CAMBRIDGE GREEK AND LATIN CLASSICS THUCYDIDES THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR BOOK VII EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER PELLING CAMBRIDGE GREEK AND LATIN CLASSICS GENERAL EDITORS P. E. EASTERLING Regius Professor Emeritus of Greek, Untversity of Cambridge PuiLiP HARDIE Fellow, Trinity College, and Honorary Professor of Latin Emenitus, University of Cambridge TNEIL HOPKINSON RiCHARD HUNTER Regius Professor of Greek Emeritus, University of Cambridge S. P. OAKLEY Kennedy Professor of Latin, Unsversity of Cambridge OLIVER THOMAS Associate Professor in Classics, Untversity of Nottingham CHRISTOPHER WHITTON Professor of Latin Literature, University of Cambridge FouNDING EDITORS P. E. EASTERLING TE. J. KENNEY THUCYDIDES BOOK VII EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER PELLING Emeritus Regius Professor of Greek, University of Oxford z u CAMBRIDGE % B UNIVERSITY PRESS THUCYDIDES BOOK VII EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER PELLING Emeritus Regius Professor of Greek, University of Oxford a u CAMBRIDGE G-EP UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS University Printing House, Cambridge cB2 885, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, Nv 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314-321, 3rd Floor, Plot g, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi - 110025, India 109 Penang Road, #05-06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 2384676 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/g781107176928 DOI: 10.1017/9781316819081 © Cambridge University Press 2022 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2022 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this bublication 15 available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data NAMES: Thucydides, author. | Pelling, C. B. R., editor. Tide: Book VII / Thucydides; edited by Christopher Pelling, Emeritus Regius Professor of Greek, University of Oxford. OTHER TITLES: History of the Peloponnesian War. Book 7 DESCRIPTION: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2022. | Series: Cambridge Greek and Latin classics | Includes bibliographical references and index. IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2021036134 (print) | LCCN 2021036135 (ebook) | isBN 9781107176928 (hardback) | 1sBN 9781316630228 (paperback) | 1sBN 9781316819081 (ebook) SUBJECTS: LCSH: Greece - History - Peloponnesian War, 431-404 B.C. | Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Book 7. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Ancient & Classical | LCGFT: Literary criticism. CLASSIFICATION: LCC PA4452 .Ag7 2022 (print) | Lcc PA4452 (ebook) | ppc 938/.05-dc23 LC record available at https:/ /lccn.loc.gov/2021036134 LC ebook record available at https:/ /1ccn.loc.gov/2021036135 ISBN 978-1-107-17692-8 Hardback ISBN 978-1-316-63022-8 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. CONTENTS List of Maps page vi Preface vii List of Abbreviations IX Maps xii Introduction 1 1 The Story 80 Far 1 2 Thucydides and the Sicilian Expedition 3 9 Author, Audience, and Performance 10 4 Intertextuality 14 5 Book 7 in the History 19 (a) Books 6—7 19 (b) Book 7 and Book 8 21 (c) Books 6—7 in the Whole 29 6 Where Does It All Go Wrong? 26 4 The Shadow of the Future 32 8 The Text 35 Deviations from Alberti 38 Sigla 40 THUCYDIDES: BOOK VII 41 Commentary 89 Works Cited 269 Indexes 281 I General 281 2 Language, Style, and Narrative Technique 286 3 Greek 288 MAPS 1 Sicily page X11 2 Southern Italy X111 3 Greece X1V 4 Syracuse Xvl PREFACE ‘Tacitus was a great man,' 5414 Thomas Babington Macaulay; ‘but he was not up to the Sicilian expedition.'' To write commentaries on Thucydides' Sicilian books is a daunting privilege. The excellence of the narrative is beyond doubt: as Plutarch says ( Nicias 1.1), these books show Thucydides at his 'most emotional, most vivid, and most varied'. To try to explain how that excellence is achieved risks labouring the obvious and compro- mising that immediacy. Nor is it exactly untrodden territory. The great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentaries — Krüger, Poppo and Stahl, and Classen and Steup, all still immensely useful - had mighty successors: Dover's 1970 contribution to Gomme, Andrewes, and Dover's Historical Commentary on Thucydides (HCT) and Hornblower's 2008 third volume of his Commentary on Thucydides (CT). Dover has many textual and Hornblower many literary comments to complement their thorough treatment of the history. Yet the attempt to add two more commentaries is still worthwhile. Books 6 and 7 are natural choices for those coming to Thucydides for the first time, perhaps in an undergraduate or grad- uate class; but Thucydides' Greek is notoriously difficult. It is not just the novice reader that often needs, or at least welcomes, help, and even Dover's shorter school commentaries (1965) took too much prior facility for granted. I have therefore included more linguistic explanation than in two earlier ‘green-and-yellows’ (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics), my single-authored Plutarch's Antony (1988) and the Herodotus Book 6 co-written with Simon Hornblower (2017). Many notes too are keyed to the Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek ( CGCG) , and I hope that these too will be helpful. In many Thucydidean sentences the syntax is difficult or ambiguous while the meaning is clear, and not every native speaker may have heard that syntax in the same way. I have tried to keep this in mind throughout, along with the importance of oral delivery for texts that were designed for hearing as well as reading. In line with the aims of the series, I have given particular attention too to literary aspects. This has often squeezed out historical material that would be relevant even for a literary critic, for one can hardly gauge what Thucydides has done with his material without an idea of what that mate- rial would have been. Still, brevity here may be forgiven because so much 15 readily accessible in the commentaries of Dover and Hornblower: ‘cf. HCT and CT' could have been added much more frequently than it is, ' Macaulay, letter to Thomas Flower Ellis, 25 July 1836, Pinney 1974-81 iii. 181 (cited by Rood 2017: 20). VIII PREFACE and can be taken for granted throughout. In particular, there are many topographical issues which cannot be gone into here, especially in the opening chapters of Book 7 and the account of the final withdrawal in 7.78—85, and here the thorough work done by Dover and by Peter Green (Green 1970) is still as authoritative as ever. What I have tried to contrib- ute is more attention to what listeners or readers without maps or local knowledge would make of the narrative and what sort of picture of the terrain they would build. Thucydides tried to tell them what they needed to know to make sense of his account, but that would not always have been easy and sometimes it is hard to think that it was possible. Still, even when bewildered those readers or listeners would carry away an impression of a writer thoroughly in command of his material, and that, perhaps, was enough. Many debts have been accumulated. These commentaries were orig- inally to be jointly written with John Marincola: that turned out to be impossible, but I have benefited from his advice and from an Oxford graduate seminar that he and I gave in summer 2017. Emily Baragwanath kindly agreed to expose some of her own graduate students to an early draft of some of the commentary on Book 6, and her reports and advice were invaluable. Edith Foster, busy with her own commentary on Book 4, found time to exchange materials and send very useful comments. I have also gained much from e-correspondence with Elisabetta Bianco, Bob Connor, Irene de Jong, Donald Lateiner, Christopher Mallan, Hunter Rawlings III, Jeff Rusten, Dan Tompkins, and Tony Woodman, and from conversations locally in Oxford with Richard Rutherford, Tim Rood, and Andreas Willi. The series editors, Richard Hunter, Oliver Thomas, and the late Neil Hopkinson, went through the drafts with their usual meticu- lous eyes for detail and for superfluity, and I am grateful. One final debt 15 to Simon Hornblower. I have not embarrassed him by asking him to read any of what I have written, but he has been supportive throughout and has lent books and expertise. After collaborating with him literally in our commentary on Herodotus 6, I have often found myself figuratively doing the same in these two volumes, with his commentary always on my desk. This and its sister commentary on Book 6 should appear almost simul- taneously. Each is complete in itself and some material appears in both introductions, but there are many cross-references to the other volume in the form e.g. ‘cf. 6.98.2n.' Where references are to other passages in Book 7, the chapter number is printed in bold. ABBREVIATIONS Where dates are given in the form 418/7 they refer to archon-years; when in the form 418-417 they refer to a period, normally the winter, spanning both calendar yea rs. I ANCIENT AUTHORS AND WORKS Abbreviations for Greek and Latin authors usually follow those in OCD, except for the following: D. H. Dionysius of Halicarnassus Diod. Diodorus Hdt. Herodotus Plut. Plutarch Th. Thucydides X. Xenophon Ar. is Aristophane s, Arist. is Aristotle. II TEXTS, COMMENTARIES, SECONDARY WORKS Albert G. B. Alberti, Thucydidis historiae, 3 vols. (Rome, 1972-2000) Bétant E.-A. Bétant, Lexicon Thucydideum, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1843; repr. Hildesheim 1969) CGCG E. van Emde Boas, A. Rijksbaron, L. Huitink, and M. de Bakker, The Cambridge grammar of classical Greek (Cambridge, 2019) C-S J. Classen, Thukydides. Siebenter Band: Siebentes Buch, bearbeitet von J. Steub (Berlin, 3rd ed., 1908) CT S. Hornblower, À commentary on Thucydides , 3 vols. (Oxford, 1991-2008). Unless otherwise noted, references are to volume 111, and if no page number is given the reference is to the note on the passage discussed DK H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin, 6th ed., 1952) FGrH F. Jacoby et al., Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Berlin and Leiden, 1923-58; Leiden, 1994-)