Important scholars blame Thucydides for his presentation of Pericles, arguing that no balanced report could have excluded a fuller representation of Pericles' responsibility for Athenian policy in the period before the Peloponnesian War began. Thucydides' selection of material for book one of the History is, from their point of view, fundamentally flawed, even dishonest.

The previous chapters have suggested that we have overlooked some significant reasons why Thucydides constructed book one in the way he did. Part of his aim was to create the material acmes of the prewar period in the narrative. Thucydides announces at 1.23.6 that Spartan fear of Athenian size was the deeper cause of the war. The first sections of the book show the problem with the kind of “size” Athens possesses, illustrating the ease with which naval acmes cause wars and the unreliability of these acmes, once deployed (Corcyra and Potideia). The following sections show, among many other things, the psychological force the unprecedented Athenian acme was exerting on all relevant actors (the meetings at Athens and Sparta), and then further that the Athenian acme really existed with the size and aggressive potential Athens' enemies feared (the Pentekontaetia). The result of this size and potential was that men as intelligent and farsighted as Pericles perceived the Athenian acme as glorious and reliable, and felt confident to urge a war with Sparta (Pericles' first speech).