Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
1 Whoever may have been responsible for the Melian massacre (and ProfDe Sanctis, , Storia dei Greci, II, p. 306Google Scholar, has unhesitatingly indicted Nicias), it is, for instance, scarcely accurate to say (p. 273, n. 1) that ‘the motion was proposed … by Alcibiades,’ for (pace Hatzfeld, J., Alcibiade, 1940, p. 126Google Scholar, n. 1) the only evidence I am able to detect (namely, Plut., , Alc., 16Google Scholar, 5) is valueless, since Plutarch drew on so unreliable a source as Andocides' (or, in accordance with the communis opinio, ‘pseudo-Andocides’) pamphlet against Alcibiades. It is equally misleading to state (unlike both Thucydides and the historians, ancient and modern, of the Peloponnesian War) that ‘Fear brought it,’ and that the conflict was ‘undesired by any of the combatants’ (pp. xviii–xix). Even Aristophanes knew better than that.