The distinction clarifies what Thucydides keeps trying to tell us: that fear inspired by the growth of Athenian power caused the Peloponnesian War. There are, after all, two kinds of growth. One proceeds gradually, allowing adjustments to environments as environments adjust to whatever’s new. Skillful growers can shape this process: cultivation, for them, is like navigation for Plutarch’s steersmen—the simultaneous management of separate things. But no farmer or gardener can claim to anticipate, much less to control, all that may happen between the planting of seeds and the harvesting of
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