Telling the Tale of Athenian Hubris:
A Tragic Messenger Speech in Thucydides' History

Rebecca F. Kennedy (George Washington University)

Acknowledging tragedy’s influence on Thucydides’ History has become a staple in discussions of his historiography.  Macleod writes, "…his [Thucydides'] theme, like the tragedians', is suffering on a grand scale, and...like them, he is not afraid to represent it as the utmost of human experience" (Macleod, 140).  Such suffering retold in the tragic mode has been recognized nowhere more than in the narrative of the disaster at Sicily at the end of Book 7 where we have the fall of the great hero in a grand tragic narrative.   

Comparisons between Thucydides and tragedy have focused primarily on the interrelationship between him and Euripides or Sophocles (e.g. de Romilly and Finley).  Focus has been predominantly on these authors most likely because they were contemporaries of Thucydides.  But Aeschylus, whose plays were being reproduced by the end of the fifth century, seems also to have had an influence on the form and thematization of the Sicilian narrative (as Cornford recognized long ago).

The play I consider as an influence on the Sicilian narrative is Aeschylus’ Persians.  This particular play has been recognized as an influence on the way in which Thucydides composed the description of the disaster at Sicily (perhaps via Herodotus, but also independently).  These influences range from structural and psychological (Cornford), textual (various scholars have recognized textual allusions) and thematic (Harrison). I walk a line between, on the one hand, the larger thematic allusions suggested by Harrison and the general structural and psychological similarities of Cornford and, on the other hand, the particular textual echoes recognized by various other scholars. 

Instead, building from the notion expressed by Cornford that Thucydides functions in his own history as the tragic messenger, I argue that the Sicilian narrative, especially the description of the final defeat in the harbor and its aftermath, adheres to the form (and content) of a tragic messenger speech, specifically that of Aeschylus’ Persians.  Also, I suggest that readers of the History are being set up at the very beginning to read the end of the Sicilian affair as the culmination of a Persian War topos within the History through the tragic structuring.  Further, I argue that we can read the response of the Athenians to the messenger’s narrative of the destruction against the reaction of the Persians in Aeschylus’ play as an insight into the character of the Athenians as Thucydides wished to present it.

I make these arguments through a close reading of the messenger speech in Aeschylus’ play beside the description of the final rout of the Athenians in and after the battle in the harbor. I show how the text of Thucydides from approximately 7.57-8.1 maps onto the messenger speech and reaction to it in Persians. I then discuss the significance of the use of a traditional narrative focalizer like a messenger speech by Thucydides paying special attention to how it characterizes the Athenians first as tragic heroes paying the price for their great hubris and, then, as perhaps even greater heroes who, having been brought low by fate, emerge to face that fate with courage.