Translations of the Truth

As a historian, Thucydides’ job is to gather the truth. Then he has to make sense of it, then he has to order it, and then he has to present it. In Thucydides’ introduction, he explicitly states that he has “…described nothing but what I either saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular inquiry.” Despite his dedication to the truth, what one speaks or recounts can only ever be a translation of what actually happened. Personal bias is bound to creep in. Thucydides’ statement demonstrates that he discriminated between potential sources, thus tacitly admitting his own bias. History, then, is irrational because it is subject to the pulling and tugging of persuasion, and thus it is also rhetorical. If rhetoric were a three-legged stool built on the three major persuasive appeals, it would not be able to stand on anything less than all three legs; history happens to rely on all three: fact (logos), credibility (ethos), and the human element (pathos).

In this same vein, Pericles’ funeral oration, which acts as both a history and a eulogy, is simply a translation of the truth, and thus rhetorical. At the heart of his epideictic speech is this message: Athens is great, the fallen warriors fought for Athens, thus they are great. But in order to relay this message, Pericles spends more time talking about Athens than he does the soldiers. Dispositio, or arrangement, is his major rhetorical tool. By speaking first to kairos (i.e. this a funeral speech and a red-blooded Athenian patriotic speech), Pericles distances himself from speeches that either praise too little or praise too much, engendering himself to the audience. Pericles then stops himself and starts to talk extensively about the virtues of Athens’ forefathers and Athens itself. Like what Spencer M said in his 2014 post, Pericles extols their democratic tradition, meritocratic society, and above all, the personal courage of Athenian citizens, building his own ethos through patriotic rhetoric. The only time Pericles concedes Athenian imperfection is when he talks about the soldiers themselves. But Pericles’ oration is still a translation of the truth. The entirety of the speech must be taken within the context of Thucydides’ belief that the Peloponnesian War was started because the Spartans were jealous of the Athenians. No doubt Pericles thought the same.