Thucydides, through his speeches, addresses his readers rather than the listeners of the orations. He presents the rhetoricians expressing ideas that they may not have even thought of, or if they did consider them, they did not articulate them, perceiving events with a clear eye, even if they did not always have it. This is because it is Thucydides who thinks and sees in this way.
The rhetoricians of the speeches do not express individual opinions. In the speeches, the focus is on the plot of historical events, the causes and motives that led to them, as well as their consequences. This is why they are delivered at critical junctures in the historical narrative. We find a speech wherever there is a need for justification.
Often, in a single speech, Thucydides includes the main points of various speeches delivered in different places and by different figures, in order to succinctly present the factors that led to the course of events he narrates at a certain point in his work.
The speeches—which cover more than one-fifth of his entire work (over 40) and about a third of which is found in the first four books—give us the true stature of the great historian. They are a condensation of thoughts, feelings, reasoning, and psychological conditions of individuals and entire societies, which only Thucydides could synthesize with his own words.
THUCYDIDES - ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE
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