‘Thucydides the censor’, said Nicole Loraux, ‘stamps his judgement with the seal of objectivity…in the austere guise of an impartial observer’; he writes sub specie aeternitatis. This cannot be right. The guise that she describes is one of our own. It was Shelley who imagined an ‘eye with which the universe beholds itself and knows itself divine’; Henry Sidgwick, excising the divine, who adopted the image; John Rawls, following Sidgwick, who reached for a view of the human condition that any rationally impartial person anywhere could be expected to take at any time this side of eternity. One can choose to imagine that Thucydides was attracted to one or another of the conceptions from which contemporaries might have conjured a distance between any particular observer and his world; to conceptions in Xenophanes or Heraclitus for instance of an omniscient god (though Thucydides gives every sign of being impatient with theologies and divination); or in Empedocles of an endless oscillation between agents of combination and separation; or in Democritos of agent-less atoms colliding, rebounding, linking and delinking; but there is no sign that he was so attracted, and imputing any such conception to him, though not difficult to do, is idle.

The Corinthians did not rest. In the late summer or early autumn of 432 they called members of the Peloponnesian league to a meeting in Sparta to denounce Athens ‘for breaking the treaty and wronging the Peloponnesians’ (1.67.1). The Spartans, keen no doubt to assert their authority over any such gathering, quickly convened an assembly and invited the allies who believed themselves to have been wronged by Athens to attend and explain their grievances. Thucydides does not suggest that any Spartan spoke. Among those who did, he mentions ‘especially’ Megarians voicing their resentment at being excluded from ports in Athens’ dominion and markets in the city itself. The Corinthians allowed the Megarians and others to ‘work the Spartans up’ and shrewdly spoke last (1.67.5). When they had, an Athenian delegation which ‘happened to be already present in Sparta on other business…thought it advisable to come before the Spartans…to point out just how powerful their city was’ and explain the Athenian position (1.72.1). The Spartans then dismissed all the visitors, talked to each other in a closed assembly, came to a view, invited their allies back to hear it and announced that there would be a full and formal meeting of the league at which the members could decide what action, if any, to take. It is clear from what Thucydides writes that it was the cumulative effect of what they heard on these occasions and the response of the Athenians, not any other kind of ‘thing done’, that gave the Spartans what was to them a ‘true reason’ to act. And it was the speed of the subsequent exchanges that caused them to do so when they did.

Thucydides writes what has come to be called ‘the Archidamian war’ in years that start at the beginning of spring and close at the end of the following winter. By the end of the seventh year, in the late winter of 424–423, the Spartans, as he says, were in despair. Some 292 men, 120 Spartiates and 172 perioicoi who had been with them at Pylos were in custody in Athens, and the Spartan fleet had been confiscated. The Athenians by contrast, in ‘their current run of good luck…felt the right to expect that nothing could go wrong for them, but that they could accomplish the possible and the impracticable alike, no matter whether with a large force or a weaker one. The reason for this attitude was the success of most of their undertakings, which defied rational analysis and so added to the strength of their hopes’ (4.65.4, my emphasis). And hope, as Thucydides writes Pericles, Archidamos and Diodotos all to have observed, was dangerous – as dangerous, indeed, as despair. It is not therefore surprising that one notable reading of the text has detected ‘recurring structural elements of event sequences’ of confidence, reversal and remorse and concluded that in Thucydides’ story man in general ‘defines himself as incapable of grasping himself within the limits of his own current situation’.

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.

Thucydides says nothing about the early years of the men in his story or their lives outside politics; he allows Pericles and Archidamos, two of the most prominent, to die outside his text; and unlike other ancient writers, he uses none to make a moral point. The strictest reading of the strictures that he can seem to place on himself is that he writes individuals simply to signify their politeia in action. It has been said that some are more fully realised in the later parts of the text; that they have more individual character and produce effects that are more distinctively theirs. Some argue that this is a corollary of Thucydides’ increasing interest and attentiveness, others that it reflects the changing nature of events later in the war.

It is not easy to decide. The events as we know them are in large part the events as Thucydides describes them. Nonetheless, the last year and a half of the Sicilian campaign and the two years that followed did stretch Athenians as they not been stretched before; in part, one can suggest, because the politics of Athens in the later fifth century more generally opened themselves more to the vagaries of individual character than those of any other political community in Thucydides’ story, in part because the city was for four months in 411 divided against itself. No politeia would have been immune to the circumstances of war over three decades. But in Sparta and perhaps also in Corinth there were restraints of a constitutional and institutional kind (a distinction that was less sharp at this time than it came to be) that were not to be put in place in Athens until after the war. And in places like Macedonia, where power was between kin and decided by character alone, we know too little to say anything very much.

There is no exact equivalent for our concept of interest in ancient Greek and it is not an altogether satisfactory term of art in politics now. The word seems not to have appeared in English political writing until the later sixteenth century, and by the end of the twentieth, had often come narrowly to connote a regard for self and indifference to others. But this does not have to be so, and there is no more satisfactory term. Its explanatory force in English, as in the Greek, lies in what is to someone's advantage, and even if advantage in politics may not always include other people, it will invariably be formed in relation to them. And it is not always simple. ‘What's thy interest in this sad wreck? How came it? What is it? Who art thou?’, the Roman tax-collector asks what he does not know to be the sexually disguised daughter of the king of the Britons who, in the gathering complications of Shakespeare's Cymbeline, has just woken on the headless body of an enemy whom she has mis-identified as a former ally and lover (4.460–1). Thucydides saw that complications arise at every point: in just how clear an interest is, who has it, its nature and how it comes to be formed and informed (or misinformed) as it is; in the differences between the interests people admit and those they might be thought truly to have; in the relations between their interests and those of others; and in how all these things are affected by circumstance, including the passage of time.

Thucydides remarks that Sparta's fear, which he believes to be the ‘truest cause’ of the war, was ‘the one least openly stated’ at the time (1.23.6). This is not to say that he reports no one having mentioned it. Corcyraeans spoke of it to Athenians and Corinthians addressing Spartans did their best to fan it. But no Spartan openly acknowledged it. This is scarcely surprising. A state that values the perception of its power will rarely admit to fear of another. If fear is the motive or ‘true cause’ of hostility it will usually be attributed to a fault elsewhere: to an enemy's greed or real or apparent aggression, or to an ally's failure. Even if the terms in which Thucydides distinguishes between what motivates but is not spoken and what is spoken but may not motivate are unstable, he is clear about the difference. At this moment however he does not identify either as clearly as he might have done. He leaves it to the reader to see how in the years before the start of open hostilities between Sparta and Athens, it was to be exaggerated arguments advanced by an ally of Sparta's in response to events which need not in themselves have been decisive that for a different and deeper reason caused Sparta to move to war, and that for reasons of its own, the leadership in Athens let it do so.

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.