Thucydides, a literary theorist might say, ‘sideshadows’; he writes from where the protagonists were, neither foreshadowing events they could not have known nor ‘backshadowing’ in hindsight. It is a device with which he makes it clear that in the first eighteen years or so of the conflict, no one was very sure what they were doing. Neither the Spartans nor the Athenians, having found themselves inadvertently at war, nor those relying on an alliance with the one or hoping to escape from the dominion of the other, were able to take the war to their enemies. They could only respond to opportunities to disadvantage others and gain what advantage they might for themselves, however notional that might be. The peace that the powers agreed after the first ten years of fighting, in effect a return to the balance in the treaty of 446–445, can suggest that the Athenians had won the war as Pericles had conceived it. But the Spartans had not lost, and it did not last. Powerful men in Athens and Sparta were not willing to accept it, Argos was not party to it, those in the Boeotian federation, Corinth, and other allies of Sparta feared it, and Athens’ subject states had no say. The conflict resumed, and it was not until the Athenians themselves had been defeated in the ill-advised expedition to Sicily that the Spartans were to devise a strategy for winning and the Athenians to concentrate on not losing – strategies in which the Spartans hoped to persuade the Persians to support them and Athenians hoped to persuade them otherwise.