| This thesis focuses on links in Thucydides' History between self-interest and virtue. Part I demonstrates how five debates in particular--the Corcyraean debate (I. 32-44), the Mytilenian debate (II. 37-49), the Plataean debate (III. 53-68), the speech of the Spartans after Pylos (IV. 17-22), and the Melian dialogue (V. 85-113)--are pervaded not only by the opposition of justice to self-interest, but also by the competition between two conceptions of self-interest, one of which takes the utility of morality into rather greater account.; Of these competing conceptions of self-interest, the one that acknowledges the utility of morality is clearly and consistently represented as being of longer duration and larger scope. Speeches such as those of the Plataeans (3.53-59) and Spartans (4.17-20), which are typically interpreted as weak and irrelevant appeals to justice, pity, or decency, are shown to be comprehensive appeals to self-interest that place particular emphasis on the beneficial effects of moral dealing, and are argued to be more potent than is generally recognized.; Morally desirable behaviors and attitudes that are argued by Thucydides' speakers to be beneficial to the agent include generosity, decency, restraint, fidelity to compacts, respect for the ties of kinship, and respect for the reciprocal obligations associated with the Greek word charis.; Part II examines the interplay of speech and narrative in the History and demonstrates that the wisdom of those deliberators who reject arguments for the utility of morality is often questioned. A number of episodes are examined in which the exhibition of moral qualities is depicted as positively advantageous.; The dissertation concludes that arguments for the utility of morality play a significant thematic role in the History, and that Thucydides understood the varying fortunes of Athens and Sparta as, in part, a function of the varying degrees to which their deliberators accorded morality a place in the calculation of self-interest.* ftn*Originally published in DAI Vol. 58, No. 4. Reprinted here with corrected title. |
