it. In the stasis at Kerkyra, piety very early comes to be perverted to factional ends (3 70.4-6), after which we hear only of lying oaths and breaches of the right of asylum, to say nothing of carnage in holy places. Politically piety mattered to the Greeks above all as the foundation of oaths, so it is on the emptiness of all sworn guarantees that Thucydides dwells here. In times of stasis, oaths are perverted and figure only as means of the very deceit against which they are supposed to guard. Kinship, laws, piety: cities boast no peaks to which to repair in times of stasis. This, not advice on staying high and dry, is the point of Thucydides' treatment here.

In the course of expounding the weakness of oaths, Thucydides notes also the ascendancy of considerations of revenge over those of safety. (A concern with safety is one source of the power of oaths.) While men ran no risks for the sake of noble generosity, they did run them for the sake of vengeance. Under stasis, the very narrowing of the focus of life to the demands of pre- serving it from one moment to the next involves men in an endless spiral of bloodshed, in which all other appetites cede to a thirst for vengeance, prefer- ably vengeance preceded by reconciliation.8 For intelligence having emancipated itself from decency, nothing gains such a reputation for the one as a deed which in normal times would have shocked the other. Even ordinarily, Thucydides suggests, men tend to cherish cleverness to the detriment of virtue (3 82.7); amid stasis, the foulest murder impresses merely as the neatest and sweetest.

All of which enables us to state the cardinal calamity of stasis: trust disap- pears from society, and with it society itself. Stasis destroys nothing less than the infrastructure of civil trust. Seem as it might that trust among citizens must depend upon their treating one another decently, in fact it is rather their decent behavior which proves to turn upon their mutual trust. This is

8Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 6: ". . . Sudden Dejection is the passion that causeth WEEP- ING; and is caused by such accidents, as suddenly take away some vehement hope, or some prop of their power .... Therefore some Weep for the losse of Friends; Others for their un- kindnesse; others for the sudden stop made to their thoughts of revenge, by Reconciliation."



838 Clifford Orwin

not to deny that the truly virtuous would trust each other, or that virtue is the only sound basis for trust. It is only to say that in actual cities the basis for trust is much shakier. What passes for virtue depends upon trust, which in turn depends upon mutual interests which as such give rise to mutual restraint. It is not decency which holds most men in check, but rather such ulterior constraints as make decency pay.

After having expounded at length the manifold horrors of stasis, Thucydi- des offers the briefest of statements as to its basis in human nature: "To blame for all of which was the pursuit of rule out of greed and ambition, from which arose the zeal of those once embroiled in contention" (3 82.8). After what has preceded this statement may seem both bald and trite. It is not. Thucydides here anticipates the claim of this or that stasis-monger to have acted zealously for the public good-which he had loved not wisely but too well.

The leading men in the cities on both sides, each with fine-sounding names, the one extolling political equality for the multitude and the other moderation through the rule of the best, made prizes of those common concerns which they served in speech, and stopping at nothing in their contest to overreach one another, they dared the most terrible things, and pushed their revenges further still, not respecting the bounds of what was just and in the interest of the city, but on both sides restraining themselves no further than pleased them at the moment. Thus neither side set any store by piety, but the use of fair words to accomplish some malicious deed was much applauded. As for the citizens caught in the middle, they perished, either becaue they would not join the fray or from envy lest they be spared (3 82.8).

Many today, impressed by the examples of Russia, Germany, Spain, and China (and, more recently, Pol Pot's Cambodia and ubiquitous terrorism of both right and left), would stress ideology as the font of the worst domestic evils, meaning by ideology lofty visions such as murderers sincerely es- pouse.9 Such a view both extenuates the crimes of the ideologues, who appear misguided philanthropists rather than lovers of imposing their wills, and inculpates ideology as itself the cause of their atrocities. Thucydides appears to demur. He would not have us assign the excesses he describes to misguided zeal for the public good: the hotter the zeal and the grander the professions, the greater the indifference to the public good.

This long chapter on stasis is followed by a brief but climactic one. We must try to grasp how it is climactic: how what it describes is the crowning evil of such a throng of evils.

Thus every form of malignancy took root in the Hellenic world as a result of the stasis, and ingenuousness, in which innate nobility plays so great a part, was laughed into obliv- ion; but the frame of mind that prevailed far and wide was that of two armies distrustfully arrayed against each other. For there was no word binding enough, no oath terrible enough to reconcile them, and all alike, when they got the upper hand, calculating that no

9For such an interpretation of the stasis passage, see Cogan (1981, pp. 149-54), who ascribes the extremism of the partisans to "the abstractness of [their] ideological orientation."




lasting security was to be expected, rather than bring themselves to trust others did what they could to protect themselves. And it was the meaner minds who were most likely to prevail, for fearing their own deficiencies and the wits of their adversaries (lest they be overmatched in argument and the others in the resourcefulness of their wits contrive to pre-empt them), they boldly resorted to deeds. Their opponents, on the other hand, in their contemptuous confidence that they would anticipate them and that they themselves had no need to obtain by deed what was theirs for the taking by wit, were likely to be caught off guard and destroyed (3 83).

Stasis is a war of all against all, in which no one can trust anyone, the pre- emptive strike is de rigueur, and those who might seem superior to others fare if anything even worse than they. All these aspects of Thucydides' account resurface in Hobbes's state of nature. This warrants a closer comparison of the two, with an eye to clarifying the distinctiveness of Thucydides' approach.

Hobbes argues for what we may fairly describe as a negative political orientation. We ought to take our political bearings not by what attracts us as best, but by what repels us as worst. What is worst is no government, and so we should confess that all government, as the negation of no government, is good government. For Hobbes that than which nothing is worse is the state of nature or of anarchy; in this he and Thucydides are at one. Yet Hobbes's political counsels are much the more dogmatic of the two, in part because his orientation is much more dogmatically negative. This will appear from com- paring their presentations of anarchy itself.

For Hobbes the crowning horror of the war of all against all is that with which it threatens all, a violent death at the hands of others. This threat is the great equalizer; in particular it levels those who pretend to some politically relevant superiority to others. Since all men are in fact equally capable of inflicting this greatest evil on another, "and they are equals who can do equal things to each other" (De Cive, 1.3), those who pretend to some natural title to rule are not in fact better entitled than others. As equal (and therefore as impotent) by nature as you or I (and all the more vulnerable by virtue of their foolish vainglory), those who fancy themselves nature's anointed are in for a thundering comeuppance. Needless to say, their fall will not pain the rest of us. What angers or touches us in Hobbes's account is rather the fate of the humble and harmless, trapped in the crossfire of contending ambitions.

Now this negative orientation owes something to Thucydides, whom Hobbes so admired. He too shows that the chasms that yawn beneath us in politics are deeper than the peaks that beckon us are high. Such, for ex- ample, is the basis of his sympathy for Sparta, a regime which aimed less at achieving the political best than at avoiding the political worst-vulnerabil- ity to the threat posed by its Helots (4 80; cf. 8 24 with 8 40). The passage on stasis confirms, I think, better than any other in the work, how deeply mind- ful is Thucydides of the benefits of Spartan sobriety. He notes that stasis con- vulsed "so to speak" all of Hellas; in fact it engulfed Athens but not Sparta (cf.



840 Clifford Orwin

1 18.1 with 2 65, 6 53-61, 8 47-98). Nothing bespeaks Sparta's greatness like the evils which her regime averts, evils the reliable absence of which outweighs all other political goods. Being negative, however, this achieve- ment is inconspicuous (1 10): Athens abounds in brilliant spokesmen like Perikles and Alkibiades, to say nothing of splendid and spectacular deeds, but the case for Sparta needs a Thucydides to do justice to the horrors of civil war.

Yet Thucydides does not simply share the negative orientation of Hobbes. His emphasis is decidedly different. Book 3, Chap. 83 anticipates Hobbes in drawing our attention to the dire consequences of stasis for men who pretend to be importantly better than others. Its tone, however, is not captious, but poignant. Here there is no attempt at debunking. Rather Thucydides registers, evidently with equal sympathy, the fates of two kinds of superiority which appear to be wholly incompatible: a noble guilelessness, on the one hand, and a subtle wiliness, on the other.

Guilelessness is one possible translation of to euithes-I finally chose "ingenuousness"-into which to gennaion largely enters. To euithes is a vener- able term for simplicity and integrity, which commonly occurs in classical Greek only in its ironic sense of simpleton. As for to gennaion, meeting it in Plato or Aristotle, we translate it as good birth, to show that like those writ- ers we distinguish between it and true virtue. It is the old aristocratic term for human worth, the root of which conveys that this is something inherited. Thucydides here uses old-fashioned terms to designate old-fashioned virtues, which in the present context cannot but evoke nostalgia.

As for to polytropon, Thucydides' term for the wiliness feared but finally vanquished by the meaner minds, this is actually its only occurrence as a noun in classical prose. As an adjective it had supplied Homer's famous epi- thet for Odysseus, "of many turns," which is to say resourceful. It too then is an old-fashioned term, although the type of man to whom it applies is anything but hidebound. Though Thucydides uses it only here, it is easy to think of characters of his to whom this term might apply, such as the Athe- nian general Demosthenes, or even the Athenians collectively as Perikles praises them (2 41.1), or as the Corinthians blame them (1 70). The present context clearly locates this man of to polytropon at the opposite extreme from him of to euithes and to gennaion-the one is the man most dreaded by the factious intriguers, the other the man most scorned by them.

And yet the extremes meet: that appears to be the point of this passage, and that is where its pathos lies. For Thucydides the crowning evil of stasis, notwithstanding that it menaces all, is that those whom it menaces most are superior men, to whom in this worst of human situations their very superi- orities are detrimental. The man of to euithes is moderate without neces- sarily being intelligent; for him of to polytropon intelligence is all in all. But for intelligence to sever itself from moderation is for it to enter upon a fool's game, which it can win only by assimilating itself to folly (cf. Macleod, 1979, pp. 59-60). The straightest of men and the most devious, this latter-day Ajax




and Odysseus, have a common interest in avoiding stasis, and Thucydides by so warning them shows himself impartially a friend to both.

PLAGUE

The plague of Athens descended on the city in the second spring of the war and raged unabated for two years. Having discussed the obscurity of its origins, the course of its symptoms (his description of which is deservedly famous for its clinical precision), and the susceptibility of scavengers to it (2 47-50), Thucydides turns to its effects on the private lives of the various classes of those touched by it (2 47-51). The plague strips most citizens of all concerns in common with their fellows: like stasis, it assaults even the family, but from the opposite direction. It reduces men to solitary wretches, alone in their prostration before calamity and indifferent alike to kinsmen, party, and city.

Thucydides next discusses the consequences for the plague of the current political situation, and finally those of the plague for it. The most lethal aspect of that situation was the overcrowding of the city due to the wartime influx from the countryside (2 52). Because of this the mortality raged uncon- trollably, and the public places of the city, both profane and sacred, were strewn with heaps of the homeless unattended dead and dying. It was from this in turn that the laws of the city were first disturbed (2 52.4), these being to begin with the sacred laws of burial, which the survivors, overwhelmed by the calamity, could or would no longer observe. Thucydides begins his discussion of lawlessness, then, with those laws the flouting of which followed most directly from the specific character of the disaster; it may also matter that these were sacred laws.

There follows an account of the more general lawlessness bred by the plague.

And moreover it was the plague which first fostered greater lawlessness in the city in other respects. For people now blithely ventured what before they would have done covertly and not just as they pleased, seeing the sudden changes and how, some rich per- son dying suddenly, another man who before possessed nothing now straightway owned what had been the other's. And so they decided to spend quickly and for the sake of enjoy- ment, holding their bodies and their wealth to be alike but things of a day. And no one was keen to persevere in what had been reputed noble [or honorable, kalon], holding it un- certain whether they would survive to achieve it. But instead the pleasurable and whatever procured it, these were established as both noble and useful. Fear of gods and law of men deterred no one, for as to the former, people judged it all the same whether they revered [the gods] or not, seeing that all died regardless, and as for crimes none expected to stay alive long enough to come to trial or pay the penalty, but held rather that a much heavier sentence had been decreed against them, and that before it fell, it was only fair that they enjoy life a little (2 53).

"Lawlessness" (anomia) has a broader sense in Greek than in English, because "laws" (nomoi) include all habits and usages sanctioned by public opinion, whether or not a penalty is specified for infractions. And indeed the first



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malfeasance that Thucydides notes is one that was clearly not on the statute tablets: the unseemly use that desperate people made of their own lawful property. Here, as throughout his account of the plague, Thucydides looks back to Perikles' famous funeral oration, which immediately precedes it. Perikles had praised the Athenians for eschewing conspicuous consumption, and for instead regarding their considerable wealth as a resource for public action (2 40.1). Indeed a recurrent theme of his speech was the ultimate indifference of the true Athenian to private wealth in favor of dedication to the city and the endless glory that Athens in her transcendent uniqueness con- ferred in return (2 42.4, 43.5, 44.4). Under the rude impact of the plague, the Athenians indeed demonstrate a certain indifference to wealth, one which mocks, however, that graceful restraint so praised by their leader. Indiffer- ent indeed to amassing riches, but equally so to employing them for any public, seemly, or distant object, their sole and obsessive concern is to spend it before death wrenches it from them (or, more accurately, them from it).

The transition from this reckless squandering of one's own to criminality in the usual sense occurs by way of a sentence on the kalon, the honorable, noble or fine. "Fine things are hard," notes Glaucon to Socrates (Republic 435c), and what is hard requires perseverance, which as such makes sense only for the sake of its goal. Even in their desperation, however, men do not simply abandon the noble in favor of the pleasant, with the former ceasing to exert any hold over them. Instead they assimilate the two, and here the noble shares the fate of the useful, another (if grayer) barrier to losing oneself in present pleasures. As the useful (chrisimon) shrinks to immediate gratifica- tion and whatever procures it, so does the noble, so that what before appeared merely pleasant or a means to pleasure now seems shining or honorable as well. Moderation, severed from any prospect of reaping the anticipated benefits, appears the part of a fool, a slavish bondage to outworn constraints. The appeal of (and to) the noble thus persists, but to the confusion of all decency and above all of the proud self-restraint which in better times ex- presses nobility of soul.

Lastly Thucydides records the crime wave for which the collapse of the noble into the pleasant would naturally pave the way. Absent fear of dis- grace, the restraints of last resort are fear of gods and law of men, but these now avail nothing. If the gods cannot or will not protect their worshippers, why think that they would punish transgressors? Law of men fails because law is law (that is to say is effective as law) only when it commands and not merely counsels, and it commands only where it can punish. Where there is no fear of punishment there is then no law; relieved of this fear by their fear of the plague, men take whatever they can grab. What is more, they believe that they have it coming to them. Sentence having been pronounced on them prior to the offense, they balk at perishing with their books unbalanced and without even a crime to fit the punishment (cf. Xenophon's Apology of




Socrates 28.) Whatever the dejection (athymia, literally, "want of spirit") which overwhelmed the actual victims of the plague (2 51.4), those still wait- ing for the ax to fall display spirit of a sort. They fight back, pathetically but as best they can, at a fate which they have done nothing to earn (and which, after the manner of most human beings, they persist in viewing in terms of justice). Doomed to end their lives with a whimper, they permit themselves a last squawk; that enjoying life a little is the goal suggests that their crimes are petty not great. Here, in sharp contrast to the presentation of stasis, there is no mention of greed, ambition, lust to rule, or of settling scores with (human) enemies; it would not be surprising if such scorching passions suc- cumbed to the clammy chill of the plague. (The Athenian people as a whole, however, do go so far as to avenge themselves on Perikles for the plague by fining and temporarily deposing him [2 59, 65. 1].)

For all its ravages, then, the plague succeeded in wringing from men neither their susceptibility to honor nor their sense of fairness. Rather it perverted or inverted these, leaving honor an inducement to debauchery and the sense of fairness a spur to injustice, in defiance of an arbitrary verdict which was not society's but from which society offered no protection. Justice, such as it was-such as it still figured in these lives of utmost desperation- was now itself a force tending to the dissolution of society.

CONCLUSION

Plague and stasis comprise opposite routes to the disintegration of the city: they are the extremes between which all normal politics lies which as such help clarify the conditions of political normality. Stasis displays the consequences of the radical "politicization" of life; the plague, those of its depoliticization. I bracket "politicization" because while the partisanship of stasis is political, it destroys politics, precisely by subverting all restraints on politics: justice and the common good prove to be deeply indebted to the private. In the case of the plague, on the other hand, the "state" (i.e., law) withers away, ceasing to command men's obedience or even their attention. Both accounts call attention to the body, the mute substratum of political life, out of sight when out of mind, but when troubled the source of the most profound disturbances in the political field. In the case of stasis, the real or anticipated threat to the body is itself of political origin: the interruption of daily supplies as a result of the vicissitudes of war. The response is therefore political: a struggle for mastery in the city which, by the strange logic of violence, breeds heedlessness of that very survival the insecurity of which spurred stasis in the first place. In the case of the plague the enemy is non- human, divine or natural but mysterious, and does not except incidentally lead to strife among human beings. Rather than poison civic relations it overwhelms them. It is not self-forgetting hatred which seizes men but a pro-



844 Clifford Orwin

found apathy towards everything but scratching the itches of their bodies. Yet here too the consequence is paradoxical: men both live for their bodies and act as if they were free of them; it is because hopelessness frees them of anxiety for their bodies that they are so free to indulge them. Stasis and plague concur in suggesting that there can be no greater political misfortune for men than to be free from the constraints normally posed for them by their bodies.

From which we may conclude that both plague and stasis comment on the Funeral Oration, that noblest of all visions of political life to be found in the pages of Thucydides. Perikles eulogizes citizens who, while retaining their individuality or fundamental self-concern, have emancipated these from their bodies, and live in anticipation of a glorious immortality for which as it were they exchange their bodies in their boundless devotion to Athens their city (2 43.2-3). Perikles does not go so far as to forbid the Athenians to hope for the survival of their bodies (2 43.1), or even to hope to acquire the means of their comfort and delectation (2 42.4). He does insist of them, however, that when vengeance on the city's enemies beckons, they resolutely set all other hopes aside (ibid.); care for the body is licit only to the extent that one will lay it down for the city. Not that Perikles can or does forbid the Athe- nians all attachment to flesh of their flesh. He does insist, however, that they regard their children primarily as a resource for the city (2 44). Erotic relations he plays down entirely, while urging the citizens to enter into one with the city (2 43.1). Beautiful or mad as this may sound, Thucydides knows of cases of the realization of this dream of liberation from the constraints of the body-two such cases.

The Funeral Oration, despite or because of its genre, consistently ab- stracts from death and the body. The plague, by contrast, brings home to both the Athenians and the reader the primacy and frailty of the body (Strauss, 1964, pp. 194-95, 229 n. 92) and the extent to which politics as usual, to say nothing of the great politics urged by Perikles, depends on forgetfulness of these. The plague displays the abyss that yawns when men can no longer see the city for their bodies. The prospect of imminent death spurs men to live in and for the moment; but the moment inevitably eclipses the city.

Political life depends on hopes and fears for the future, and therefore on the expectation of one. In particular the quests for honor and safety animate men's behavior in society: we act so as to deserve the praise and avert the anger of our fellows. (Utility too, to the extent that it shapes political life is preeminently a future utility.) The city both coaxes and coerces a certain indifference to the pleasures and pains, the gains and losses of the moment, by parading greater and worse ones in the future. The plague pre-empts these blandishments and so stifles political life. With nothing either to hope or fear from their fellow citizens, men immerse themselves in such pleasures as depend only on themselves, but on themselves as transformed by their indifference to the future, and the godlike (if fleeting) impunity which this con-




fers. Society proves to depend more fundamentally on men's hopes and fears for their bodies than (as Perikles would appear to wish) on their capacity to overcome these. In fact men cease to fear for their bodies only when they lose all hope for them, as in the case of the plague, and there the consequence of their ceasing to fear for them is a headlong rush to indulge them. The situation under stasis is different: there men continue to fear but despair of any solid security. The consequences are similar, however. In an ugly par- ody of the course commended by Perikles to the Athenians in their dealings with foreign enemies (2 42.4), the various parties, not out of free and noble choice but swept away by the torrent of violence, come to prefer vengeance upon their fellow citizens to their own safety.

Society then owes its stability largely to the ballast provided by our everyday concerns for the body and our ability to satisfy them, and most of all to our fear of death, coupled with the hope of postponing it. Thus far, at least, Thucydides corrects the funeral oration and anticipates a more moderate position. Not Hobbes's position, however, for Thucydides knows better than to anticipate Hobbes in hoping for too much from fear. He knows that men are readier to hope than to fear, and that we promptly forget even our best founded fears at the beckoning of groundless hopes. Hobbes's protoliberal solution to the political problem requires us to place our reason squarely in the service of our fears; Thucydides insists that reason tends to be dazzled and corrupted by our hopes. Men and even more so cities can never be counted upon to act on even the most reasonable fears: although fear may compel those whom it seizes, its grip is fickle and unpredictable, in particular its grip upon reason (cf. 3 45; 4 61-63; 4 108.4; 5 102-103). Nor, as we have noted, has Thucydides any faith in "development": prosperous cities (and citizens) are not a whit less likely to go awry than poor ones.

Like Hobbes, then, Thucydides stresses the depths into which fear may prevent us from sinking, without however offering Hobbes's hopes of effec- tively actualizing its benefits. He knows of only two cities that have succeeded in acting more or less consistently on reasonable fears: Sparta and Chios (cf. 8 24 with 8 40). In both of these. cases the ineluctable persistence of a pressing danger has inspired a regime of steady habits of collectively self- protective virtue. If Hobbes stresses the solidity, Thucydides underscores the fragility of the floor furnished by fear, which is necessary but by no means sufficient for ensuring decent political restraint. And of the Spartans at least we must add that their habits are in fact too fearful: moderate in prosperity, they are too readily dejected in adversity (cf. 1 84.2 and 4 18.4 with 1 70.3, 4 15-20, 4 55-56). They lack, moreover, the decisiveness and daring needed for success in both diplomacy and war (8 96). Besides which their fearfulness is incompatible with magnanimity in their dealings with others; they are always looking anxiously over their shoulders and so see only to their safety and interests (5 105- 109; cf. 3 68).



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One last point concerning the distinctiveness of Thucydides' treatment. As we have seen in the case of stasis, the worst thing about the worst is its lethal enmity towards the better men (cf. also 2 51.5 on the plague). So stated Thucydides' concerns sound closer to those of Plato and Aristotle than to those of Hobbes; again his political orientation is not simply negative. This explains why he is not simply "conservative," why Sparta must share his ad- miration with Athens. Each city achieves its distinctive excellence, Athens the more imposing but riskier one; Athens rises higher to fall lower. The worst too Thucydides views from the perspective of the better men: without impugning their superiority, he shows them what they have to lose if, taking its political standing for granted, they fail to prevent things from getting out of hand. He reminds them that even the most "Athenian" of men depends on "Sparta"; that whenever life's fragile steadiness is shattered there is danger that the dregs will rise to the top. The crowning evil of anarchy is that it delivers the better men gift-wrapped to the worst ones. In normal times this much at least can be avoided, which is not to say that good men have clear sailing. But I have already said that for Thucydides the depths of politics are yawning, not the heights.

Manuscript submitted 23 November 1987 Final manuscript received 22 February 1988

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Pouncey, Peter R. 1980. The Necessities of War: A Study of Thucydides' Pessimism. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Clifford Orwin is associate professor of political science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S lAl.



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Stasis and Plague