ABSTRACT
During the part of their journey which took them along the southern shore of the Black Sea, the ten thousand Greek mercenaries, or ‘Cyreans’ as Xenophon calls them, halted for a while near the city of Cotyora, roughly halfway between Trapezus and Sinope. The terms ‘panhellenism’ and ‘utopia’ are notoriously slippery, and using them to describe trends in Greek intellectual history is a perilous business requiring considerable caution. A lack of ‘confidence’, a feeling of ‘insecurity’, ‘dissatisfaction with the present’ all suggest that the writers of the period were aware in some way of a systemic failure of organized society in Greece, that they perceived profound inadequacies in the existing political structures of their day. In his obituary of Pericles which immediately follows this speech, Thucydides declares that the Athenians did not follow his advice and essentially defeated themselves by letting their personal interest take priority over the interests of the state.
