Plato and Thucydides Research Paper

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Thucydides and Plato had conflicting methods in their attitudes toward the good life. Thucydides demonstrates empirical thinking in his readings of human nature and comportment throughout the Peloponnesian War and Plato demonstrates normative thinking in the writing within his books and discourses in particular Gorigia. Plato's interpretations of a good life revolve on principles that an individual has reached contentment. What contentment means to Plato is a person who has no desires because that person possesses all-encompassing love in his/her life.

Plato understood this to be equal for everyone and that displaying entire virtue is accessible by everyone. Virtue is accessed by everyone when one has all love and none of the desires. This is how Plato views access to virtue which is markedly different from Thucydides' perspective. Plato's understanding of love more so involves a mythological comprehension of the world.

The Greek Historian, Thucydides, however, demonstrated his imperialistic methodology when narrating the history of the Peloponnesian war between Sparta. And Athens. His perspective was that of a realist with stringent morals and need for evidence. His view on pleasure for instance, was based on divine law and judicial punishment. "Thucydides and the Gorgias is the emergence of pleasure as the good against the background of divine law and judicial punishment; the greatest difference is the mere juxtaposition of Pericles' funeral speech and the plague in Thucydides and their causal connection" (Benardete, 2009, p. 78).

Unlike Plato that saw the good life encompassing an understanding of the world and love, Thucydides saw the good life as someone who entirely devoted to rejection of satisfaction.

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"The good life, tem is the life devoted to the overcoming of satisfaction and self-satisfaction. It is a life of pain insofar as pain represents resistance" (Benardete, 2009, p. 78). One who embraces pain and resists satisfaction in Thucydides life, is living the good life. Although both Plato and Thucydides understand the value of virtue in relation to leading a good life, Thucydides attributes pain and suffering to leading a "good life."

Going more into his vision, his also so practicality as aspects of the good life especially as it pertained to politics but through a seemingly negative perspective. "Thucydides' contribution to practical life is that his vision of the nature of politics seems unremittingly bleak, diagnosing the inevitability of political disintegration and despairing of the possibility of remedy" (Mara, 2008, p. 242). Plato saw, especially in his writings, The Republic, the possibility of a just and good society and political entity. His views was not as bleak as Thucydides in that he….....

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