(a) 23.4–6 combines the main thrust

(a) 23.4–6 combines the main thrusts of 23.1–3 (prophasis as implying both passivity and emotion) and of 22.1–23.1 (action and speech aspiring towards ‘reason’) into emotional reaction to pressure. (b) 23.5–6’s focus on causation corresponds to the last clause of Herodotus’ Preface (‘for what cause they went to war against one another’).(c) 23.5–6 echoes Herodotus’ ‘resumed preface’ (1.5.3): ‘This is what the Persians and Phoenicians say. But I am not going to say that these things happened this way or otherwise, rather I shall indicate the man whom I myself know to have begun unjust deeds towards the Greeks’. Naturally, Thucydides’ much more complex formulation implies a much more complex causality.(d) 23.4–5 ‘first-began . . . [the war] . . . I pre-wrote first’, picking up on 1.1 ‘I wrote up . . . first-beginning’, echoes Hesiod’s Theogony (1, 115) in paralleling the author’s ‘beginning’ with his theme of ‘beginnings’.(e) 23.5–6 exemplifies 22.1–2’s distinction between logoi and erga, again implying that the former are less solid historically.(f) Since 23.4–6 entails a narrative not only about the war’s beginning and progression but also about its pre-beginnings, its causes, and its responsibilities, the spatium historicum, austerely confined in 21.1–2 and 22.2 to contemporary, or near-contemporary, history, is now somewhat extended, although Thucydides cannot be as committed to the factual truth of the Pentecontaetia as to that of the main war narrative from 2.1.