4 ideas
In 416 BC Athens demanded that the neutral island of Melos submit or be destroyed, telling its leaders that justice applies only between equals in power and that 'the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.' The Melians refused, trusting in the gods, Spartan rescue, and the justice of their cause; Sparta never came, and Athens killed the men and enslaved the women and children.
Hope is a reasonable comfort only for those who have other assets to fall back on if it fails. For those staking everything, hope blinds them to the odds at the moment clear calculation matters most, turning a survivable loss into total ruin. A decision should be judged by its probable outcome, not by how just the cause is or how much one wishes it to succeed.
During the second year of the war, a plague struck Athens while its population was crowded inside the city walls under Pericles' strategy of avoiding land battle. Thucydides, who caught it and survived, recorded the symptoms in clinical order so the disease could be recognized if it returned, and described temples filled with corpses and doctors dying fastest because they had the most contact with the sick.
When death becomes sudden and indiscriminate, people stop believing that restraint will be rewarded or wrongdoing punished, because no one expects to live long enough to face consequences. Funeral rites, piety, and lawfulness collapse, and people spend what they have on immediate pleasure. Social norms depend on a shared expectation of a future, and they erode when that expectation disappears.