Reviewing the conduct of the two great Grecian parties at this momentous juncture, with reference to existing treaties and positive grounds of complaint, it seems clear that Athens was in the right. She had done nothing which could fairly be called a violation of the thirty years’ truce: and for such of her acts as were alleged to be such, she offered to submit them to that amicable arbitration which the truce itself prescribed. The Peloponnesian confederates were manifestly the aggressors in the contest; and if Sparta, usually so backward, now came forward in a spirit so decidedly opposite, we are to ascribe it partly to her standing fear and jealousy of Athens, partly to the pressure of her allies, especially of the Corinthians. Thucydidês, recognizing these two as the grand determining motives, and indicating the alleged infractions of truce as simple occasions or pretexts, seems to consider the fear and hatred of Athens as having contributed more to determine Sparta than the urgency of her allies.[157] That the extraordinary aggrandizement of Athens, during the period immediately succeeding the Persian invasion, was well calculated to excite alarm and jealousy in Peloponnesus, is indisputable: but if we take Athens as she stood in 432 B.C., it deserves notice that she had neither made, nor, so far as we know, tried to make, a single new acquisition during the whole fourteen years which had elapsed since the conclusion of the thirty years’ truce;[158]— and, moreover, that that truce marked an epoch of signal humiliation and reduction of her power. The triumph which Sparta and the Peloponnesians then gained, though not sufficiently complete to remove all fear of Athens, was yet great enough to inspire them with the hope that a second combined effort would subdue her. This mixture of fear and hope was exactly the state of feeling out of which war was likely to grow,—and we see that even before the quarrel between Corinth and Korkyra, sagacious Greeks everywhere anticipated war as not far distant:[159] it was near breaking out even on occasion of the revolt of Samos,[160] and peace was then preserved partly by the commercial and nautical interests of Corinth, partly by the quiescence of Athens. But the quarrel of Corinth and Korkyra, which Sparta might have appeased beforehand had she thought it her interest to do so,—and the junction of Korkyra with Athens,—exhibited the latter as again in a career of aggrandizement, and thus again brought into play the warlike feelings of Sparta; while they converted Corinth from the advocate of peace into a clamorous organ of war. The revolt of Potidæa,—fomented by Corinth, and encouraged by Sparta in the form of a positive promise to invade Attica,—was, in point of fact, the first distinct violation of the truce, and the initiatory measure of the Peloponnesian war: nor did the Spartan meeting, and the subsequent congress of allies at Sparta, serve any other purpose than to provide such formalities as were