Material culture in Thucydidean narrative (Greece)

This thesis offers a reading of Thucydides' History in which the words that denote objects are carefully scrutinized. Chapter 1 of the thesis examines the narratives about Plataea, offering a reading that pays close attention to narrated objects in context, and an argument that objects are being used to characterize. Chapter two gives a somewhat more formal argument about the use of objects for characterization, discusses and furnishes the proofs for the contention that objects in Thucydides are narrator focalized, and finally offers a short discussion of previous scholarship on Thucydides' materialism. Chapter three analyses the material culture of the Archaeology. It argues that Thucydides shows that the Greeks are caught in a destructive cycle of material accumulations that lead all parties to fruitless wars and cultural regression. Chapter 4 discusses the materialism of Pericles' speeches and shows that Pericles invests Athenian material resources with inherent advantages and a permanent glory that is intended to give them a positive meaning for every context. The same materials that the Archaeology shows to be destabilizing, if used for conquest, are the ones he urges upon the Athenians as the guarantors of security and greatness. Therefore, both the Archaeology and the narrative context that surrounds the speeches controvert Pericles' emphasis on imperial glory and acquisitive conquest. I conclude that Pericles and Thucydides do not share a common view of the role of the material in human affairs.; Chapter 5 examines the materials of the Sicilian expedition—the Athenian fleet and the siege wall project at Syracuse, for instance, and attempts to describe the paradoxical story of how the Athenians exhausted their own money and resources trying to take other people's money and resources. The two strands of the thesis join here, since the materials of the Athenian expedition largely reflect a materialism that has its roots in Pericles' rhetorical enlargements of the material.