The Peloponnesian War

The Peloponnesian War was the long and devastating conflict between Athens with its maritime empire on one side and Sparta with its Peloponnesian allies on the other — in effect a civil war that engulfed the whole Greek world. Its deepest cause, the historian Thucydides wrote, was the growth of Athenian power and the fear this inspired in Sparta.

The course of the war

The war fell into phases over nearly thirty years. An early plague devastated besieged Athens and carried off its great leader Pericles. A vast Athenian expedition against Syracuse in Sicily ended in total catastrophe in 413 BCE. With Persian money the Spartans at last built a fleet able to challenge Athens at sea, and in 404 BCE a starving Athens surrendered.

Its meaning

Athens lost its empire, its fleet, and for a time its democracy, and the political self-confidence of the whole Greek world was shaken. It was in this darkened, defeated Athens that Socrates taught and was condemned, and out of that crisis that the political philosophy of Plato's Republic was born. The war was immortalized by Thucydides in one of the first works of critical history.