This book has aimed to treat the totality of Athenian feelings and thoughts about war, peace, and alliance, based primarily on the evidence of the assembly speeches of the fourth century bc. My basic methodological assumption has been that the skilled and successful orators whose works we possess did not waste their time with arguments or emotional appeals that were not likely to be persuasive. That they made such a variety of arguments strongly suggests that Athenian decisions were complex: no single consideration or system of thought seems to have dominated Athenian decision-making to the exclusion of others. This conclusion may, in part, be due to the nature of our evidence. We possess the arguments, but we can rarely tell whether some were decisive and others not. Notwithstanding this limit on our knowledge and the inclusivity it enforces, three salient attributes of Athenian thinking have emerged repeatedly.

First, the use of domestic analogies was pervasive. The different internal practices and values that were applied to the relations of states ranged from the simplest and most intimate, the household metaphors, whose application to states served mainly to evoke emotional responses, to the more complex and distant relations of reciprocity and law, which allowed for a more complex and analytical approach to issues of foreign relations. Of course, most orators wanted to win both the “hearts and minds” and deployed arguments derived from a range of domestic analogies in their speeches.