The Athenians had been brought low by their pride and decline in political morality. Like the view of humanity presented in the cynical governmental structures of Plato’s Republic, this was a bleak assessment of the true potential of human nature and the flaws of Athenian democracy, born of bitter experience; and although it was an emphatically moral view of history, it was not one which especially involved divine intervention – if at all.24 Thucydides had grasped that vital historical insight that groups of people behave differently and have different motivations from individual human beings,
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