Pericles’ Utopia

Abstract

In this chapter, Greenwood looks afresh at the genealogy of utopias and utopianism in Classical Greek political thought (traditionally seen as originating with Plato’s Republic). She identifies Thucydides’ Pericles as a utopian political thinker who offers a version of the imperial democratic polis as utopia and suggests that Pericles’ utopian vision was a provocation for Plato’s utopian thought. Greenwood argues that to conceive of Pericles as a utopian thinker is not to make his funeral oration—a vital text for Athenian civic ideology—less accessible for the history of Athenian democracy. Instead, invoking Antonio Gramsci’s notes on “indirect sources for the history of subaltern social groups” in Notebook 25, she entertains the idea that Periclean utopianism articulates the aspirations of the Athenian demos—with the ugly irony (seldom absent from utopias) that these aspirations depended on making other classes of people subaltern to their desires.