Drama, Oratory and Thucydides in Fifth-Century Athens: Teaching Imperial Lessons

221 Pages·2020·6.724 MB·English

by  Sophie Mills

Drama, Oratory and Thucydides
in Fifth-Century Athens
This study centres on the rhetoric of the Athenian empire, Thucydides’ account of
the Peloponnesian War and the notable discrepancies between his assessment of
Athens and that found in tragedy, funeral orations and public art.
Mills explores the contradiction between Athenian actions and their self-
representation, arguing that Thucydides’ highly critical, cynical approach to the
Athenian empire does not reflect how the average Athenian saw his city’s power.
The popular education of the Athenians, as presented to them in funeral speeches,
drama and public art told a very different story from that presented by Thucydides’
history, and it was far more palatable to ordinary Athenians since it offered them
a highly flattering portrayal of their city and, by extension, each individual who
made up that city.
Drama, Oratory and Thucydides in Fifth-Century Athens: Teaching Imperial
Lessons offers a fascinating insight into Athenian self-representation and will be
of interest to anyone working on classical Athens, the Greek polis and classical
historiography.
S ophie Mills is Professor of Classics at the University of North Carolina at
Asheville, USA.
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Drama, Oratory and
Thucydides in Fifth-Century
Athens
Teaching Imperial Lessons
Sophie Mills
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2020 Sophie Mills
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asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mills, Sophie, author.
Title: Drama, oratory and Thucydides in fifth-century athens : teaching
imperial lessons / Sophie Mills.
Other titles: Routledge monographs in classical studies.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge monographs
in classical studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019055054 | ISBN 9780815365921 (hardback) | ISBN
9780351260322 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Thucydides—Criticism and interpretation. | Oratory,
Ancient. | Greek drama—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PA4461 .M47 2020 | DDC 938/.505—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055054
ISBN: 978-0-8153-6592-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-351-26032-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1 The Athenian . . . empire? 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Empire and rhetoric 6
1.3 Source problems and Athenian imperial rhetoric 7
1.4 “I would annex the planets if I could” (Cecil Rhodes) 9
1.5 “An empire exempt from all natural causes of decay”
(Lord Macaulay) 12
1.6 “Imperious, irrepressible necessities of life” 15
1.7 “We do our humble best to retain by justice what we may
have won by the sword” 20
1.8 The seductions of empire 24
2 Tragedy and Athens: Aeschylus and Sophocles 45
2.1 Introduction: Athens in and out of disaster 45
2.2 Aeschylus’ Persians 52
2.3 Aeschylus’ Eumenides 59
2.4 Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus 64
3 Euripides, empire and war 81
3.1 Introduction 81
3.2 Heraclidae 83
3.3 Suppliants 88
3.4 Heracles 91
3.5 Peirithous and Theseus 92
3.6 Ion 93
3.7 Erechtheus 95
3.8 Hippolytus 97
3.9 Trojan Women 98
vi Contents
4 Aristophanic Archē 107
4.1 Comedy, truth and Athens 107
4.2 Remnants of the ideal 110
4.3 Wasps 111
4.4 Acharnians 113
4.5 Knights 115
4.6 Peace 117
4.7 Birds 118
5 Thucydides: what was really said? 130
5.1 Introduction 130
5.2 Thucydides’ methods 131
5.3 Thucydides and mythology 138
5.4 Believing Thucydides 140
6 Thucydides’ Athens: Λόγῳ μέν . . . Ἔργῳι δέ 147
6.1 Book one 147
6.2 Book two 152
6.3 Book three 155
6.4 Book five 157
6.5 Book six 159
6.6 Book seven 163
Bibliography 178
Index 208
Acknowledgements
G reat thanks must go to the University of North Carolina at Asheville for
appointing me as NEH Distinguished Professor of Humanities from 2012–2015
and for granting me leave in the spring of 2018, during which much of this book
was written. I am also grateful to the Institute of Classical Studies in London and
its library for access to its unparalleled collection of sources and two very happy
summers spent there, and to Beatrice Diesk, my research assistant in summer
2014. Thanks also to Thomas Harrison, Rosanna Lauriola, Polly Low, Andreas
Markantonatos, David Pritchard and Angeliki Tzanetou for professional encour-
agement of various kinds, and to multiple audience members and readers over the
years, some of them anonymous, who have helped me sharpen some of the ideas
presented here and simply discard others. On a personal level, I thank my mother,
Mrs. Kate Mills, for her unstinting love and support and for helping me find a
title, and also my father, Mr. Roger Mills, for all his love and encouragement,
and Clare and David Murphy for half a century of care and kindness. Above all,
I thank Amy Joy Lanou for everything, always, with my love: λύσω τὴν ἐμαυτῆς
ὗν ἐγώ. . . .

1 The Athenian . . . empire?
1.1 Introduction
F or where else in the world has a race gone forth and subdued . . . a con-
tinent . . . peopled, not by savage tribes, but by races with traditions and
a civilisation older than our own . . . subduing them not to the law of the
sword, but to the rule of justice, bringing peace and order and good govern-
ment to nearly one-fifth of the entire human race, and holding them with so
mild a restraint that the rulers are the merest handful amongst the ruled, a tiny
speck of white foam upon a dark and thunderous ocean?1
Each great metropolitan center that aspired to global dominance has said,
and alas done, many of the same things. There is always the appeal to power
and national interest in running the affairs of lesser peoples . . . there is the
horrifically predictable disclaimer that “we” are exceptional, not imperial.2
O ur nation is the greatest force for good in history.3
B ut what do any of these stirring quotations have to do with the power of Ath-
ens in fifth-century Greece? After all, Athens’ sphere of influence was tiny by
later standards, lasted considerably less than a century, was governed not by an
emperor but by a democracy, and in its relative racial and other homogeneity was
very different from the European empires that succeeded it or the Middle Eastern
empires that preceded it. Moreover, no universally accepted theoretical definition
of empire exists, and the relationship between empire and the broader question of
power – harder, softer, or a vaguer, more general influence? – is highly con-
tested.4 Empires are established and maintained in many different ways, 5 and it
may arguably even be inappropriate to use any modern theories of imperialism to
analyze ancient society because the types of evidence surviving from the ancient
world are so different from those of the modern world.6 If empire is defined by
models based on European domination in the non-European world, through the
influential definitions of empire based on Marxist theory, which entwine imperial-
ism with capitalism as part of an economic system, or even through the compari-
sons between the Roman Empire and the United States that were popular during