Thucydides saw that the ultimate confrontation between these two remarkable societies would be both inevitable and terrible (1.23.2; 2.11.6–9; 2.12.3); inevitable, because of their remarkable antitheses between land and sea, autocracy and liberality, narrow Dorian gentry and broader Ionian commerce; terrible, because there existed between the two powers neither an adherence to the past restrictions on Greek warmaking nor sufficient common political ground to negotiate a lasting peace.
