id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
grbs-15571	Joho, Tobias	The Revival of the Funeral Oration and the Plague in Thucydides Books 6-7	2016	33	.pdf	application/pdf	12112	405	54	Building upon earlier work by Strasburger,2 Hellmut Flashar argued that Pericles’ picture of Athens in the Funeral Oration is at variance with Thucydides’ own depiction of the Athenians’ actual conduct, which, far from being inspired by striving after virtue, seems driven by hard-headed power politics combined with oc- casional outbursts of frantic passions.3 Flashar concluded that Thucydides’ goal is an ironic exposure of the tension between the true situation at Athens and the sugar-coated Periclean pic- ture.4 While Flashar is right to draw attention to this tension, his solution seems to presuppose an all-or-nothing opposition, which does not quite fit Thucydides’ picture. Unity of polar opposites Konrad Gaiser observed that the fundamental principle at work in Pericles’ account of the Athenian character is the com- bination of opposite tendencies, of which a person manages to 8 As we will see below, Thucydides stresses that on the eve of the Sicilian Expedition a wave of collective desire and hope overruns the Athenians.	cache/grbs-15571.pdf	txt/grbs-15571.txt