Alcibiades and Melos

The dramatists were not the only writers to face up to Athens' problematic citizen and the issues to which his erratic career gave rise. Thucydides and Plato did so in their respective ways, but often employing the language of subliminal suggestion, of innuendo. The form in which Thucydides reports the discussion between the Athenians and the Melians before the Athenians began besieging Melos in the summer of 416 has long been a problem. In place of set speeches usually delivered in public, we are given what purports to be a dialogue conducted in private. “An isolated Thucydidean experiment” or the product of a crude insertion by a later editor, are two recent explanations. Although, as seems possible, the headings that distinguish the speakers are indeed later interpolations (and early readers had to make the distinction themselves by “paying close attention to what was said”), the passage is remarkable on several other counts. The conclusion here is that the Melian Dialogue was neither experimental nor a later addition, but was the result of Thucydides' careful, and clever, approach to his material, and that it has much to do with Alcibiades

Art · Linguistics · Literature · Subliminal stimuli · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Classics · Computer Science · History · Organic Chemistry Synthesis Methods · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Crises (Staseis) and Changes (Metabolai)

  Open Access•Denis Correa, Martinho Soares et al.•Crises (Staseis) and Changes…•2022

  Incluir item