La prudenza e l'ambizione. La democrazia ateniese tra innovazioni e resistenze

At the beginning of the last quarter of the fth century BCE Athens is at a crossroads: after 421 peace is only apparent and different projects coexist in the city: some are more cautious and bet on the careful management of a par- tially acquired balance; others consider the agreements ctitious and are more aggressive and ready for action. Sign of that action are the military alliance stipulated in 418 with Segesta (an indigenous town in western Sicily); and especially the bloody repression of Melo of 416: the Athenians prevent the inhabitants of the small island from expressing dissent or distance. All politicians and all citizens, however, share the institutional framework of democracy founded by Cleisthenes and re ned by Pericles: it does not extin- guish the factions, but it channels the dissent in clearly de ned spaces and occasions as the ekklesia, the assembly of the citizens which is reserved the sovereign decision in the matter of peace and war. That’s why the assembly is the privileged place to understand an epochal decision: some ambassadors of Sicilian cities (Segesta and Leontini) reached Athens to ask for help against their enemy cities on the island. Athens immediately decides to send to Sicily 60 ships commanded by Alcibiades, Nicias and Lamacus, but a new assembly is convened to deliberate the details. At this point we can rely on the narration of Thucydides, not exactly an ac- count, but an essay in which the historian gives voice to two protagonists of his work, embodying two souls of Athens. In fact, the decision to send a military expedition is already taken, but, as Thucydides points out, the real issue is the conquest of the island and a radical change in the Athenian politics in the Mediterranean Sea. In the decisive assembly Nicias and Alcibiades give a very different interpretation of this change: they decline in an opposite way topics, feelings and perspectives. In this contribution I intend to propose an analytical reading of the speeches of the two strategists, valuing words and notions of their assembly rhetoric: Nicia accepts change, but he considers it a dangerous inclination to be corrected in order to remain in a well known internal and external political strategy. Alcibi- ades, on the other hand, uses a wide and varied range of registers (personal biography, comparison with ancestors, dialectics between generations) to dem- onstrate that change is a necessary dimension: the city seems to have no choice and must show increasing dynamism. In the representation of Alcibiades, therefore, the nature of Athenian imperialism demands novelty and changes, even if the future (the years after 413) will not necessarily follow the rhythm of the inevitable growth neither of the empire nor of a demagogic democracy.