Unreported Speeches in Thucydides 2.55-65: The Peace Negotiations with Sparta and the Trial of Pericles

Scholars have long questioned the authenticity of the speeches Thucydides includes in his history (Ullrich; Nissen; Badian). Any serious interpretation of the historian or of the Peloponnesian War rests on the answer to that question. As Kagan has also argued (Kagan), this study interprets Thucydides’ controversial statement in 1.22.1 to mean that the speeches contain the actual arguments, if not the exact words, delivered by real speakers in the historical circumstances he describes (Grote; Gomme). Therefore, the important question is not what Thucydides does with the words of particular speakers, but why in significant instances he chose the speeches he reported and omitted others for which he had sufficient information. The paper begins with an analysis of the historian’s programmatic statement and goes on to explain my methodology for reading the speeches. The study then proceeds to a test-case. Namely, in his account of the Peloponnesian War for the summer of 430, Thucydides omits certain assemblies and speeches that are crucial for understanding the events surrounding the peace negotiations with Sparta and the trial of Pericles. Using internal evidence, Old Comedy (e.g., Arist., Knights, 792-796), and later writers such as Plato (Gorgias 516 a), Diodorus (12.45.4) and Plutarch (e.g., Pericles 35.4), this paper identifies and attempts to reconstruct unreported speeches from Thucydides 2.55-65 and to explain why the historian excluded important information he knew. The aim is to demonstrate the selection process of Thucydides and to illuminate the understanding of the Peloponnesian War he wanted to convey to his readers. In this test case, the historian’s selection of speeches minimized the internal politics and factional strife that might have implicated Pericles without resorting to invention.