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