Bret Devereaux

Really? I'm reading your Sparta series now and it seems to imply the opposite.

Sparta is both 1) a unique polis because of the helots and 2) one of the hardest of hard oligarchies.

I get the sense that Pericles does; he's speaking here, not Thucydides. There's a whole exciting debate about the degree to which Thucydides' speeches were his own construction or original (he claims to have gotten the gist of the original when he could)...

...but this is a speech he could have personally attended or had direct, reliable reports of. A fair number of his readers would have been witnesses to the speech. Which suggests it follows Pericles' thinking, rather than Thucydides'

Maybe. I tend to think that when people were reading it 15 or 20 years or more after the fact, they were probably not fact-checking it too strenuously, and Thucydides probably suspected they would not, as he had just then invented fact-checking.

"With reference to the speeches in this history...my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said" (Thuc. 1.22.1).

To paraphrase Rex Warner's introduction: There is no way to reconcile the last 2 clauses with each other. I would like to believe these are close to real speeches bc I am a huge Thucydides fanboy. But my cynical heart says that they are mostly proto-narration.