ABSTRACT
No fear of gods or law of men restrained them. On the one hand, because they saw that everyone was dying in the same way, they judged piety to be no different from impiety for practical purposes. On the other hand, no one expected to live long enough to pay a legal penalty for wrongdoing …12
Thucydides here explains an unusual development in morality by reference to what was presumably an unusual lack of fear of the gods. The clear implication is that, in normal times, expectation of divine punishment or protection was influential over behaviour.13 When describing the “cruel” civil strife which broke out during the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides similarly suggests that concern about divine intervention had lost its usual force:
As a means of guaranteeing the undertakings which they [the partisans] gave to each other, shared acts of lawbreaking were at least as common as references to divine law.14
