DANIEL BOYARIN Deadly Dialogue: Thucydides with Plato For Andrea Nightingale Orators dispute cases and philosophers refute and establish positions. —Richard McKeon 1 Thucydides is not ordinarily thought to be a major player in the gestation of the rhetoric/philosophy rhubarb. Nor is he ordinarily read as providing a protreptic for rhetoric. In any history of philosophy, Plato will be noted—for good or ill, usually the former—as the thinker who drew the sharp distinction between debate (rhetoric) and dialogue (philosophy). Debate, that is, the attempt to persuade an audience of the truth of one’s position by delivering a lengthy prepared address intended to advance one’s position against an opponent’s similarly intended speech, is taken as the highly problematic emblem of rhetoric and hence sophism. 2 The genre of dialogue, on the other hand—undistinguished from dialectic—is taken as the true form for philosophical inquiry into truth in a disinterested fashion. Even though it is only in Plato that we first find the contrast between debate and dialogue explicitly thematized, I propose that it is well formed, if implicit, in the slightly earlier but nearly contemporaneous Thucydides as well. By comparing the singleton dialogue, the Melian Dialogue, with another moment in the same author, the equally famous Mytilenian Debate, I hope to show that Thucydides is taking a position on the question of dialogue (phi- losophy), as opposed to rhetoric (sophism), a position exactly opposite to the one adopted by his rough contemporary but slightly junior, Plato. There are, notoriously, twenty-six speeches and only one dialogue in all of Thucydides’s great work. As cannot be emphasized enough, the Melian Dialogue is an absolute unicum in Thucydides—there is no other dialogue anywhere in the work—prompting many critics, from antiquity (Dionysius of Halicarnassus) until now, to wonder what might be its explanation. 3 In his attempt to answer this conundrum, after showing that the distinction between long speeches and dialectic was a highly thematized one at the time of Thucydides by citing Euripides and Aristophanes, H. LL. Hudson-Williams 59 abstract In this paper it will be argued that Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue is best illuminated in the context of Socratic dialogue as given by Plato. Thucydides and Plato take directly oppositional positions on dialogue versus debate or philosophy versus rhetoric. Representations 117. Winter 2012 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 59–85. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2012.117.1.59.