A funeral oration for the first year's dead, the classic statement of what a democracy thinks it is
Pericles' speech, as reported (and largely composed) by Thucydides in Book II.
History · Ancient world
The Peloponnesian War
431–404 BC
The civil war of the Greek world
A twenty-seven-year struggle between Athens, with its maritime empire, and Sparta, with its land alliance, which drew in most of the Greek world and ended with Athens stripped of its fleet, its walls and its empire. Its historian, an exiled Athenian general, wrote the first work of political history recognisable as such.
How to spot them
- ▸Clue patterns: an empire of ships against an alliance of hoplites, the Long Walls, a plague inside the besieged city
- ▸Its historian was a failed general exiled for losing Amphipolis
- ▸The disastrous expedition to Sicily and the siege of Syracuse
- ▸Ended in 404 BC with the walls torn down to the music of flute-girls
What happened
A plague that arrived by sea in the second year and killed the statesman who had shaped the strategy
The plague of Athens, 430–426 BC; Pericles died of it in 429.
'The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must'
The Melian Dialogue, Book V, 416 BC; the island's men were killed and the women and children enslaved.
An expedition to Sicily wrecked by the mutilation of statues at home and the defection of its own general
The Sicilian Expedition, 415–413 BC; Alcibiades defected to Sparta after the affair of the Hermai.
A final naval catastrophe on a beach in the Hellespont that left the city with no fleet
Aegospotami, 405 BC, where Lysander caught the Athenian fleet ashore.
A peace named after the Athenian who negotiated it, which lasted barely half its fifty years
The Peace of Nicias, 421 BC.
Thirty men installed as a puppet government after the surrender, overthrown within a year
The Thirty Tyrants, 404–403 BC.
Quick-fire facts
- •It ran from 431 to 404 BC between Athens with the Delian League and Sparta with the Peloponnesian League.
- •Thucydides wrote the history; his account breaks off in 411 BC and was continued by Xenophon's Hellenica.
- •The war is conventionally split into the Archidamian War (431–421), the Peace of Nicias, and the Ionian or Decelean War.
- •Pericles' strategy was to abandon Attica and rely on the fleet and the Long Walls; he died in the plague in 429 BC.
- •The Sicilian Expedition of 415–413 BC ended with the destruction of the Athenian force at Syracuse and the execution of Nicias and Demosthenes.
- •Alcibiades changed sides repeatedly, serving Athens, Sparta and Persia in turn.
- •Persian gold, supplied to Sparta by Cyrus the Younger, paid for the fleet that finally beat Athens.
- •The Spartan admiral Lysander destroyed the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in 405 BC and besieged Athens into surrender in 404.
- •Athens' Long Walls were demolished at the surrender and the Thirty Tyrants briefly imposed; democracy was restored in 403 BC.
- •The Melian Dialogue of 416 BC is the most quoted passage in Thucydides and the origin of the phrase 'Thucydides trap' in modern strategy writing.
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- Thucydides — History of the Peloponnesian War
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Peloponnesian War
- Victor Davis Hanson — A War Like No Other