it is a general rule of human nature that people despise those who treat them well and look up to those who make no concessions. - Thucydides

There are also clear heroes and villains in Thucydides’ history. To a modern audience steeped in the behavioral and social sciences, Thucydides can appear to miss nuances in human temperament, concentrating instead on “objective” and absolute criteria such as timidity and heroism or recklessness versus self-control. In his eyes, human behavior is not predicated on or explained by one’s specific environment or upbringing, but instead directed by the play of chance, fate, and hope upon innate character — conditions universal to all and particular to no man.

In their troubles they naturally called to mind a verse which the elder men among them declared to have been current long ago: — A Dorian war will come and a plague with it.

There was a dispute about the precise expression some saying that limos, a famine, and not loimos, a plague, was the original word. Nevertheless, as might have been expected, for men's memories reflected their sufferings, the argument in favour of loimos prevailed at the time. But if ever in future years another Dorian war arises which happens to be accompanied by a famine, they will probably repeat the verse in the other form.

(Book 2 Chapter 54.2-3)

[S]till hope leads men to venture; and no one ever yet put himself in peril without the inward conviction that he would succeed in his design.