Power and Public Opinion

"Our armies come...as liberators." General Maude entering Baghdad, 1917

If you are seen to be playing the part of liberators, the more firmly based will be your power in conducting the war. (Thucydides III 13, 7)

The faculty of reason may lie relatively unused in the majority of a people, but there is not a man anywhere who is incapable of emotion. And it is to the emotions, therefore, that appeal must be made. Rouse in your behalf, trust, hope, anger, and affection; rouse against your rival indignation, anger and hatred - and success is yours. It is truly complete, when a public meeting can be induced to cheer a speech which it cannot understand and greet the other side's reply with stampings of the feet. (B. de Jouvenel, Le Pouvoir, 233)

All political authority rests finally on moral factors - on the trust placed in it by man. (Gerhard Ritter, The Corrupting Influence of Power, 27)

(I couldn't find Feiffer's Life Guard cartoon where the boy - by devious means - gets the girl, but I found this cartoon instead where the girl - by devious means - gets her man! They're both all about POWER!!)

Ω

“At the very beginning of Plato’s Republic, when the definition of δικαιοσύνη, justice, is first attempted, an interpretation adumbrated by Cephalus and carried further by Polemarchus is politely but swiftly disposed of by Socrates. It is that right conduct consists in telling the truth and discharging one’s obligations – the hallmark of a true gentleman, as we may also gather from Xenophon’s account of the education of the Persian monarch Cyrus. As amended by Polemarchus, with reference to the poet Simonides, this amounts to rendering every man his due – doing good to your friends, therefore, and harm to your enemies. Socrates discounts this notion by means of a reductio ad absurdam, but it is to be noted that Polemarchus, though bewildered by Socrates’ skill, still clings to his belief. It is after all what he had been brought up on, a sound practical maxim reflecting the norm of civilised society. Guiding everyday actions by a moral doctrine introduced partly to provide a general standard (so that all those among whom the same convention is shared will know how their fellows act and react) and partly to give transient actions a more than transient validity. (See Thucydides I 86). By its means, these actions are related, through the use of value words, to eternal verities – duty, truth, the good, the harmful. It is action to a predictable norm and sanctified by sound moral backing which appeals to the man- in-the-street, and insofar as power is in his hands, or derived from and accountable to him, the action in which it expresses itself must conform to these requirements.

“It is noticeable that in the early Platonic dialogues the first efforts to define the abstract quality selected for discussion always express themselves in terms of action. In the Laches, for example, courage is ‘sticking to one’s post and not runing away’. In the Charmides, sophrosyne, which we have hitherto rendered as ‘restraint’m or ‘moderation’, is expressed as ‘to do everything in an orderly manner without fuss, like walking along the street and talking and everything else’. The man-in-the-street needs to have a moral reason and justification for doing what in fact he does do, even though he may not profess any high standard of morality, or indeed any morality based on metaphysical or religious conviction; and he will feel this need even though the actions themselves possess no inherent moral content. The concept of power, which has been the theme of these investigations, falls into this category; in itself, it has been evisaged as independent of morality. But that is not the attitude towards it which is generally accepted and generally by harming our adversaries who arouse feelings of apprehension in uspoints must first be made. The first is, that its proper use follows almost exactly Polemarchus’ definition of justice; the popular attitude to power is that you use it to help your friends and do down your enemies, and that in so doing its use must be endorsed by the term ‘just’. The second point – and one which has been postulated at earlier stages of the discussion – is that power is popularly held to express itself in positive action, in achieving the individual end that you want to achieve.

“On this second matter the quotation from Jules Feiffer, which precedes this chapter, is eloquent enough. The definition is of that Platonic kind we have just looked at – ‘power is chasing off the rival and getting the girl’. [Or in substitute cartoon I have used – ‘power is undermining the male ego and getting your man]. It is evident that to the ordinary man, charity very properly begins at home, and number one comes first. Plato’s analogy in the Republic between the microcosm of the individual man and the marcocosm of the polis is exact, in that states operate thie policies on the same premises as those on which the individual citizen operates his. The principal use of power is promote our own advantage, ὠφελία, and our honour, status or dignity, τιμή, by helping our friends and among them our best friend, ego; and it is further used to ward off apprehension, δέος, who arouse feelings of apprehension in us.To this extent, theerfore, the evidence of Thucydides which we have considered in this connexion accurately produces what we may judge to have been the current, everyday approach to communal or individual actionalys. Where we run into difficulty is that Thucydides in his is analysis of the matter is strict in discounting the basic validity of our first point – that you use it , to help or to harm, in a manner ergarded as ‘just’. To him all arguments revolve, when the cards are on the table, around the requirements of expediency and advantage, and we have see that this is a fair assessment since the power intending to achieve these things is not in itself concerned with any other aspect of the matter. Nevertheless there remains a need for spititual or moral support, a need to say that an action is ‘right’, that a decision is ‘equitable’, that shares are ‘fair’, that a war is ‘just’ or even ‘holy’, that an inquisition is ad maiorem Dei gloriam, that chicanery, slaughter, destruction are carried out for ends which are in themselves ‘good’ on an absolute standard (thus of course ‘justifying’ the means) and which bring benefit to their victims eve though the victims may not, at least in this world, be able to testify to the accuracy of this appraisal. You can make a desert, as Tacitus later observed, and call it ‘peace’; you can give it, indeed, any name you like, and it will be valid for you with all its overtones. Whatever the Realpolitik behind the action, the necessity of giving it a respectable nomenclature cannot be gainsaid.”

Ω

On this view as expressed here by Geoffrey Woodhead can there be any absolute moral standards? 

Power and the Elite

It was their contention...that the number of those with a share in the government should be limited to 5000, and that these should be the people best equipped to serve the state either in their own proper persons or with their resources. (Thucydides VIII 65, 3)

Let us choose a certain number of the best men in the country, and set the power in their hands. It is only natural to suppose that the best men will produce the best policies. (Herodotus III 81 - reporting the advice of the Persian noble Megabyzus to King Darius of Persia).

In contemplating revolutions, it is easy to perceive that they may arise from two distinct causes - the one to avoid or get rid of some great calamity, the other to obtain some great and positive good. (Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man)

He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well-governed as they ought to be, shall never want attentive and favourable hearers. (Richard Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity I)

Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain therefore to treat them as if they were equal. (J.A.Froude, Party Politics)

'We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal' but who is this 'We'?

“The last chapter dealt with power in the hands of the majority, power in the actual possession of a democracy, and with the nature and character of its exercise. This time we turn to the problems of a minority without power, an elite who thought of themselves as aristocrats and whose critics and enemies preferred to think of them as oligarchs. because of the stimulus to acquisition which, as we have seen, is characteristic of power, it is not only natural that those who have it should seek to acquire more; it is natural also that those without it should seek to acquire it, and it is natural further, that they should regard the obtaining of it not as a manifestation of ingrained ambition, of the pleonexia which we identified as inherent in mankind, but as the rectification of an injustice. Such an attempt at the acquisition of power forms one of the principal features of Thucydides' final book, when the changed circumstances of the Athenians, after the disaster in Sicily, had produced a crisis of confidence in the Athenian democracy. That the attempt was unsuccessful and comparatively short-lived in no way detracts from the value of a study of its motivation and execution.

“In undertaking the study I recognise that the oligarchic  movement of 411 BC has in general received from [posterity what we should nowadays term ' bad press'. This is to some degree enhanced by our inability to appreciate its inspiration - and I use the word 'appreciate' in its fundamental sense. Born and bred as we are in a democratic society, we are unlikely to commend the objectives of those who conspired to overthrow one. We are liable to find their methods as repugnant as their aims, and most of all we cannot profess, or would nowadays find it inexpedient to profess, any sympathy with their principles. But the historian cannot properly fulfil his function unless he is prepared , to the best of his ability, to enter into the circumstances with which he is dealing, to participate in the scene and, in the deepest significance of sympathy, to feel with those whose thoughts and actions he is examining. We must therefore be strict with ourselves in divesting ourselves of our ingrained or preconceived political attitudes, and in assessing what the Athenian oligarchs attempted to do with all the fellow-feeling for them that we can muster.

No equality nonsense for Plato!

“Our chief difficulty is that the idea that the government should remain exclusively in the hands of those best qualified to govern is now at a discount. It is a logical concept that the art of administration demands certain qualities of mind just as the practice of medicine or any other skill. It is reasonable that a proper education in affairs, a good standard of knowledge and intelligence, alone can and should qualify a man to have a voice in the government of his country. Government based on ignorance, and votes prompted by irrationality and emotion, must on any unbiased analysis be ultimately harmful to a country's or a city's interests. Plato more than once attacks the folly of government carried on by the majority vote of ignorant amateurs. There is a famous passage on the subject from the Protagoras, and it may serve the present purpose to quote another, no less famous, from the Gorgias. Socrates argues, 'When the citizens meet to appoint medical officers or ship-builders or any other class of professional, surely it won't be the orator (i.e., the politician) who advises them then. Obviously in every such election the choice ought to fall on the most expert ... and it is expert advice that will be called.' Gorgias argues that the orator's skill in speaking is so persuasive that it can outweigh the professional. But Socrates elicits a damaging admission from him - that the persuasion will be effective only before a popular audience. 'So when the orator is more convincing than the doctor', says Socrates, 'what happens is that an ignorant person is more convincing than the expert before an equally ignorant audience.'

'We hold these truths to be self-evident'' Who is 'We'?

“On this basis Plato would, without doubt, condemn the British and American systems wholeheartedly. Because we cannot govern by means of a sovereign assembly of all the citizens meeting in one place, we have to delegate the authority to govern to our representatives - to people, what is more, who want to represent us and to govern. Now voluntarily to place power in the hands of those who actively seek it, and who flatter and cajole us in order to get it, is to Plato supreme folly. According to him, only those should be trusted to rule who do not want to do so, and who have to be compelled against their will to undertake the task. What is more, in electing our representatives we also act on the principle, which we have elevated into a graven image before which all good democrats must bow, that every man should have an equal voice and an equal vote - as if all men had an equal capacity to judge the rights and wrongs of the situation, the needs of the country, the qualities of the candidate, and so forth, and as though all had an equal stake in the result. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident;, begins the American declaration of Independence, 'that all men are created equal...' Thomas Jefferson, whose thought lies behind these words, has much to answer for to posterity. The sentiments of Froude, whose words are included among the quotations which preface this chapter, accord better with the facts. What is more, those with greater capacities and better understanding customarily fulfil in society positions of greater responsibility and are expected to assume greater burdens. Yet their voice in government is not commensurate with their responsibilities any more than it is commensurate with their merits; and although they deserve greater privileges in life because of their greater burdens, the very word 'privilege' is denounced as as symbol of inequality, nay of immorality, in a democratic context. The idea that a man should be suitably rewarded for his exertions, whether financially or in status or both, is overwhelmed, despite its essential logic, by the irrationality of an egalitarianism itself based on a false premise.'"

'Men are made by nature unequal'.J.A. Froude

So what view do you take on this issue? Is everyone equal? If not, what role should be given to different sections of society? Is there an adequate or acceptable compromise? Or should we abandon our big-city lives and seek out an egalitarian commune? Remind me to tell you about one I visited in Nuremberg many years ago. It was quite a thoroughgoing, totally Germanic solution!

Power and the People

(From A.G.Woodhead's Thucydides On the Nature of Power)

The Greek Democracy's 1987 commemorative stamp for Aristophanes

I shall be told that democracy is neither a wise nor a just thing, and that those who have the money are most likely to govern well. To which I answer, first of all, that the people is the name of the whole, the oligarchy of a part; secondly, that the rich are the best guardians of the public purse, the wise the best counsellors, and the many, when they have heard a matter discussed, the best judges; and that each and all of these classes have in a democracy equal privileges. (Thucydides VI 39, 1)

Democratic power recognizes no other authority in Society than itself, and claims always to go just as far as the General Will carries it. But this power, if there is no stopping it, is on the other hand eminently open to be wooed and won. (B. de Jouvenel, Le Pouvoir, 225)

The Common people are always impressed by appearances and results. (Machiavelli, Il Principe 18)

               Nor is the people's judgement always true;

               The most may err as grossly as the few.

                                       (John Dryden, Absolom and Achitophel, Pt 1, ll. 778-9)

   

A perfect democracy is ... the most shameless thing in the world. (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France)

“There can be no doubt that, whatever his views on the nature of power, Thucydides regarded it as a mistake for a state to vest that power in the demos at large. Demokratia, a word newly in currency in the fifth century, emphasises that the kratos lay with the demos. There was an imbalance of its distribution. Although the equality which democracy introduced was much praised and, as D. Kagan notes, 'Athenian literature is full of references to its virtues', and although Thucydides draws attention to that basic principle not only by means of such men as Athenagoras but also through Pericles himself, nevertheless isokratia was something which Sparta was credited with having championed. Under democracy the upper classes and the bourgeoisie, to whom Thucydides himself belonged, could feel that some in the time-honoured phrase were beginning to be more equal than others. The pendulum had swung too far.

“To us, of course, the term democracy coveys the idea of equality, duty, service, priovilege, and justice which it conveyed to a conscientious Athenian democrat but failed to convey to Thucydides and his friends. We must not however forget that to them ‘demos’ had two senses – a sense in which in an Athenian decree, it could mean the sovereign Athenian people as a whole, and a sense in which it could mean a political faction, the ‘left wing’, as we might say. So that when the demos had kratos, it did not necesarily imply, without equivocation, that a completely egalitarian society had been realised. It meant, on the interpretation of some, that ‘the left’ had taken over. To the aristocrats this was almost to say that power was in the hands of the mob, and the word plethos emphasises the numderical aspect of this concept. The ‘many’, hoi polloi, now controlled the state, and Thucydides was one of those who saw with misgiving the era of the common man, the tyranny of the plebs which in 424 BC Aristophanes bravely parodied in his fiercely critical comedy The Knights.

“Aristophanes there depects Demos as a foolish and arbitrary old man, a harsh master of his slaves Nicias and Demosthenes, but easily led by the nose by his favourite politicians. However, the poet was not being wholly just to the qualities and good sense of the Athenians. Given the character of power as we discussed it in the previous chapter, and granted that the possessor of it will be motivated by self-interest in its exercise and retention, it was arguable that the Athenian in fact followed out with great effectiveness the principles we have examined. That, at any rate, is the line which that anonymous pamphleteer known as ‘The Old Oligarch’ pursues in his treatise on the Athenian state written, most probably, early in the Peloponnesian War. He uses all the phraseology and jargon of party politics i the Athens of his time. The people are the ‘base ones’, the πονηρoί, while the upper classes are the βέλτιστοι, the best people, in Roman terms the optimates. He writes in effect,as M.F. McGregor put it, ‘I do not approve of democracy, but, if you must have it, I admit that the Athenians make a fine job of it’. But this is not Thucydides’ view. Thucydides did not approve of democracy, and saw no strength of wisdom whatsoever’ in the rabble. The only stage at which it appeared to him to shie in any virtuous light was in the period of Pericles’ lifetime; but that was because of Pericles, and in despite of the nature it was subsequently shown to possess. Once the great man was gone, it stood condemned by its own inadquacies and by the verdict of historical facts. We are in consequence led to consider what are the particular factors at work when we put the principles of power illustrated in Thucydides’ history, which were considered in the first chapter, into relation with his views on democracy and his record of that democracy in power.

“The possessor of kratos acquires from his possession a certain dynamis. By using the verb cognate to that noun, he δύναται, he ‘can’, he is potens in the Latin sense. He has the capabilities, resources of strength and materials, all that is implied in words like the adjective δυνατός and others of the same root. Under the principles already investigated, the demos, thus equipped, will look to its security, under the influence of δέος , will act always with regard to its ultimate self-interest (ωφελία) and will believe in, and seek to foster and defend, its dignity and honour (τίμη). It may or may not temper its rule with justice (δικαιοσύνη); Thucydides implies that it did not so temper its rule, but is honest enough to allow the more general Athenian view that it did to be given a hearing. In fact, althougbAristophanes depects the demos as arbitrary, and in the Melian Dialogue Thucydides argues that the springs of action are pretty close to those which Callicles and Thrasymachus would endorse, that particular interpetation of power is the interpretion least likely to be used by a popular government. For popular opinion, as we shall investiagte in alater chapter, is more emotional and sentimental, diverted from a strict recknoning of policy on the basis of expediency by the intervention of what people consider to be humane and moral factors. When in 427 BC the Athenians reversed their orignally harsh decision to execute all the male citizens of Mitylene, which had revolted from them, they are rebuked by their own hero Cleon on this very score of over-great humanitarianism. A democracy cannot rule an empire in the way it should be ruled because the people are too sentimental, and are therefore weak and hestitant when a crisis demands that they be strong and ruthless. ‘The City’, as Sir Frank Adcock put it, ‘embodies power, and power grows from power and nothing else.No other interests may prevail against it, no other criterion is in place. The ancient mythical past of Athens is full of stories of generosity and protection of the weak, but, in the present, exhibition of these qualities is limited by the immediate interests of the state. If moderation is politic, a means to create a more lasting power, it is a virtue, but only then.’

”

Not as nice as they looked, especially to the Melians

We should note separately here that Thucydides identifies three advantages which accrue to the possessor of power:

1)    δέος (deos):  apprehension one feels or inspires. 

2)    ωφελία (ōphelia): advantage, benefit or profit. 

3)    τίμη (timē): honour, status, standing in the world.

When these are threatened, a power feels pressure to respond and the way it responds is a measure of the power it has or retains.

Power and the Historian

(From A.G.Woodhead's Thucydides On the Nature of Power)

Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. (Thucydides, V 105, 2)

So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power, but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan XI)


“The Athenian Empire is only one manifestation of power in action in Thucydides' world. What we are concerned with now, therefore, is not the historian's personal attitude to such manifestations, to political systems like democracy or oligarchy, to political personalities like Pericles or Cleon, or to political institutions like popular law-courts or representative councils. It is a concern rather with his attitude to the nature of power which those systems or those individuals or those organs of government exercised, and with his interpretation of the contexts in which they exercised it. It is indeed true that we cannot entirely divorce the concept of power from the practicalities of the situation, from the people who acquired or used power, or from the systems and institutions which were the framework or the vehicle of that exercise. It is in fact through Thucydides' treatment of the separate issues or manifestations of power that we have to elicit his attitude towards the principle and exercise of power itself. For instance, there were and are in practice inhibiting factors in the use of power, as J.R.Lucas has correctly argued and as Thucydides equally correctly depicts. Since, from the nature of our evidence, we are constrained to see all the issues and manifestations largely through Thucydides' eyes we cannot cut ourselves off entirely from Thucydides' analysis of them, appealing only to the facts as he appears to state them.

“This consideration may be taken a stage further. For example, we have to bear in mind that there may be a relationship, whether of conflict or otherwise, between Thucydides the recorder and Thucydides the analyst. We must not only watch how he describes situations in which power is discussed or exercised, as in the Melian dialogue, but we must also observe how he phrases his descriptions, what words he uses and the connotations of those words. And in so doing it emerges that we must investigate whether to Thucydides the recorder and Thucydides the analyst we must also add Thucydides the judge. To put a simple dilemma, to which I referred earlier – is Thucydides reporting what the Athenians at Melos (or Athenians in general) in fact thought about the character of power, as I stated? Or is he expressing what he believes to have been a theory of power on which they acted but which, as barker thought, they would have hesitated openly to acknowledge, or the reality of which they did not comprehend? Or is Thucydides using the situation to enunciate, by this unusual method, his own personal theory, unrelated to what anyone else in fact thought or said or did? In any choice we make among these possibilities, we are tempted to ask a further question – is Thucydides explicitly or implicitly condemning such a doctrine as he expresses in relation to Athens’ pressure on Melos? The possibilities are not mutually exclusive and may indeed be combined. Thucydides can report and, in the manner of his reporting, criticize at the same time,  as he does for example at the time of the Spartan arguments and omits the count-arguments of the Athenians. Plainly stated, it is the contention of this chapter that, in the fact of power and the rightness of its exercise, Thucydides is reporting and no more, and that his attitude to power, like power itself in its nature, is neutral.

“The trouble is – and this to some extent why so much effort is expended in diagnosing what Thucydides’ own opinions are -  that we do not want Thucydides to be neutral, and we do not want power to be neutral either. We want to model the great historian in our own image, to see him as moral in the condemnation of power and its exercise, because we ourselves prefer to regard power as intrinsically immoral, as a vehicle of corruption. The connection between power and morality, ancient as it is and examined with a clarity still unsurpassed by the Greek tragic dramatists, has emerged as one of the great issues of our time which occupies and troubles those who give thought to public affairs more perhaps than, in their concern for specific problems and remedies, they sometimes realise. Now whether the acquisition and exercise of power, in the sense to which I have referred, is indeed to be regarded by us as amoral proceeding, and whether this takes place in our own time or in the fifth century B.C., seems to be beside the point of our inquiry. We shall return to the question of the morality of power in the fifth century in the last chapter, and whether Thucydides contaminated his concept of power with a moral judgement about it we shall consider later in this one. What we must be careful to do is to keep ourselves and our own judgments out of it. It is quite irrelevant whether we think the Athenians were good men or bad men to have enunciated the doctrine to the Melians that they did; and it is the more irrelevant if, as is inescapable, any conclusion we make, one way or the other, is to be based on what we regard as moral.

“We must accept, I think, that the problem of the relationship between public and private morality preoccupies us in a way that was alien to the world of Thucydides. That there was this kind of problem under discussion we know well, but it took a different form; it was concerned with a clash of differing authoritative claims on the individual rather than with a conflict between authoritative claim on the one hand and absence of claim, connoting in the modern view freedom, on the other, which is the way in which it presents itself to us. The quotation from the Melian dialogue with which we began (Thucydides V 105 2) acknowledges them, and is not controverted. The Athenians expect that they may one day be sufferers from the law’s application, just as at the time of the conquest of Melos they were its beneficiaries; but they do not complain that there is something wrong with this. They will not use terms such as that their action is ‘right’ or ‘just’, save insofar as the priviledges of using these terms is conferred on them by the possession of power. Power itself, that is to say, is neutral in character. It may be just according to the point of view of the person so describing it, but the description does not affect its essence. The Athenians enunciated the law of nature and the gods. The existence of that law is accepted by Thucydides, and by Machiavelli, and by Hobbes. It is we who do not accept it, and who, since the time of Hobbes, have sought ways and means of circumventing its conclusions. Our attitude to the law is as a result ambivalent. It is through Hobbes that we may see how the ambivalence comes about. ‘Whether men will or not’, he says (as the Athenians at Melos more or less said), ‘they must be subject to the Divine Power’; and again, ‘it comes to pass that we are obliged to obey God in His natural kingdom’. In a world which, though largely pagan, derives its general concept of morality and its motivation from the Hebrew concept of God and the Christian concept of divine revelation, we cannot reconcile the divine law as we wish nowadays to understand it with the divine law as the Athenians expressed it or as Hobbes modified it. Thus our own accepted habits of thought, and our reactions to expressions based on those habits of thought, tend to hamper us in any appreciation of what Thucydides is telling us.”

Cleon argued against sending a reprieve to Mitylene

The Five Pillars of Power

Thucydides uses five terms to describe Athens' successful exercise of power. Thye city showed these five qualities - kratos, dynamis, tharsos, gnome and periousia. Two other major players, as it were, are sophrosyne and tyche. We have already looked a little at two of them, but it is worth getting to know and understand the others one by one.

Athens dominated the sea, Sparta the land

kratos (κράτος): This the word for power. People everywhere seek power and seek to increase their power. It is a drive - something given in our nature - that increases until it meets opposition from some other person or state. Nietzsche claimed that even people whose lives appear to be a denial of power, as, say, early or monastic Christians, were in fact seeking to increase their power by other means. This word has no bad connotations forThucydides. He does not see it with the moralising patina it has acquired for us who tend to believe with Lord Acton (11834-1902) that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." For Thucydides this was not a necessary or inevitable state-of-affairs, although he is deeply concerned with the ways in which the exercise of power may go disastrously wrong. κράτος is the second element in our words 'democracy' and 'aristocracy', words which mean 'rule by the common people' and 'rule by the best people' respectively. Thucydides, himself an aristocrat, accepted the democratic constitution of his city but retained the outlook and values of an aristocrat.

dynamis (δύναμις) This word denotes the dynamism of a state. This is something that is more readily appreciated if one compares the attitudes of different city-states, Athens and Sparta or Corcyra, or in more recent times Hitler's Germany with the democratic nations. It is the way or ways power is deployed or expressed or achieved. 'Dynamis is the hallmark of the successful state... Dynamis is won in war, or by making the right friends. It can be dissipated by internal discord or blocked by external opposition. The Corinthians in their speech at Athens on the Corcyrean crisis claim that is enhanced by restraint ('not wronging one's compeers') rather than by taking risks which superficially may seem attractive. Themistocles, we are told, saw that the acquisition of dynamis was the end towards which his policy, on his city's behalf, should be directed. The Athenians at Sparta are made by the historian to express their pride in it; they regard it as natural that they should seek to retain it once they had acquired it; they note that their exercise of it is more gentle than the apparatus that has doubts about itself laws of power entitle them, but imply that that entitlement is in itself unexceptionable.' (A.Geoffrey Woodhead, Thucydides on the Nature of Power, page 38). 

tharsos (θάρσος) This is another element in Thucydides' understanding of power. The word itself means confidence, boldness or courage. A democratic state like Athens might respond to setbacks by a complete loss of confidence whereas a state like Sparta might react in a more cautious or at any rate a somewhat different manner. We can see the importance of confidence if we think of the effect the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill had on the British people or of the way Hitler's speeches stirred up the German population in stage-managed performances; and more generally we may note how orchestrated displays of confidence are probably an indication of uncertainty in the political elite. The three-minute hate-sessions in George Orwell's novel 1984 show us a state that feels the need to constantly manipulate levels of support in the population. The kind of confidence that we see in Sparta is something very different for confidence there was based on lifelong training and a hundred years of military success. Thucydides attributed to the Spartans what he called ἡσυχία or hēsychia, a kind of unperturbable cool such as we might associate with Gary Cooper in High Noon.

A Spartan mother told her son to come back with his shield or on  it.

gnome (γνώμη) Gnome means reason, judgement, resolution or purposefulness. It is the central quality in Thucydides' estimation of the qualities needed in a leader. No one in his estimation had this more abundantly then Pericles, unless it was perhaps his great predecessor, Themistocles. He emerges in the historian's account as possessing gnome to  marked degree and as someone who stressed periousia and its central importance alongside the need to maintain the tharsos of his fellow citizens at the right level, not too little and not too much. After his death, in the Sicilian campaign, all these things went disastrously wrong when the Athenians perhaps out of factional spite recalled Alcibiades, the one competent general for that large strategy, leading to the complete loss of their resources and all confidence.

periousia (περιουσία) The Delian League - the Athenian Empire - gave Athens huge reserves of silver which Pericles used to build the Parthenon and other public buildings to express the city's new-found prominence following the collapse of the Persian invasion. This treasure represents the city's periousia, or as we would say today in English, our resources. Today the British Chief of Staff, General Taylor, was reported as saying that the greatest threat to the country was the country's economic weakness as this would deny the military the resources needed for its defence strategy. On the other hand, money is not the only resource a country has. Sparta did not have great wealth to match that of Athens, but it did have great strength in its trained manpower and in the reliability of its allies. Athens herself had her navy and her skilled seamen. Germany at the end of the Second War was completely destroyed but she had locked up capital in the skills and abilities of her citizens.

We have listed the five major elements in Thucydides' concept of power. Sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη) is not one of these, but perhaps it deserves a place high up in that list of qualities. It is the virtue stressed by Plato and later by Aristotle as the foundation of character - self-control, discretion or moderation. For Thucydides and other Greeks of fifth century it was the virtue they associated with the aristocratic temperament, something that had in it a kinship to the Spartan ἡσυχία, but where the Spartan virtue indicated a coolness of temper, the Athenian emphasis was on intelligent and restrained judgement. It was something naturally opposed to sudden and violent undertakings such as a demagogue might successfully urge on an emotional populace. It goes hand-in-hand with gnome as the qualities most needed in a political leader.

But all these qualities might prove useless against the workings of chance or fortune, τύχη. Once the restraining influence of Pericles was gone from the scene, Athens became prey to its own more volatile elements - the unstable tharsos of the the ordinary citizens and the factionalism of the parties. It is probably to this experience more than anything else that we should attribute Plato's hostility to the democracy and which led him to depict it in the Republic as a drunken captain and a sleeping beast (Rep.488a-e & 493b). Pericles had hoped that intelligence might overcome the contingencies of politics and war, but he was in the event proved wrong against all his very reasonable and just expectations.

Athens' wealth came ultimately from its seafaring trade

The First Speech of Pericles (1.140-144)

Περικλῆς, Periklēs; c. 495 – 429 BC

The first paragraph - page 31 in Paul Woodruff's selection - sums up Pericles as a statesman and as a political thinker.  Here we have in a few introductory lines the gist of Thucydides' characterization of Pericles. Here is this passage in Thomas Hobbes' great translation which was first published in 1628:


"Men of Athens, I am still not only of the same opinion (γνώμη) not to give way to the Peloponnesians (notwithstanding I know that men have not the same passions (ὀργή) in the war itself which they have when they are incited to it but change their opinions (γνώμη) with the events (συμφορά)), but also I see that I must now advise the same things or very near to what I have before delivered. And I require of you with whom my counsel shall take place that if we miscarry in aught, you will either make the best of it, as decreed by common consent, or if we prosper, not to attribute it to your own wisdom only. For it falleth out with the events of actions, no less than with the purposes of man, to proceed with uncertainty (ἀμαθῶς χωρῆσαι), which is also the cause that when anything happeneth contrary to our expectation, we use to lay the fault on fortune (τύχη)."

I have inserted key terms in Greek in order to give a sense of the concepts that shape Thucydides' picture. The leitmotiv is unmistakeably γνώμη (gnômê), something made clear in the Greek which makes it the third word of the paragraph and contrasts it in apposition with 'O, Athenians'. We need to have a clear sense of this term. It means the mind or judgement as well as a purpose, intention or resolution. Here it means something like intelligent policy, what in his opinion should be done. It is a matter of intelligent judgement, not an opinion prompted by natural impulses or emotions. But a person's judgements or opinions could of course be subverted by emotion or passion and that is what Pericles is afraid of - the Athenians under the pressures of war will be swayed to opinions and states of mind and then γνώμη (gnômê) can mean everything vacillating and unsteady. Thucydides wants us to show Pericles as the embodiment of steady, intelligent policy based on reason. The intelligence and strategy of Pericles himself contrasts with the changing opinions of the Athenians, which for the most part Pericles was able to control. This ability shows him as very much a master of sophistic rhetoric, as, that is to say, someone who is able to sway the crowd by rousing and quieting emotions. Plato saw this process critically in his analogies of the wild beast - the people - who had to be pacified with ad hoc methods, imagining a more perfect rational solution.

The medieval goddess Fortuna (originally Tyche) turns life's wheel

What follows is an extended quotation from Lowell Edmonds' book Chance and Intelligence in Thucydides, Harvard, 1975. Don't be put off by all the greek. Everything is translated, but we need the original to bring out the conceptual antitheses Thucydides is working with here and throughout the History:

"But Pericles understood gnômê in terms of an antithesis, namely the gnômê-tyche antithesis. The Periclean understanding of this antithesis is implicit in the other speeches of Pericles, too. Now since Thucydides' account of Pericvles' career preserves so carefully the term gnômê, one may suppose that the gnômê-tyche antithesis is also the conceptual framework of Thucydides' understanding of the historical meaning of Pericles' career. Analysis of pertinent sections of other speeches of Pericles will support this view.

"To return to the  gnômê-tyche antithesis in the prooemium to the first speech, it is remarkable, first of all, that Pericles should even mention tyche. The topos of the incerta belli was, according to the rhetorician Anaximenes, to be used in dissuading an audience from war. Archidamus so uses this topos in attempting to dissuade the Lacedaimonians from going to war with Athens (1.84.3). In fact, Pericles prooemium is rhetorically, pessimistic in tone: to look forward to possible reversals of expectations surely does nothing to inspire martial ardour. While the hypothesis of the prooemium, with its rationalism as regards tyche, is optimistic, the rhetorical pessimism persists. In the second sentence of the prooemium Pericles admits the possibility of the Athenians' being 'tripped up'. In the third sentence he explains why he has admitted this possibility.

"Let us first examine the first clause of the third sentence (1.140.1):

ἐνδέχεται γὰρ τὰς ξυμφορὰς τῶν πραγμάτων οὐχ ἧσσονἀ μαθῶς χωρῆσαι ἢ καὶ τὰς διανοίας τοῦ ἀνθρώπου:

The problematic word here is ἀμαθῶς . It is active in sense. Though an English translation of the adverb which fits both subjects of the infinitive is difficult to find, 'blundering' may be ventured: 'It is possible for the circumstances of our affairs to take as blundering a course as men's plans.'

"Events may fail us as much as we are capable of failing ourselves through bad planning. The simile implicit in ἀμαθῶς (namely, events are like plans with respect to ignorance or senselessness) masterfully understates the disparaging view of tyche which then emerges with a climactic sharpness in the last clause of the prooemium. To put the case in this way is to make planning primary: through the use of this simile, Pericles describes adversity in terms of human planning, which thus becomes the criterion. Adverse luck is then understood as that which was unplanned, or contrary to plan. This orientation is epitomized in the phrase ὅσα ἂν παρὰ λόγον in the next clause: that which is contrary to calculation. In this way Pericles trivializes chance, while admitting its existence. Chance is not an objective force impervious to human reason as in Archidamas' view (1.84.3), but, through the implications of Pericles' simile, is reduced to the same status as human error, that is to the subjective. ... 

The self-confidence of Pericles is in marked contrast with the humbler view of Hermocrates (4.61.1), who considers it foolishness to believe τῆς τε οἰκείας γνώμης ὁμοίως εἶναι καὶ ἦς οὐκ ἄρχω τύχης (that I am complete master equally of my own mind and of chance, which I do not rule)." 

Pericles is in other words supremely rational and optimistic but with more than a touch of rhetorical manipulation in the way he presents the dangers that face Athens in deciding to go to war. However sympathetic we might think he and his cause, it is hard not to see in Thucydides' presentation a hint of hubris. You might see parallels with some aspects of the modern world. These kinds of conceptual contrasts are fundamental to Thucydides' understanding and presentation. We need to keep them in mind, which is not easy through the darker medium of English.


Questions:
(1) The later medieval notion of a goddess called Fortuna presents some obvious intellectual difficulties. What objections might one one bring to the idea of such a goddess?
(2) Can everything covered by the Greek term tyche be avoided and overcome by rational forethought and planning?
(3) What major dangers posed by 'fortune' have been decisively overcome today? Which are still with us?
(4) What else is needed apart from good planning if we are to be successful in warfare?

The Acropolis at the time of Pericles, paid for by money from the Empire.