Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War Book VI 1107176913, 9781107176911, 9781316819067, 2021082828, 2021032829, 9781316630211, 2021032828

Citation preview

CAMBRIDGE

GREEK

AND

LATIN

CLASSICS

THUCYDIDES THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR BOOK

EDITED CHRISTOPHER

VI

BY PELLING

CAMBRIDGE

GREEK

AND

GENERAL P.

E.

LATIN

CLASSICS

EDITORS

EASTERLING

Regius Professor Emeritus of Greek, Untversity of Cambridge

PuiriP

HARDIE

Fellow, Trinity College, and Honorary Professor of Latin Emeritus, University of Cambridge

TNEIL

HOPKINSON

RicHaRD

HUNTER

Regius Professor of Greek Emeritus, Unzversity of Cambridge

S. P. OAKLEY

Kennedy Professor of Latin, Untversity of Cambridge

OLIVER

THOMAS

Associate Professor in Classics, University of Nottingham CHRISTOPHER WHITTON Professor of Latin Literature, University of Cambridge

FOUNDING

EDITORS

P. E. EASTERLING TE.

. KENNEY

THUCYDIDES

THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR BOOK EDITED

VI BY

CHRISTOPHER

PELLING

Emeritus Regius Professor of Greek, Unsversity of Oxford

w

Z CAMBRIDGE

.p

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

CAMBRIDGE

UNIVERSITY PRESS

University Printing House, Cambridge cB2 8Bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 2oth Floor, New York, Nv 10006, USA

477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 414-221, grd Floor, Plot g, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi — 110025, India

109 Penang Road, #05—06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University's mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107176911 DOI: 10.1017/9781316819067 Θ Cambridge University Press 2022 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2022 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data NAMES: Thucydides, author. | Pelling, C. B. R., editor. TITLE: The Peloponnesian War, Book VI / edited by Christopher Pelling. Other titles: History of the Peloponnesian War. Book 6 DESCRIPTION: Cambridge, United Kingdom

; New York, NY : Cambridge

University Press, 2022. | Series: Cambridge Greek and Latin classics | Includes index. IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2021082828 (print) | LCCN 2021032829 (ebook) | 1sBN

9781107176911

(hardback) [15ΒΝ 9781316630211

(paperback) | rsBN

9781316819067 (ebook) SUBJECTS: LCSH: Greece - History - Peloponnesian War, 431-404 B.C. CLASSIFICATION: LCC DF229.T56 G74 2022 (print) | Lcc DF229.T56 (ebook) | DDC 938/.05-dc23 LC record available at https:/ /lccn.loc.gov/2021032828 LC ebook record available at https:/ /lccn.loc.gov/2021032829 ISBN 978-1-107-17691-1 Hardback ISBN 978-1-316-63021-1 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS List of Maps List of Figures Preface List of Abbreviations Maps

page vi vii IX xi ΧΙν

Introduction

1

I Thucydides and the Sicilian Expedition 2 Author, Audience, and Performance

3 Book 6 in the History (a) Books 6—7

8

14 14

(b) Book 5 and Book 6

17

(c) Book 6 in the Whole

20

4 The Speeches

22

5 Athens and Syracuse

20

6 The Text

36

Deviations from Alberti

38

Sigla

40

THUCYDIDES: BOOK VI

41

Commentary

93

Works Cited Indexes I General 2 Language, Style, and Narrative Technique 3 Greek

321 342 348 350

MAPS 1 Sicily 2 Southern Italy 3 Greece 4 Syracuse

page X1V XV XVl xvlil

FIGURES 1 Vase of satyr attacking Herm. Musée cantonal d’archéologie et d'histoire, Lausanne. Inv. 3250.

2 Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Roman copy of fifth-century BCE statues by Critius and Nesiotes. Napoli, Museo Archeologico Nazionale.

page 173

222

PREFACE ‘Tacitus was a great man', said Macaulay; ‘but he was not up to the Sicilian expedition'.' To write commentaries on Thucydides' Sicilian books is a daunting privilege. The excellence of the narrative is beyond doubt: as Plutarch says (Nicias 1.1), these show Thucydides at his ‘most emotional, most vivid, and most varied'. To try to explain how that excellence

is achieved risks labouring the obvious and compromising that immediacy. Nor is it exactly untrodden territory. The great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentaries — Krüger, Poppo and Stahl, and Classen and Steup, all still immensely useful - had mighty successors: Dover's

1970 contribution

to Gomme,

Andrewes,

and Dover's Historical

Commentary on Thucydides (hereafter, HCT) and Hornblower's 2008 third volume of his Commentary on Thucydides (hereafter, CT). Dover has many textual and Hornblower many literary comments to complement their thorough treatment of the history. Yet the attempt to add two more commentaries is still worthwhile. Books 6 and 7 are natural choices for those coming to Thucydides for the first time, perhaps in an undergraduate or graduate class; but Thucydides' Greek is notoriously difficult, especially in the speeches, and Book 6 has the most speeches of them all. It is not just the novice reader that often needs, or at least welcomes,

help, and even

Dover's shorter school commentaries (1965) took too much prior facility for granted. I have therefore included more linguistic explanation than in two earlier 'green-and-yellows' (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics), my single-authored Plutarch's Antony (1988) and the Herodotus Book 6 co-written with Simon Hornblower (2017). Many notes too are keyed to the Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek (van Emde Boas, Rijksbaron, Huitink and de Bakker 2019), and I hope that these too will be helpful. In many Thucydidean sentences the syntax is difficult or ambiguous while the meaning is clear, and not every native speaker may have heard that syntax in the same way. I have tried to keep this in mind throughout, along with the importance of oral delivery for texts that were designed for hearing as well as reading. In line with the aims of the series, I have also given particular attention to literary aspects. This has often squeezed out historical material that would be relevant even for a literary critic, for one can hardly gauge what Thucydides has done with his material without an idea of what that material would have been. Still, brevity here may be forgiven because so much ' Macaulay, letter to Thomas Flower Ellis, 25 July 1836, Pinney 1974-81 iii: 181

(cited by Rood

2017: 20).

Χ

PREFACE

is readily accessible in the commentaries of Dover and Hornblower: ‘cf. HCT and CT’ could have been added much more frequently than it is, and can be taken for granted throughout. In particular, there are many topographical issues which cannot be gone into here, especially in the closing chapters of Book 6, and here the thorough work done by Dover and by Peter Green (Green 1970) 15 still as authoritative as ever. What I have tried to contribute is more attention to what listeners or readers without maps or local knowledge would make of the narrative and what sort of picture of the terrain they would build. Thucydides tried to tell them what they needed to know to make sense of his account, but that would not always have been easy and sometimes it is hard to think that it was possible. Still, even when bewildered those readers or listeners would carry away an impression of a writer thoroughly in command of his material, and that, perhaps, was enough. Many debts have been accumulated. These commentaries were originally to be jointly written with John Marincola: that turned out to be impossible, but I have benefited from his advice and from an Oxford graduate seminar that he and I gave in summer 2017. A notable moment came when, after discussion of the debate of the generals at 6.47—50.1, a straw vote produced a majority for Nicias. They were a cautious group. Emily Baragwanath kindly agreed to expose some of her own graduate students to an early draft of the commentary on 6.1-31, and her reports and advice were invaluable. Edith Foster, busy with her own commentary on Book 4, found time to exchange materials and send very useful comments. I have also gained much from e-correspondence with Elisabetta Bianco, Bob Connor, Irene de Jong, Donald Lateiner, Christopher Mallan, Hunter Rawlings III, Jeff Rusten, Dan Tompkins, and Tony Woodman, and from conversations locally in Oxford with Richard Rutherford, Tim Rood, and Andreas Willi. The series editors, Richard Hunter and the late Neil

Hopkinson, went through the drafts with their usual meticulous eyes for detail and for superfluity, and I am grateful. One final debt is to Simon Hornblower. I have not embarrassed him by asking him to read any of what I have written, but he has been supportive throughout and has lent books and expertise. After collaborating with him literally in our commentary on Herodotus Book 6, I have often found myself figuratively doing the same in these two volumes, with his commentary always on my desk. This and its sister commentary on Book 7 should appear almost simultaneously. Each is complete in itself and some material appears in both introductions, but there are many cross-references to the other volume in the form, e.g. ‘cf. 7.69.2 n.'. Where references are to other passages in Book 6, the chapter number is printed in bold.

ABBREVIATIONS Where dates are given in the form 418/7 they refer to archon-years; when in the form 418-417 they refer to a period, normally the winter, spanning both calendar years. I

ANCIENT

AUTHORS

AND

WORKS

Abbreviations for Greek and Latin authors usually follow those in OCD,

except for the following:

D. H. Diod. Hdt. Plut. Th. X. Ar. is Aristophane II

TEXTS,

Dionysius of Halicarnassus Diodorus Herodotus Plutarch Thucydides Xenophon s, Arist. 15 Aristotle.

COMMENTARIES, WORKS

AND

SECONDARY

G. B. Alberti, Thucydidis historiae, $ vols. (Rome,

1972—2000) J. K. Davies, Athenian propertied families 600-300 BC (Oxford, 1971) R. Talbert (ed.), Barrington atlas of the Greek and Roman world (Princeton, 2000) E.-A. Bétant, Lexicon Thucydideum, 2 vols. (Geneva,

1843; repr. Hildesheim, 1969) I. Worthington (ed.), Brill's new Jacoby (Leiden,

on-line) H. Cancik, H. Schneider, and M. Landester (eds.), Brill's new Pauly (Leiden, Boston, and Cologne, in

print and on-line, 1996-) Cambridge Ancient History. Most references are to vol. iv*, Persia, Greece and the western Mediterranean c. 525 to 479 B.C. (ed.J. Boardman, N. G. L. Hammond,

D. M. Lewis,

and M. Ostwald, Cambridge, 1988) and vol. v*, The fifth century B.c. (ed. D. M. Lewis,J. Boardman,J. K. Davies,

and M. Ostwald, Cambridge, 1992)

xl

ABBREVIATIONS

ΧΙ

CGCG

F. van Emde Boas, A. Rijksbaron, L. Huitink, and M.

CHGRW

P. Sabin, H. van Wees, and M. Whitby (eds.), The

C-S CT

EGM FGrH Fornara

GG

de Bakker, The Cambridge grammar of Classical Greek (Cambridge, 2019) Cambridge History of Greek and Roman warfare ii (Cambridge, 2017)

J. Classen, Thukydides. Sechster Band, Sechstes Buch, bear-

beitet vonJ. Steup (Berlin, 3rd ed., 1905) S. Hornblower, A commentary on Thucydides, g vols. (Oxford, 1991-2008); unless noted otherwise, references are to vol. ΠΙ, and if no page number is given the reference is to the note on the passage discussed R. L. Fowler, Early Greek mythography, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2000-19) F. Jacoby, et al., Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Berlin and Leiden, 1923-58; Leiden, 1994-) C. W. Fornara, Archaic times to the end of the Peloponnesian War ( Translated documents of Greece C? Rome 1, Cambridge, 2nd ed., 1983)

W. W. Goodwin, A Greek grammar (Basingstoke and London, new ed., 1930)

GP

J. D. Denniston,

GSW Hammond

W. K. Pritchett, The Greek state at war, vols. 1-v (Berkeley and London, 1971-91) M. Hammond, Thucydides: the Pelobonnesian War

HCT

(Oxford, 2009) A. Andrewes, A. W. Gomme,

Hornblower-

and if no page number is given the reference is to the note on the passage discussed S. Hornblower and C. Pelling, Herodotus: Book 6

Huitink-Rood

L. Huitink and T. Rood, Xenophon: Anabasis Book ΠΙ

IACP

M. H. Hansen and T. H. Nielsen (eds.), An inventory of

IG ILS

Inscriptiones Graecae, Berlin (1873-)

1954)

The Greek particles (Oxtford, 2nd ed.,

and K. J. Dover, A histor-

ical commentary on Thucydides, 5 vols. (Oxford 1945-

80); unless otherwise noted, references are to vol. 1v,

Pelling

(Cambridge, 2017) (Cambridge, 2019)

archaic and classical Greek poleis (Oxford, 2004)

H. Dessau (ed.), Inscriptiones Latinae selectae (Berlin,

1892-1916)

ABBREVIATIONS

xiii

Κ-Α

R. Kassel and C. Austin, Poetae comici Graeci (Berlin,

Krüger

K. W. Krüger, Θουκυδίδου Συγγραφη mit erklàrenden Anmerkungen, zweiten Bandes erstes Heft, fünftes und sechstes Buch (Berlin, 2nd ed., 1858)

LGPN LSJ

1983-9)

P. M. Fraser εἴ al., A lexicon of Greek personal names (Oxford, 1987-)

H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, and H. S. Jones, A Greek—English

ΜΘΊ

lexicon (Oxford, gth ed. with rev. supplement, 1996) W. W. Goodwin, Syntax of the moods and tenses of the Greek verb (Boston and London, 1890; reissued, 1965)

Marchant

E. C. Marchant,

ML

Thucydides: Book vi (London,

1906)

R. Meiggs and D. Lewis, A selection of Greek historical inscriptions to the end of the fifth century BC (Oxford, revised ed., 1988)

S. Hornblower, A. J. S. Spawforth and E. Eidinow, eds.,

The Oxford classical dictionary (Oxford, 4th ed., 2012) Oxford classical text R. Osborne and P. J. Rhodes, Greek historical inscriptions 478-404 BC (Oxford, 2017) Oxyrhynchus papyri E. F. Poppo, Thucydidis de bello Peloponnesiaco, vol. 111, sect. 1, rev. and aug.J. M. Stahl (Leipzig, 2nd ed.,

1879)

P. J. Rhodes and R. Osborne

(eds.), Greek historical

inscriptions 404—323 BC (Oxford, 2003) J. S. Rusten, Thucydides: the Pelobonnesian War book 2 (Cambridge, 1989) Scholiast Supplementum epigraphicum Graecum (Amsterdam, Walbank

1923-)

M. Walbank, Athenian proxenies of the fifth century Bc (Toronto,

1978)

MAPS

.

Tyrrhenian

Q

56 O

o

0

(

Lipari Islands

Hyccara?

oÉryx 8

Q

OEgesta

.

) Motya

oHalicya

lonian

~delinus pig¥

ὦ

(Halyey,

Sea \

S

$&

Acragas Q95* M

e

dj

Land over 1,000 metres

0

20

:

L

0

10

-

40 L

20

-

60 L

30

9

^2

:

40

Megara Hyblaea

“Montea O

Casmenaego Climiti Acrae

Camarinao9"

Θ 9

Pantacyas River

\,3'

^5

"

e

50 miles

1 Sicily

xlv

F

)

«

a

apsus OSyracuse

is Ri EnS)aecuyf;:{vsef "

9 Hybla

Assinarus River -

S

80 k

-

?Briccyniao

Leontini

Gelà ^

-

&

TA ΄

Ξ

f

Ν

Morgantine

MAPS

Metapontum9

XV

AD » J Taras

MESSAPI

S

lapygia® o

?‘.'RiVer

Point lapygia

O Thurii

Hylias River

Tyrrhenian 568

Crotono

I

o

n

i

a

n

S

e

a

Caulonia ?

Messina/Zancle . oRhegium

— P Epizephyrian Locri

OLeucopetra

: 0

L

[¢

0

2 Southern Italy

Land over 1,000 metres

1

1

L

]

MAPS

xvl

Ab

Epidamnuso

φ,

Μ

Q

Α

C

EDONIA

Q

PotidaeaW«

"

Scio

Corcyra

J

lonian

568

QDodona Ἅ

Α

*

ä

Anactoriu

A

Leucas

b

:

ziv

φ

A Dprone

X b

mbracia

/(oc

2

0

. *

ὧ.

B

°

"A

0

ὖ

Aegitio

.

ο ;.y

&)

JBOESTIAR

@4

Theti2haara & ET opus ] o Delium o)

Cephallenia

Plataea oDecelea 4Styra

Sicyon EleUSIS

Cyllene

y

Zacynthos

(/\\/

Pheiaó

,

I)llarathon-ï

Leäf"e:th ga-'roa'"'äoAthensCarystus

ol CADIA Phlius 9 "leinie oy pa Orneae [e]

.gAegma i aurus

A

Laureion o« Sunium Ceos

Troezen

EpidaurusoLimera Taenaron

€>Cythera

Y

ΘγγΓΘ

I:I

Land over 1,000 metres 100 I

150 I 1

100

200 km ] 1

125

)

150 miles

3a Greece

OD:?U

Melos

3

MAPS

Imbroscz:’ Sigeum ; Wlemnos - /0Jroy Tenedos™

»

Methymna

»

G

esbos

ilene

Argmusaeo :

)Scyros Q

οὉ

©

ὗ.

Q

o}

Chios

Y

o

%Andros

>

Samos

3 &%?Tenos ὖ

ι

^ 6:7 eQe ο

ο

920 Ql.a

?

ΜῈ

[ξὓρ

®

*

&3 |

9

ὔΟ“:ρ

-

OEphesus

Qb

f

!

E

U?*

oodæo

Thera')

\Miletus

ς

,'-O

. .

ü

Γὓ:* $

0?0

3b Greece

hodes

MAPS

xvilil

N e

=

(?)Leon ‘\/\_ A

"U

Trogllus\/ ἤ

[]

!! ζ ξ )ςo =

(?)Labdalon

$

\

-

=} Syracusan| 5 8| cross-wall | £ Euryelus

v

EPIPOLAE

Ej

$Ξ

Syracusan wall

%N .

Z

(99.3)

,

eFig tree

Circle τΥ 3.

W

γή Temenites

Syracusan wall (101.2)

,

Achradina .

L sumelela !

Yinarsh mars

$

f

X

Battle of Anap us (66-70)

\L

ὶ

;

7

í

' Little

Harbour

O

-

Great Harbour

Olympieion

$)

3/

-/

|

Athenian Fleet after 103

"

O < Ω Ξ

7

$40 - : » facUsg

-9/

:

l. /]

3

¢