The Soldier's Choice: City and Soul in the Life of Classical Athens

by Hayden Pelliccia (Editor), Charles Brittain (Editor), Harvey Yunis (Editor), Jeffrey Rusten (Foreword by)

Overview

In the pitch of battle, according to Pericles, the Athenian citizen-soldier chooses to die rather than leave undefended the democratic principles that Athens embodies: this defines The Soldier's Choice. The great war between Sparta and Athens dominated the Greek world for twenty-seven years (431–404 BCE) and shaped much of the culture it bequeathed to posterity.

The Sparta of that era did not produce writers, but Athens did: Thucydides, an unsuccessful general in the war, became its first historian; Aristophanes, Greece's greatest comic poet, devoted the first quarter century of his career to plays about the war; the foundational figure of Western philosophy, Plato, grew up in its shadow and populated his works with men of the war generation.

Because their writings belong to different genres, these three seminal figures have rarely been treated together, an oversight The Soldier's Choice decisively corrects. As prominent members of a small intellectual community, each of the three wrote in profound engagement with the currents represented by the others. The contributors to this volume, experts in the relevant genres, reveal and explore these long-neglected interactions.

Contributors: Sara Forsdyke, Edith Foster, Terence Irwin, Richard Kraut, Mary Margaret McCabe, Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, Hunter R. Rawlings III, Ralph M. Rosen, Jeffrey Rusten, Victoria Wohl, Nancy Worman, Harvey Yunis

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501783487
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	10/15/2025
Series:	Cornell Studies in Classical Philology
Pages:	234
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Hayden Pelliccia is Professor of Greek Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of Mind, Body, and Speech in Homer and Pindar and the editor of Selected Dialogues of Plato.

Charles Brittain is Professor of Classics and the Susan Linn Sage Chair Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters at Cornell University. He is the author of Philo of Larissa and the translator of Cicero's On Academic Scepticism.

Harvey Yunis is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities at Rice University. He has published books and articles on Greek rhetoric and Greek political thought, including scholarly editions of Plato's Phaedrus and Demosthenes's On the Crown.

Table of Contents

1. Trial by Jury in Classical Athens: A Travesty of Justice?
2. Soldiering Styles: Thucydides on the March
3. Hellanicus's Influences onThucydides's Composition
4. Demos, the Public Subject, and the Politics of Particularity in Fifth-Century Athens
5. Theorizing Satire in Pseudo- Xenophon's Constitution ofthe Athenians
6. Comic Community
7. The Philosopher's Choice of Soldier? Brasidas and the Republic
8. Character, Constitutions, and Epideictic Rhetoric in Thucydides, Plato, and Beyond
9. Thucydides versus Plato?
10. The Ethical Function of Theophrastus's Characters
11. The Sophist's Choice(s): Platoand Comedy in the Perspective of Lucian of Samosata

What People are Saying About This

Susan Lape

The Soldier's Choice is a coherent and multidisciplinary collection of important essays by an impressive group of authors. Together, their contributions embody and encourage precisely the capaciousness of approach that provides a platform for illuminating the shared concerns and conversation of philosophers, historians, and comic poets.

Matthew Alan Sears

The Soldier's Choice collects engaging scholarship on important questions pertaining to Thucydides, Plato, their later reception, and democratic Athens more broadly. The editors and contributors present powerful arguments that engage with conventional topics and canonical literary works in unique ways that will advance the scholarly conversation in fruitful new directions.