Audience Sensory Experience in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War

Webb, Elizabeth Anne (2024). Audience Sensory Experience in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. PhD thesis The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00097266

Abstract

This thesis centres on the nature of audience sensory experience in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. It explores sensory aspects of the narrative beyond the Aristotelian five senses (vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch). I bring together literary approaches to Thucydides’ text with methodologies from archaeology to understand the narrative’s sensory affectivity for an audience. I develop ideas of sensorial assemblages from archaeological theory (Hamilakis, 2013), which are used to investigate the interactions between people, objects, places and ideas. These elements are stimuli for audience emotion, which enhance the textual affectivity. Furthermore, I use the framework of sensorial assemblages to explore Thucydides’ deployment of sensory hierarchies and I examine concepts of place, space and movement, interwoven with time. Building on this, my analysis underlines how the audience experiences the appearance of groups sometimes overlooked in Thucydidean scholarship, particularly women and enslaved people. This thesis concludes with an investigation into the significance of the paucity of emotional vocabulary in Thucydides’ work and suggests that this is, paradoxically, affective for his audience. The most interesting implication of this thesis lies in the connection between the audience’s sensory experience of the text and the creation of strong, affective memory. My examination of the nature and impact of sensory episodes for Thucydides’ audience reveals a further method by which Thucydides achieves the creation of a ‘possession for all time’ in his History of the Peloponnesian War.