Dionysius of Halicarnassus delighted in ‘the old-fashioned wilful beauty’ of Thucydides’ writing, its ‘solidity, pungency, condensation, austerity, gravity and terrible vehemence’, and he was right to say that it ‘above all’ affected the emotions. Yet although Thucydides was fashioning his prose when the advent of writing was hastening moves in Greek to abstraction, he nowhere indicates that he himself thought of the emotions, feelings, pathe or pathemata as a class. He uses neither word for the generality and has no very elaborate lexicon in which to convey the particulars; he says less than one might expect about desire, pleasure, envy, pity, sadness, inner disturbance or shock; he writes often only of fear and hope and of orge, mood or disposition, the more definite connotation of which, when there is one, is anger rather than feelings of a calmer or more positive kind; and he barely mentions any other. On motive itself, he tends simply to mark its existence in the verb hormo, to be eager for something or be motivated to bring it about. His skill lies in conveying the emotion in the deed.