The dramatists were not the only writers to face up to Athens' problematic citizen and the issues to which his erratic career gave rise. Thucydides and Plato did so in their respective ways, but often employing the language of subliminal suggestion, of innuendo. The form in which Thucydides reports the discussion between the Athenians and the Melians before the Athenians began besieging Melos in the summer of 416 has long been a problem. In place of set speeches usually delivered in public, we are given what purports to be a dialogue conducted in private. “An isolated Thucydidean experiment” or the product of a crude insertion by a later editor, are two recent explanations. Although, as seems possible, the headings that distinguish the speakers are indeed later interpolations (and early readers had to make the distinction themselves by “paying close attention to what was said”), the passage is remarkable on several other counts. The conclusion here is that the Melian Dialogue was neither experimental nor a later addition, but was the result of Thucydides' careful, and clever, approach to his material, and that it has much to do with Alcibiades.

This aspect has already been noted. Ostwald rightly draws attention to the way in which the “design and execution” of the Melian Dialogue “breathes the spirit of the anti-Spartan war-mongering characteristic of Alcibiades”, but, it will be argued here, that far from suppressing Alcibiades' involvement as Ostwald suggests, Thucydides was employing the rhetorical device known as ἐμφάσις: “the process of digging out some lurking meaning from something said” (Quint. Inst. 9.2.64).