Speaking the Same Language ― Speech and Audience in Thucydides' Spartan Debates

Speaking the Same Language recovers the role played by the audiences of debates in Thucydides' account of the war. By restoring these audiences to a more prominent position, Debnar emphasizes the perspective of the participants in the war and heightens the dramatic immediacy of the debates. She offers close readings of twelve speeches and shows that the earlier speeches help characterize the Spartans and their supporters as a Dorian ethnos opposed to their common enemy - the Athenians and their Ionian allies. Yet later speeches show that, as the war progresses, the Spartans frequently use arguments that would seem more at home among the Athenians and become less susceptible to arguments that assume their Dorian values remain unchanged. This transformation in the Spartans' use and reception of discourse reflects the collapse of the antithesis that lies at the center of Thucydides' study.
Traditionally, Thucydides' speeches haev marked a boundary between literary and historical studies of his History. Paul Debnar bridges this divide, combining close textual analysis with an examination of narrative and historical context. These has so far been very little scholarly attention given to debates involving the Spartans or to the role of the internal audiences. Debnar focuses on the literal and figurative construction of the audiences, demonstrating that Thucydides' assessment of historical audiences was a critical factor in what he thought was appropriate for his speakers to say in any given circumstance - he claims, after all, to have composed these speeches himself, either from his own memory or from accounts given to him by his sources.
Accessible to the non-specialist, the book includes translations of Thucydides' Greek as well as relevant historical and critical background for each of the speeches, and will be useful to scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates in the fields of Greek history and literature, ancient historiography, rhetoric, political sciences, and ethnic studies.

Paula Debnar is Associate Professor of Classics, Mount Holyoke College.