Prosopography

[ricardienne]

It's just the Greek word for 'fanfiction', right? Here are some excerpts from Robin Lane Fox's 2010 article, "Thucydides and Documentary History" (Classical Quarterly 60.1 11–29), which is mostly speculation about the sources of the treaties in Thucydides, and, sadly for me, very little about what Thucydides is *doing* with them when he sticks them verbatim into his history. But it's very entertaining:

Thucydides never stood trial. He was deposed from his generalship in absence and prudently withdrew....
Where did he go? His family’s Thraceward properties and mining interests were an obvious haven, but Thucydides was already a historian and throughout Greek historiography, exile intensified historical activity. At 4.109 he gives a masterly ethnic and linguistic analysis of the various peoples and their settlement types on the easterly prong, no less, of the Chalcidic peninsula. It was impossible for him to know so much about them without going personally to the area. He was there, I suggest, in spring 423 B.C. when he heard on the Chalcidic bush telegraph of the arrival of a truce between Athens, Sparta and their allies. The Spartan envoy appeared on the eastern prong of the peninsula to announce it to the Spartan allies: what exactly, Thucydides wondered, were the terms of the truce? There was a further irresistible attraction, the Spartan envoy himself. Thucydides names him, Athenaeus, the one truly ‘Athenian’ Spartiate, therefore, and the one Ἀθηναῖος in 423 B.C. who would not vote at once for Thucydides’ punishment.

From the list of Spartan ambassadors who swore the treaty at Athens, we can discover Athenaeus’ patronymic: he was the son of Pericleidas, a Periclean homonym. How poignant to the Athenian Thucydides, smarting under his recent failure. How evocative too, not any old Athenaeus, but a blast from the great Periclean past. Pericleidas is a unique Spartiate name. At the time, I suggest, he was a particularly relevant young man to send to Athenian spectators, as his name implies. How had its Athenian resonance entered Spartan nomenclature? I believe it was on that great day in 479 B.C. when the Spartan king Leotychidas and the Athenian general Xanthippus had routed the Persian fleet at Mycale. Clasping right hands, I assume, they swore that in the wake of victory one of Leotychidas’ kinsmen (one whose wife was due to give birth) would name his child, if a boy, after Pericles, Xanthippus’ son. In 462 B.C. the result, Pericleidas, arrived in Athens as a pale young Spartiate with a suitably evocative name. He was the most emotive envoy available for Sparta, and a handsome one too, about sixteen years old, τοῦ περ χαριεστάτη ἥβη, which would not be lost on his male Athenian spectators.

Spartan generals abroad were not readily accessible to inquisitive Athenians: Spartan envoys (we begin to realize) were another matter. Perhaps Thucydides knew Athenaeus from the past: certainly he would be glad to meet him now. There was (I suggest) a dinner and Thucydides inquired about the exact terms, the ἀκρίβεια, of the text of the new truce. Mission accomplished, Athenaeus lent (or gave) him his copy

(Yes, I do believe that was a hint of slash...) Then there's a long bit about Thucydides hanging out at the Olympics of 420, but this is the best part of it. I almost can't tell how much is a joke, but I suspect rather a lot (the only point he's makings is: Lichas probably had copies of the treaties):

“Like Lysander, Lichas the careful diplomat kept texts, I suggest, of treaties on which he had worked personally, intending – why not? – to frame them one day for the Spartan equivalent of his downstairs ἄνδρων along with a drawing of his four victorious racehorses at the Olympics of 420 B.C. and a signed, or at least marked, list of his fellow Spartiates in the agoge class of (say) 455 B.C.”

And this finale. I just. Can't. Even.

Fifthly, in that Purgatory reserved for sceptical or atheist ancient historians, if Syme has told Thucydides that these quoted documents were simply ‘stopgaps’, Thucydides will have replied with appropriate pre-Tacitean irony. They were the crown jewels of his personal researches, acquired from Spartan participants in five instances and lovingly inserted while hot, or smouldering, from the events in question.

Subtext at your discretion.