Allison Levy on Thucydides
Thu, November 4, 2021 4:00 PM at Lemon Tree Room, Graduate Hotel
"Hope and Periclean Rhetoric in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War"A crucial theme of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is hope. In particular, the work emphasizes the dangers of hope, and thus presents an outlook that seems rather foreign to ours. In presenting Athens’ path to defeat in the great war that is his subject, Thucydides draws our attention many times to the role hope plays in that defeat, and suggests that Athens’ decline may be understood, in part, as a decline in its leaders’ management of hope. A close look at Thucydides’ presentation of the leadership of Pericles will yield some insight into the particular genius of that outstanding statesman for such management. It will also shed light on the complicated relationship of hope to virtue and to the feeling of one’s own power. Finally, this discussion will bring out a tension within virtue, namely, between its apparent justice and nobility.
Allison Levy received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Boston College. She is a Tutor at St. John's College, Santa Fe.