Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE)

Abstract

AbstractThe Peloponnesian War was the longest and most destructive conflict in classical Greek history, involving most major cities of the Greek Mediterranean and drawing in neighbors such as Achaemenid Persia. The principal combatants were Athens and Sparta, each at the head of a network of allies. Athens' alliance, often referred to as the Athenian Empire due to its autocratic leadership and extraction of compulsory tribute from members, included most of the Aegean islands and the Greek cities along the coasts of Asia Minor. The Spartan alliance, sometimes known by the modern term the Peloponnesian League, was a looser association between cities of the southern Greek landmass known as the Peloponnese, subject to Spartan political influence, and more distant and autonomous allies such as Thebes in central Greece and Syracuse in Sicily. Thucydides, an Athenian general banished for military failure, wrote the definitive history of the war, which unfortunately ends in an incomplete state while reporting the events of 411. A younger Athenian contemporary, Xenophon, completed the history of the war in his Hellenika. Historians consider the war's most important result the end of Athens' “Golden Age” and the downfall of its efforts at imperial dominance of the Greek world, but it did not transfer long‐term hegemony to the Spartan victors, instead ushering in a period of continued political competition and anarchy in the fourth centuryBCE.