ABSTRACT
One of the things that makes Thucydides’ History compelling is the tension between the subject of the narrative, the Peloponnesian War, which focuses on dispersions and ruptures in Greek society,4 and the historian’s insistence on the predictability and stability of human behaviour. In other words, loss and impermanence, relating to the particular events around which the History is built, are balanced by a belief in unity and conformity, which operate at a general level away from particularities. Thucydides does not simply draw general lessons from his story, as many authors do. For he identifies a mechanism of formation and transformation in historyhuman nature-which will allow readers of his work to estimate how events will proceed on the general level. Thucydides’ ideas here owe much to contemporary medical belief in the possibility of predicting the course of diseases by assuming an essential constancy in their natures. The Hippocratic writers refer to this as ‘prognosis’. Thucydides’ innovation was to apply the idea to the realm of human conduct, which was largely ignored by the medical texts. Medicine, a well-established discourse by Thucydides’ time, offers a wider parallel to the History in that it too charts particular disruptions and disjunctures and at the same time asserts the existence of wholeness and continuity which can be restored to the sick through its care. Law has important points of contact here. By Thucydides’ time it also was a well established discourse. Although there is no jurisprudence contemporary with the medical theorists and we cannot speak of law as a techne (‘art’ or ‘skill’), as we can with medicine, law does have a recognizable internal coherence and a stability which is seen not so much in the surface expression of particular texts or documents but in the underlying way in which law organizes its interests and presents itself, like medicine, as a correct forum for discussing what is good for men.5 As discourses both medicine and law had (and continue to have) strong cultural affinities in terms of their tight control over their spheres of influence, their unwillingness to be proved wrong, and their ability to convert error into triumphs of progress. Both had distinctive institutional sites (the ietreion, ‘surgery’, the dikasterion, ‘court’) where the patient or criminal was examined. The wide-ranging senses of nomos within the normative field from statute law to custom to socially agreed usage made law a ready-made system for determining and prescribing the form of human conduct. For Thucydides, who is consistently interested in how men behave toward one another, it was natural to consider the claim law makes to stabilize human nature and the obstacles that human nature puts in its way, especially as law was, and was seen to be by the historian, of great ideological significance to the Athenian democracy.
