Category: Thucydides

O Miseras Hominum Mentes, O Pectora Caeca!

Ishaan H. Jajodia
Nash Menin
Paul Nash, The Menin Road, 1919.

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides includes a small but revealing note on methodology (1.21–22),1 which concludes as follows:

“It may be that the lack of a romantic element in my history will make it less of a pleasure to the ear: but I shall be content if it is judged useful by those who will want to have a clear understanding of what happened — and, such is the human condition, will happen again at some time in the same or a similar pattern. It was composed as a permanent legacy, not a showpiece for a single hearing.” (1.22)

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  1. All quotes from Thucydides are quoted from: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Martin Hammond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). ↩

The Poet, The Historian, and the Philosopher

Ishaan H. Jajodia

James Boyd White, best known for his imaginative readings of law in The Legal Imagination, makes a spate of interesting observations through close readings of the texts as varied as Thucydides’ History and Jane Austen’s Emma in his book, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). In his analysis of Plato’s Gorgias 1 , he draws two conclusions which have a particular interest for me: the first on what differentiates philosophy from history and poetry, and the second on what he calls the ‘Platonic Premise’ 2.

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Socrates. Alcibiades
Francois-Andre Vincent, Alcibiades Being Taught by Socrates, 1776.

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  1. ’The Reconstitution of Language and Self in a Community of Two: Plato’s Gorgias’ in James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 93–113. ↩
  2. All quotes from Plato are from: Plato, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997). ↩