It would be striking indeed if Thucydides is right to say that the whole of Greece ‘experienced an immediate surge of elation’ after Athens’ defeat in Sicily: that even ‘those who were aligned with neither side were thinking that even if no one invited them to join in they should no longer stand aside from the war but should of their own accord move to attack the Athenians, each of them reasoning that the Athenians would have done the same to them had they met with success in Sicily; and that they calculated that the rest of the war would be short-lived and that it would be a fine thing to have played some part in it’. It would suggest that the Hellenes felt themselves to be one. But it is easy to believe in the ‘eagerness’ of Sparta's allies to be released from the ‘great hardships’ of war and that ‘most important of all, the subjects of Athens were now ready to revolt from her, even beyond their means to do so, because they were judging the situation in a mood of high emotion and could see no case for believing the Athenians would survive through the following summer’ (8.2.1–2). All sides, says Thucydides, were preparing for conflict ‘as though they were only now beginning it’ (8.5.1). The ‘first war’ as he had thought of it had ended in 421 (5.24.2). This was in effect the start of ‘another’ (7.28.3).

It is not always easy to see what the protagonists’ ambitions might have been in the previous eighteen years, not least because they did not always seem themselves to be sure. But now they were. The Athenians wanted to save themselves and what they could of their dominion, and the Peloponnesians and disaffected parties in Athens’ subject states wanted to end it. But the subject states could not be sure of succeeding alone and neither of the two leading powers was confident of achieving what it wanted to with its own resources. Each accordingly sought support from Persian satraps in Anatolia, who were themselves being pressed to raise revenues from the Greek settlements that had been ceded to them in 449. The politics therefore were simpler than before.