The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others by Paul Cartledge

Author:Paul Cartledge [Cartledge, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, History, Ancient, Political Science, Language Arts & Disciplines, Linguistics, Greece, Government, Difference (Philosophy), Comparative, Greece - Civilization - To 146 B.C, National characteristics; Greek
ISBN: 9780192192660
Publisher: Oxford University Press US
Published: 1993-04-15T06:28:53+00:00

model of a civic choice that is both free and determined' ( Loraux 1986a: 104).

But Perikles' epitaphios was political in a second, narrower sense as well. It was a specifically democratic discourse, and thus both implicitly and explicitly contrasted Athens's 'rule of all by all, freely and openly' with the governance of heteronomous and authoritarian Sparta. The passion and conviction with which Thucydides makes his Perikles laud Athens's democratic institutions and culture ('an education for all Hellas') has sometimes been misinterpreted as an expression of Thucydides' own feelings towards the radical Athenian democracy under which he grew up. Closer attention to the surprisingly aristocratic features of the epitaphios, coupled with Thucydides' own explicitly hostile judgements on democracy in both theory and practice (2.65.7, 9; 8.97. 2) rule such a reading out of court. Thucydides was no ideological democrat, nor can his historiography in general be called in any useful sense democratic (pace Farrar 1988).

Rather, the context in which the speech was delivered--a collective state funeral for Athens's war dead in the Kerameikos cemetery located at the very heart of the city--demanded an ideological construction that was fully in harmony with the city's democratic politeia. But, as is often--perhaps necessarily--the case with ideologies, what it left out, what it did not say, was as important as what it included. Two major exclusions were de rigueur. First, metics. Although by definition not citizens, those resident aliens who were male, of military age, and could afford to equip themselves as heavy-armed infantrymen were required to fight for Athens as hoplites. Such metic hoplites were, we know from Thucydides' narrative, recruited to the standards in large numbers at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War and suffered casualties; and since Xenophon in a pamphlet on revenues ( Poroi 2. 3) refers to 'Lydians, Phrygians, Syrians, and barbarians of all sorts' among the metic hoplites, some of them at least in the mid-fourth century were freed slaves. Yet of their very existence Thucydides' Perikles breathes not a word. They, along with the men and women kept in slavery, constituted the Other within.

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