Book 3, Chapter 10 — Fifth Year of the War—Trial and Execution of the Plataeans—Corcyraean Revolution
Plataea is given a trial in which the verdict is predetermined, then its men are executed for the crime of being Athens's ally.
Summary
The Plataean trial is a legal proceeding without genuine judicial content. The Spartans have promised a fair trial as the condition of Plataea's surrender, and they keep the promise formally while voiding it substantively. Five Spartan judges are appointed; the question they put is the single one the Plataeans cannot answer satisfactorily: 'Have you done the Lacedaemonians and their allies any service in this war?' The Plataeans respond with a speech of genuine eloquence and historical precision — their service to Hellas in the Persian Wars, their alliance with Athens entered freely and in good faith, their maintenance of neutrality for as long as was possible. It makes no material difference. Each Plataean is brought forward, asked the question, answers no, and is executed.
Thucydides's analysis of what drives the Spartan decision is characteristically unsentimental. Thebes wants Plataea destroyed for local political reasons — a neighboring democratic city that has sided with Athens is dangerous — and Sparta, in need of Theban goodwill for the war's land operations, gives Thebes what it wants while providing a legal fig leaf. The execution of approximately two hundred men, after a formal trial, for the crime of having honored their treaty obligations, is presented without explicit moral comment. The legal form is preserved; the legal content is abandoned; the outcome is predetermined. The juxtaposition with Pericles's Funeral Oration, where Athens is presented as a state governed by laws that protect even the weak, is not stated but is structurally unmistakable.
The Corcyrean civil war gives Thucydides the occasion for one of the most important passages in the History — his analysis of how civil conflict corrupts language and norms. In Corcyra, as the democratic and oligarchic factions fight with growing ferocity, the words used to describe virtues and vices reverse their meanings: rashness becomes courage, prudence becomes cowardice, moderation becomes weakness, extremism becomes loyalty. The analysis has been cited ever since as the first systematic account of how political violence restructures moral language, and it remains one of the most quoted passages in the work for readers in the political philosophy and sociology traditions.
- Book 1Book 1 opens not with battle but with argument.
- Book 1The immediate causes of the war begin with Epidamnus — a small colony on the Adriatic whose civil strife triggers a chain of interventions that pulls Corinth against Corcyra and Corcyra toward Athens.
- Book 1The congress at Lacedaemon is the Peloponnesian War's diplomatic overture.
- Book 1The Pentecontaetia — the fifty years between the Persian Wars and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War — is Thucydides's compressed account of how Athens turned from war-leader to empire.
- Book 1Chapter 5 is the last diplomatic chapter before war breaks out.
- Book 2The war formally begins with the Theban attack on Plataea.
- Book 2The plague of Athens is the History's most famous sustained passage outside the Funeral Oration.
- Book 2Chapter 8 covers the third year of the war across multiple theatres.
- Book 3Book 3 opens with the revolt of Mytilene, the largest and most strategically significant of the Athenian allied cities.
- Book 3Two episodes in Book 3's second half illustrate what civil and inter-state war does to the norms that normally govern violence.
- Book 3Chapter 11 follows the Athenian general Demosthenes through a remarkable arc: from the catastrophic defeat in Aetolia, where he led light-armed Athenian troops into wooded hill country they were utterly unequipped to fight in and lost the greater part of them, to the brilliant campaign in Acarnania, where he used his knowledge of irregular warfare, learned at severe cost, to ambush and nearly annihilate a Peloponnesian and Ambraciot force.
- Book 4The Pylos campaign is the tactical and psychological turning point of the war's first decade.
- Book 4Chapter 13 moves across multiple theatres in the war's seventh and eighth years.
- Book 4Book 4's final chapter belongs to Brasidas — the one Spartan commander who combined military brilliance with political intelligence, the qualities Sparta as an institution consistently undervalued.
- Book 5The tenth year of the war produces one of history's more striking coincidences of elimination.
- Book 5The peace after Cleon and Brasidas is a peace in name only.
- Book 5The Melian Dialogue is ten pages in most editions and has been discussed for two and a half thousand years.
- Book 6Book 6 opens with the debate and vote on the Sicilian Expedition — one of the History's great scenes of collective irrationality.
- Book 6While the Athenian expedition crosses the sea, Syracuse holds its own debate about whether to believe the threat.
- Book 6With Alcibiades gone and Lamachus increasingly the operational commander, the Athenian force finally moves seriously against Syracuse in the expedition's second year.
- Book 7Book 7 opens with the Athenian position deteriorating on every front simultaneously.
- Book 7Demosthenes arrives with the reinforcements and immediately does what Nicias had been unable to do: he assesses the situation, decides on a bold stroke, and acts.
- Book 7Book 7's final chapters are the most sustained tragic narrative in classical literature.
- Book 8Book 8 opens with Athens after Sicily — a city that could not believe what it had done to itself, then could not stop the consequences.
- Book 8Chapter 25 covers one of the strangest episodes in Athenian history: the oligarchic revolution of 411 BCE, in which a conspiracy of four hundred men overthrows the Athenian democracy at the city's moment of maximum strategic vulnerability.
- Book 8The History's final chapter covers the collapse of the Four Hundred, the restoration of a modified democracy in Athens, the recall and rehabilitation of Alcibiades, and the Athenian naval victory at Cynossema — a victory that demonstrates Athens's ability to recover even now.