But Athens held the evil will in check for seven-and-twenty years; for
twenty-seven summers and twenty-seven winters, to use Thucydides'
reckoning, she proved to us that it is possible, in defiance of
probability, to fight against what seems written in the book of heaven
and hell. Nay more, at a time when Sparta, whose sole industry, whose
sole training, whose only reason for existence and whose only ideal
was war, was hugging the thought of crushing in a few weeks, under the
weight of her formidable hoplites, a frivolous, careless and
ill-organized city, Athens, notwithstanding the treacherous blow which
fate dealt her by sending a plague that carried off a third of her
civil population and a quarter of her army, Athens for seventeen years
definitely held victory in her grasp.

During this period, she more than once had Lacedaemon at her mercy and
did not begin to descend the stony path of ruin and defeat until after
the disastrous expedition to Sicily, in which, carried away by her
rhetoricians and bitten with inconceivable folly, she hurled all her
fleet, all her soldiers and all her wealth into a remote,
unprofitable, unknown and desperate adventure. She resisted the
decline of her fortunes for yet another ten years, heaping up her sins
against wisdom and simple common sense and with her own hands drawing
tighter the knot that was to strangle her, as though to show us that
destiny is for the most part but our own madness and that what we call
unavoidable fatality has its root only in mistakes that might easily
be avoided.


4

To point this moral was again not my real object. In these days when