On Justice Power and Human Nature

While Thucydides is often cited as the first historian to examine and analyze human events without attributing their outcomes to divine forces, his work shares themes and techniques used by Homer and the Athenian tragedians who retold mythical narratives. These include type scenes, reversal of expectations, tragic irony, and debate/dialogue. Athenian tragedies feature a chorus that would engage in debate-like conversations, which allowed listeners or readers to hear contrasting perspectives and formulate their conclusions accordingly.

Like Homer, Thucydides used type scenes that followed a predictable series of steps. This is especially evident in the presentation of speeches at assemblies in Sparta, Athens, and Syracuse, which follow a set sequence. Thucydides and Homer both made use of dramatic reversals of expectations: What humans intended and expected often resulted in the opposite outcome. Pericles’s intention to protect Athens prompted him to bring all Athenian citizens inside the city walls, but the subsequent overcrowding instead caused the plague to break out. In addition, when Nicias attempts to discourage the Athenians from embarking on the expedition, he instead emboldens them. They pour resources into the expedition such that when it fails, the consequences are disastrous. Similarly, Athens’s intention to expand its empire via the conquest of Sicily results in the Athenians losing everything: the expedition, the war, their democracy, and their empire.

Like the Athenian tragedians, Homer made use of tragic irony, which depends on the audience knowing more than the characters in the narrative. Although Thucydides was retelling contemporary events rather than distant, mythic ones, he knew that his audience would already know how events turned out. Thus, when he presented Alcibiades telling the Spartans that the Athens he defected from was no longer his city and that he intended to restore that city, this may reflect what his audience already knows: that although Alcibiades returned to Athens and attempted to help it win the war, his efforts were unsuccessful. Pericles’s encomium for Athens in his Funeral Oration acquires poignancy when heard with the knowledge that the city will be destroyed by its own bad choices. Though no gods engineered these events, as with Agamemnon and Oedipus, the effect resonates.