It will be recalled that Pericles w

It will be recalled that Pericles was said to have had four characteristics: he could see and expound what was necessary, he was patriotic and above money. Athens' misfortune and the essential cause of her ruin was that none of his successors combined all these traits. Nicias, who was honest but inactive, had the last two; Alcibiades, who was able but utterly self-interested, had the first two; only the Syracusan Hermocrates combined them all. The general consensus that the Sicilian books have the power of a great tragedy seems to spring from the fact that, as in a tragedy, one feels the working of deeper forces, yet is aware at the same time that, had certain seeming accidents not taken place, the outcome could have been averted. It seems that the human mind, while recognizing a guiding pattern beneath events, instinctively disbelieves that such a pattern Controls all day-to-day happenings or is itself un-affected by them. The marvel of Thucydides' achievement in the Sicilian books is to have fused the sense of pattern and the sense of accident into a terrible and lifelike unity.