<http://purl.org/dc/terms/description>
"This paper suggests an unconventional solution to the \u201Cmoral question\u201D regarding Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. The term \u201Cmoral question\u201D refers to the fact that a significant number of current leading commentators on Thucydides think that the historian must have some form of moral outlook, but experience difficulty when they attempt to decipher a moral perspective from the historian's text.\n\tTo find a solution to the \u201Cmoral question\u201D, this paper looks back to a short passage written by Friedrich Nietzsche titled \u201CWhat I Owe to the Ancients.\u201D In this short and highly personal essay, Nietzsche suggests that the key to properly reading Thucydides is to interpret him in the context of the sophists, teachers of rhetoric and moral philosophers prominent in Thucydides' 4th century Athens.  By comparing statements on the sophists that appear throughout Nietzsche's body of work to the surviving writings of the sophists and their contemporaries, a picture of \u201Csophist culture\u201D is established, in order to test the hypothesis that Thucydides can be profitably interpreted as expressing a sophistic understanding of morality. \n\tA \u201Csophistic understanding of morality\u201D, in the simplest terms, centers on the the relativity of morals, the idea that morality has no real, concrete, and universal existence, and that morality is thus a fragile and changeable human construct. By following Nietzsche's picture of Thucydides as the \u201Chighest expression of sophist culture\u201D to its fullest extent, we are able to answer the \u201Cmoral question\u201D of Thucydides' History, and to perceive a work that is itself a bold and challenging statement on the nature of morality, while containing relatively little explicit commentary on questions of right and wrong."@en
<https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0073264>