83.
Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Hellas.
The simplicity which is so1 large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared.
An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhere prevailed;
[2]
for there was no word binding enough, nor oath terrible enough to reconcile enemies.
Each man was strong only in the conviction that nothing was secure; he must look to his
own safety, and could not afford to trust others.
[3]
Inferior intellects generally succeeded best.
For, aware of their own deficiencies, and fearing the capacity of their opponents, for
whom they were no match in powers of speech, and whose subtle wits were likely to
anticipate them in contriving evil, they struck boldly and at once.
[4]
But the cleverer sort, presuming in their arrogance that they would be aware in time,
and disdaining to act when they could think, were taken off their guard and easily
destroyed.
1 Universal distrust. Force of character, not intellect, prevailed.
Thucydides translated into English; with introduction, marginal analysis, notes, and indices. Volume 1. Thucydides. Benjamin Jowett. translator. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1881.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.