Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War
Athens and Sparta fought for twenty-seven years and Thucydides wrote the account while it was happening. His own explanation is the most quoted sentence in the study of war: that the truest cause was the growth of Athenian power and the fear it inspired in Sparta. The two sides could barely reach each other. Athens had the fleet, the empire and the tribute; Sparta had the best infantry in Greece and no navy worth the name, and the Athenian strategy under Pericles was to abandon the countryside, bring the population inside the walls, and let the Spartans burn the fields while the fleet raided the coast. It was militarily sound and it killed him. Plague broke out in the crowded city in 430 BC and killed perhaps a third of the population over four years, including Pericles. The war then ran in phases: a peace in 421 BC that neither side kept, the Athenian expedition to Sicily in 415 BC that lost an entire army and fleet, and the final phase in which Sparta took Persian money in exchange for abandoning the Ionian cities and built a navy. Lysander destroyed the last Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in 405 BC and starved the city out. Thucydides' Melian dialogue, in which Athenian envoys tell a small neutral island that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, is the most-taught passage in the study of international politics. Thucydides himself was an Athenian general, was exiled in 424 BC for failing to save a city, and spent the exile interviewing both sides. He wrote that he had composed the work as a possession for all time rather than a prize essay for the moment, and the judgement has held.
- Year: 431 BCE
- Category: Military
