Destructive state interest and panhellenism in Thucydides

The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on August 10, 2009)Thesis (M.A.) University of Missouri-Columbia 2008.Thucydides in his text about the war between Athens and Sparta derides individuals, either members of a community or states in an international system, acting to increase their own power at the expense of others and promotes the same individuals to act in ways that support the community. This critique is not unique to Thucydides as it was a common topos among other classical Greek authors of the late fifth and early fourth centuries BC. Thucydides constructs his history in such a manner as to emphasize that when individuals act in this manner, they merely hurt the community and endanger themselves. Not only does Thucydides demonstrate the danger of individuals (either people or cities) acting in such a fashion through his description of the Corcyraean stasis and other episodes, he also promotes actions taken to support the community. In the Mytilene Debate and Hermocrates' speech at Gela, the writer shows the alternative possibilities to states acting on their own and portrays how profitable such actions can be. In this manner then, Thucydides promotes a form of Panhellenism seen in contemporaries like Aristophanes and Isocrates.Includes bibliographical reference

HOW THINGS FALL APART: PLEONEXIA, PARASITIC GREED, AND DECLINE IN GREEK THOUGHT FROM THUCYDIDES TO POLYBIUS

This dissertation examines how Greek authors from the fifth to the second century BCE employed the concept of pleonexia to explain why cities lost power on the international stage and why they lost internal cohesion. First, it argues that Greek authors understood pleonexia to mean "the desire for more at the expense of another" as opposed simply "greed" as most modern authors translate it. Second, it contends that Greeks authors deployed the concept of pleonexia to describe situations that modern authors would describe as societal collapse--defined as the reduction of societal complexity, which can be measured through either the loss of material or immaterial means, e.g., land, wealth, political power, influence over others, political stability, or political autonomy. Greek authors used the language of pleonexia to characterize the motivation of an entity, either an individual within a community or a city or state, to act in a way that empowered the entity by taking or somehow depriving another similar entity of wealth, land, or power. In a city, pleonexia manifested as an individual seeking to gain power through discrediting, prosecuting, or eliminating rivals. In international affairs, it materialized as attempts of a power to gain more territory or influence over others. Acting on such an impulse led to conflict within cities and in the international arena. The inevitable result of such conflict was the pleonexic power losing more than it had had before. The Greeks, thus, had a theory that acting on pleonexia led to a reduction in societal complexity. Tracing this paradigm in over two hundred years of Greek writing further demonstrates continuity in Greek thought across the Classical and Hellenistic cultural boundaries imposed by modern writers. The dissertation thus argues that Greek authors used pleonexia to construct a psychological model of decline that persisted for over two hundred years