Not everything in politics and war is necessity, interest or the thrill of doing down opponents. In agonistic times there can also be a restlessness, a diffuse and unfocused disposition to find something to act against. So it can appear to have been with the Athenians in the sixteenth year of this conflict. Frustrated in Greece itself, they were more strongly inclined than they had been ‘to sail to Sicily and subjugate it if they could’. Few in Athens, Thucydides says, had much sense of the island or realised that if they were to try to conquer it they would be ‘taking on a war on almost the same scale as that against the Peloponnesians’ (6.1.1). He knew himself that Syracuse was as large as Athens (7.28.30). But even he may not have appreciated that Sicily contained a fifth of the 3 million or so Greeks against no more than a further fifth in Athens’ dominions to the east and a tenth in Attica, or that Sicily had twice as much land under cultivation as the whole of the rest of ‘Hellas’. One can nevertheless believe him when he says that those who voted for another expedition to Sicily did not see themselves to be starting a large war; suggests, without quite saying so, that they would not have seen themselves to be starting a war at all; suggests that most of them did not know quite what they had in mind. Apart from Nicias and perhaps a few others, ‘Athenians’ may in some sense have wanted to subjugate Sicily. But it would be too strong to say that they were determined to do so and too strong to say that they weren't. They were, one might say, in a mood to see.