Pesten kom med kriget. Sommaren år 430 före vår tideräknings början hade Atens befolkning, tillsammans med stora skaror från landsbygden, förskansat sig innanför stadsmurarna för att söka skydd mot ett anfall från en militärt överlägsen allians under Spartas ledning. Då slog farsoten till, med förödande resultat. Uppemot en fjärdedel av invånarna – mellan 75.00 och 100.000 personer – skulle dö i epidemin, många fler insjuknade; protester och oroligheter bröt ut (Littmanm 2009; Martinez 2017). Stadens ledning hamnade under stark press, trots att beslutet att gå i krig hade fattats ”demokratiskt”. Det var nödvändigt för det atenska imperiets arkitekt och egentlige ledare, statsmannen Perikles, att tala till medborgarna (Tracy 2009; Martin 2016). Det talet publiceras här i en ny svensk översättning.
Dissoi logoi
(twofold arguments) refers to an anonymous sophistic text as well as to a relativizing technique, supposedly of sophistic origin, of arguing both sides of an issue.
The text known as
Dissoi logoi
covers a wide range of issues central to intellectuals between the mid‐fifth and the mid‐fourth century
bce
: good and bad, seemly and unseemly, just and unjust, truth and falsehood, predication and being, the teachability of virtue, the appointment of state officials, and the arts of argument and memory. These issues, which later intellectuals classified under separate disciplines like “philosophy,” “rhetoric,” “dialectics,” and even “metaphysics,” are treated here as the concern of a single art of speech, argument, and reason, an art labeled
logôn technê
.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, scholars began to use the words “
dissoi logoi
” to denote various methods and assumptions, which they believed characterized both this and other sophistic texts.
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