Beneath Politics: Thucydides on the Body as the Ground and Limit of the Political Regime

Abstract

It is an honor and a pleasure to contribute to this distinguished collection, not least because its general approach is so congenial to me. My own reading of Thucydides has always been shaped by my preoccupations as a scholar of the history of political thought. I see him not as a pre-Socratic but as a proto-Socratic—given his contemporaneity with Socrates might I say a co-Socratic?—who has already found his way to the guiding question of Socratic politics. That is the question of this volume, that of the political regime.¹ Two such regimes, Athens and Sparta, are the principal actors in his work. I say two regimes, rather than two cities, because Thucydides already grasps the fundamental insight so brilliantly displayed in Book Three of Aristotle’s Politics, that wherever a city claims to act, there lurks in fact only a regime, a part masquerading as the whole.