Search results for "Peloponnesian War"
showing 2 items of 2 documents
Retorica e costruzione del consenso in Tucidide: il caso di Mitilene.
2016
In his account of the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides explicitly insists on some dilemmas linked to the wider matter of deliberative process: in particular, the relationship between nature, profit and justice, truth and lie, speech and action. The story of the uprising of Mytilene is particularly useful, intertwining the antilogy between the two speakers (Cleon and Diodotus) with the so-called metanoia: the Athenian deliberative rethinking puts on focus the complex problems of the building of consensus in the democratic decision-making processes. Here we examine only one point of the two rich and articulate speeches: the opportunity of discussing again what has been already decided in a corre…
Vita di un impero: tracce di metafore biologiche in Tucidide
2019
Although we do not find in the narrative of the Peloponnesian War an explicit analogy between the phases of human life (more or less distributed) and those of the great political bodies, it remains nevertheless fruitful in my opinion to explore the text in search of clues for biological metaphors. In particular, I will follow the traces left throughout the narrative by three crucial elements: daring (τόλμα), desire (ἔρως), disease (νόσος). The biological metaphor of the 'degrees of development' of the living being in Thucydides does not find fulfillment in the senectus. His absence was charged by Reinhart Koselleck as a distinctive feature of Greek historiography, especially of the classica…