Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Plato: neues Konzept d. Geschichte im Gs. Zu Herodot u. Thukydides)

Kurzinhalt: Herodotus and Thucydides: Both authors reconstructed Greek history in order to give a causal explanation

Textausschnitt: 33/1 While the achievement of Herodotus and Thucydides as the great collectors of traditions and creators of Hellenic historiography must in no way be diminished, the limitations of their achievement should be understood. Both authors reconstructed Greek history in order to give a causal explanation of the wars of their age. It was also possible, however, to study history for the purpose of recovering past insights into the conditions of order, with the view of breaking the apparently inevitable chain of causes that led to one war after another. From the causality of rational action, as it was understood by Thucydides, nothing could result but a power struggle to the death. Restoration of order could only come from the soul that had ordered itself by attunement to the divine measure. This entirely different conception of history was Plato's. With the same range of historical knowledge as Thucydides, he created an idea of order that would bind into a balance the very forces that Thucydides could understand only as factors in a game of war. Plato's gigantic enterprise will be explored at length in volume 3 of this study. For the present, a brief indication of his principle as it appears in the Laws will be sufficient. (109f; Fs) (notabene)

34/1 At the time of the rapid decay of the Athenian polis, the old Plato chose Crete as the scene of his last great dialogue on politics. The dialogi personae were Megillos of Lacedaemon, Clinias the Cretan, and the Athenian stranger. The choice of the interlocutors expressed the historical structure of Greek political culture. The nameless Athenian, Plato himself speaking, personified the youngest area of Greece that had grown into its intellectual and spiritual center; the Spartan stood for the political virtues and military strength of the older Doric institutions; and the Cretan represented the Minoan period. The Hellenic renaissance since Homer, the savage, primitive, disciplined warrior communities of the Doric centuries, and the mythical golden splendor of the Minoan sea empire gained life in the three venerable elders who discussed the foundation of a rejuvenated, healthy polis on the island that once had been the center of political power. (110; Fs)