Bret Devereaux

...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.

I don't think they're incompatible at all - and they're not usually read as being so. It's generally read as a "when I knew what they said, i wrote as close to that as I could, when I didn't, I wrote what I thought the moment would have demanded they say."

And taking Pericles' praise of the Athenian system as Thucydides' opinion of it is discordant with his expressed view on the subsequent failure of that system to produce policy and his later statement that a *different* system without the democracy was just straight up better.

Do you know what book that discussion is in? Trying to find it.

Certainly he is frustrated with some of the choices Athens makes, but they are hardly singled out for special criticism relative to other forms of government. Spartans' over-cautiousness and inability to function outside their comfort zone come up again and again.