Although Thucydides did not theoriz

Although Thucydides did not theorize about the cause of the war, in addressing the subject he would have had to reflect on the sequence of developments and incidents that preceded the war in order to estimate their causal relevance in bringing it about. He gives no indication of his reasoning on the problem, but his terse and confident statement of the true cause of the war involves an implicit distinction between the cause as he saw it and other alternative causes, reasons, or explanations that contemporaries might have erroneously accepted. The meaning and implications of his remarks on the war’s cause are among the important questions that arise when we read his History and to which Thucydidean scholars and historians of ancient Greece have devoted much attention.