The ancient Greek historians (Harvard lectures) by J. B. Bury.

APPENDIX 263
indecisive Peace of 421 B.C., which left things pretty much
as they were?
Again, we may reasonably suspect that the speech of
Hermocrates at Gela in 424 B.c. was composed and inserted
after the Sicilian expedition. While it contains remarks
which seem to imply that the later events were before the
author's mind,' the decisive consideration is that the significance of the transactions of 424 B.c. was not apparent till the
events beginning in 415 B.c., and it seems most improbable
that but for those events Thucydides would have emphasized
the Congress of Gela by introducing the speech of Hermocrates.
It is a delicate question whether some of the other
speeches in the early section have been retouched, and reflect
light impinging from what at the time lay in the obscurity
of the future. For instance, in the appeal for peace which
Spartan envoys addressed to the Athenian assembly,2 at the
time of the Sphacterian episode, they hold up an ideal of
conduct which sounds like an ironical reflexion on Sparta's
own treatment of Athens twenty years later. To Eduard
Meyer, the funeral oration pronounced by Pericles on those
who had fallen in the first year of the war seems designed
by the author to be in truth a funeral oration on Athens
herself. This is a pretty idea, but I cannot find anything
in the speech necessarily implying that it was written after
the catastrophe. On the other hand, in the later speech
of Pericles, delivered to encourage the Athenians in their
despondency, there is a passage which seems to accuse him
of second sight. There is a vein of pessimism or melancholy,
a note which Pericles would not have struck on such an
occasion, and which the author would hardly have introduced
before the worst had befallen. The speaker observes that
decline and fall (eXao-o-ov-at) is a law of nature, and that if
Athens should fall, she will leave a great memory of her
empire, her military successes, and her wealth. This is the
consolation one might proffer after 404 B.c.; it is not what
would have been said to comfort the citizens in 429 B.c.; it
is hardly what would have been written in the interval.

iv. 60: allusions to the Athenian expedition and to Melos.
2 iv. 17-90.