“Every Form of Death”

As a political historian whose subject is the twenty-seven-year war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, Thucydides necessarily depicts and analyzes widespread death and destruction. Thucydides foregrounds death, then, because the cultivation of judgment requires accurate understanding of the whole of political life, including its dark side. Thucydides moves directly from Pericles’ Funeral Oration to his analysis of the plague at Athens. Clifford Orwin argues, persuasively, that the two passages go together: both are unusual in their focus on internal political life as opposed to war among cities; and both concern political collapse. Death’s political presence also has psychological implications, perverting the conceptual vocabulary of the virtues as human beings struggle to justify their cruel actions and terrible ends.