The
Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) was an
Ancient Greek military conflict, fought by Athens and its
empire against the
Peloponnesian League, led by
Sparta. Historians have traditionally divided the war into three phases. In the first, the Archidamian War, Sparta launched repeated invasions of
Attica, while Athens took advantage of its naval supremacy to raid the coast of the
Peloponnese attempting to suppress signs of unrest in its empire. This period of the war was concluded in
421 BC, with the signing of the
Peace of Nicias. That treaty, however, was soon undermined by renewed fighting in the Peloponnesus. In
415 BC, Athens dispatched a
massive expeditionary force to attack
Syracuse in
Sicily; the attack failed disastrously, with the destruction of the entire force, in
413 BC. This ushered in the final phase of the war, generally referred to either as the Decelean War, or the Ionian War. In this phase, Sparta, now receiving support from
Persia, supported rebellions in Athens' subject states in the
Aegean Sea and
Ionia, undermining Athens' empire, and, eventually, depriving the city of naval supremacy. The destruction of Athens' fleet at
Aegospotami effectively ended the war, and Athens surrendered in the following year.
The Peloponnesian War, reshaped the Ancient Greek world. On the level of international relations, Athens, the strongest city-state in Greece prior to the war's beginning, was reduced to a state of near-complete subjection, while Sparta was established as the leading power of Greece. The economic costs of the war were felt all across Greece; poverty became widespread in the Peloponnese, while Athens found itself completely devastated, and never regained its pre-war prosperity.[1][2] The war also wrought subtler changes to Greek society; the conflict between Democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta, each of which supported friendly political factions within other states, made civil war a common occurrence in the Greek world.
Greek warfare, meanwhile, originally a limited and formalized form of conflict, transformed into an all-out struggle between city-states, complete with atrocities on a large scale. Shattering religious and cultural taboos, devastating vast swathes of countryside, and destroying whole cities, the Peloponnesian War marked the dramatic end to the fifth-century-B.C. golden age of Greece.[3]
The preeminent Athenian historian, Thucydides, proposes, in book one, section 23, of his History of the Peloponnesian War, that Sparta went to war with Athens "because they were afraid of the further growth of Athenian power, seeing, as they did, that the greater part of Hellas was under the control of Athens"[4] Indeed, the nearly fifty years of Greek history that preceded the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War had been marked by the development of Athens as a major power in the Mediterranean world. After defeating the Persian invasion of Greece in the year 480 BC, Athens led the coalition of Greek city-states that continued the Greco-Persian Wars, known as the Delian League, with attacks on Persian territories in the Aegean and Ionia. What ensued was a period, referred to as the Pentecontaetia (the name given by Thucydides), in which Athens increasingly came to be recognized as an Athenian Empire,[5] carrying out an aggressive war against Persia. By the middle of the century, the Persians had been driven from the Aegean and forced to cede control of a vast range of territories to Athens. At the same time, Athens greatly increased its own power; a number of its formerly independent allies were reduced, over the course of the century, to the status of tribute-paying subject states of the Delian League; this tribute was used to support a powerful fleet and, after the middle of the century, to fund massive public works programs in Athens.[6]
