A Little Thucydides

When the news was told at Athens, they believed not a long time, though it were plainly related and by those very soldiers that escaped from the defeat itself that all was so utterly lost as it was. When they knew it, they were mightily offended by the orators that furthered the voyage, as if they themselves had never decreed it. They were angry also with those that gave prophecies and with the soothsayers and with whosoever else had at first by any divination put them into hope that Sicily should be subdued. Every thing, from every place, grieved them, and fear and astonishment, greatest that ever they were in, beset round.

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, VIII, 1, translated by Thomas Hobbes