It is a pleasure to contribute to a volume in honour of Malcolm McGregor and to be able to repay in some degree the debts I have contracted over the years to his helpfulness and co–operation, never more strongly manifested than at the time I write. He has always liked the central topic, however apparently well explored, and I hope that he may find something here to interest him in an inevitably simplified investigation of a very central topic indeed, the first major conflict between Athens and Peloponnesian states.

That a topic is central does not mean that it is well studied. About twenty years ago, the Oxford examiners put the question: ‘Examine Athenian strategy in the First Peloponnesian War.’ The result was disastrous. As they reported ruefully later, ‘Of the 52 candidates who answered this question, 38 answered it as if it referred to the Archidamian War. We concluded that we could not fairly penalise this mistake.’ The candidates were not indeed to be blamed. Their tutors had been anxious to get on to the Peloponnesian War, and most of the text–books give up on the First Peloponnesian War, confining themselves to a bald paraphrase of the military operations recorded by Thucydides, without troubling to think much about the implications of these operations. There has been a good deal more solid thinking since 1959, but there may still be more to be said.

Most of the trouble, of course, arises from the fact that our connected tradition rests on only seven pages of Thucydides, pages chiefly composed of a plain narrative of facts, sparing in ascriptions of motive and in general explanation.