Peloponnesian War

The empire that the Athenians established in the years after 478 BC was an entirely new phenomenon in the history of Greece, and the basis of much of the brilliant development of Athenian culture in the fifth century. Its growth and collapse was the key event in the history of the period, after the defeat of the Persian invasion. Yet this important historical phenomenon remains baffling to study. New developments in various fields have made urgent a revision of existing approaches, which largely originated in the first half of the last century. Advances in archaeology have hugely extended the possibilities of writing an archaeology of the empire. The accepted chronology of many key inscriptions has been powerfully challenged, so that new narrative reconstructions become possible. Relevant new documents in languages such as Lycian have become available. Understanding of the Persian empire which was the parallel, and in a sense the model, with which the Athenian empire interacted has been transformed in the last quarter century. Broader developments in historiography (microhistory; history from below; and, post-colonial theory) invite us to pose new questions.The aim of this collection is not to offer a final word on any of the problems, but to give a sense of the possibility of a new generation of studies of the empire.

Syllabus and Reading Schedule for The Rise and Fall of Popular Rule—Athens (Integrated Humanities Program, History Module, Fall 2018, UVM). Course Description: America's founders, when establishing our political institutions, took elements from those of ancient Athens and Rome, which pioneered representative government in various (and changing) forms. It is natural, after nearly two-and-a-half centuries, to think of our democracy as unshakeable and eternal. But independent popular rule in Athens—the focus of this class—lasted for less than two centuries, during which the city, after playing a leading role in the liberation of Greece from foreign control (The Persian Wars, 490–479 BC), grew into an Empire that imposed democracy on its subjects—some willing and others not—as a means of enriching and empowering itself. Athenian expansionism finally forced Sparta to lead a coalition against her rival (The Peloponnesian War, 431–404). Athens was eventually defeated. Though the city endured as an independent democracy until the conquest of Greece in 338 by Philip of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great), its defeat in the Peloponnesian War marked the end of the Athenian Golden Age. Through key ancient texts we shall follow the rise and fall of this political experiment, and examine the social and economic forces that led to the establishment and gradual corruption of Athenian democracy.

This paper assesses Thucydides' thoughts on the causes and inevitability of conflict in the Peloponnese by incorporating realist theories of interstate relations in addition to a sound analysis of Athenian imperial policy and the role of kinship in ancient Greek warfare.

An atlas of maps to accompany primary source readings in Ancient and Medieval Warfare, including the siege of Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War, the battle of Cynoscephalae, the Granicus, the Jugurthan War, Caesar's Gallic and Civil Wars, Fantosme, and Muntaner.

This article delves into the relevance of the concept of "total war" as it is applied to the Peloponnesian War. In so doing, it is noticed a lack of consensus among contemporary scholar in regards to what is required for a war to be considered as total. Therefore, I here advance three sufficient and necessary conditions to deem a warlike conflict as total war. My conclusion, on the one hand, is that the Peloponnesian War fulfilled only part of those conditions. On the other, I hold that the tendency among Hellenists is to constantly compare the two World Wars that ravaged the 20 th-century. This distorts the analysis and hampers the explanatory capacity of the concept.

Pericles has had the rare distinction of giving his name to an entire period of history, embodying what has often been taken as the golden age of the ancient Greek world. “Periclean” Athens witnessed tumultuous political and military events, and achievements of the highest order in philosophy, drama, poetry, oratory, and architecture. Pericles of Athens is the first book in more than two decades to reassess the life and legacy of one of the greatest generals, orators, and statesmen of the classical world.

In this compelling critical biography, Vincent Azoulay provides an unforgettable portrait of Pericles and his turbulent era, shedding light on his powerful family, his patronage of the arts, and his unrivaled influence on Athenian politics and culture. He takes a fresh look at both the classical and modern reception of Pericles, recognizing his achievements as well as his failings while deftly avoiding the adulatory or hypercritical positions staked out by some scholars today. From Thucydides and Plutarch to Voltaire and Hegel, ancient and modern authors have questioned the great statesman’s relationship with democracy and Athenian society. Did Pericles hold supreme power over willing masses or was he just a gifted representative of popular aspirations? Was Periclean Athens a democracy in name only, as Thucydides suggests? This is the enigma that Azoulay investigates in this groundbreaking book.

Pericles of Athens offers a balanced look at the complex life and afterlife of the legendary “first citizen of Athens” who presided over the birth of democracy.

Im Peloponnesischen Krieg (431 bis 404 v. Chr.) standen sich die Machtblöcke des Ersten Attischen Seebundes unter Führung Athens und des Peloponnesischen Bundes unter seinem Hegemon Sparta gegenüber. Dank Thukydides sind wir über den Verlauf dieses antiken Weltkriegs wie über kaum ein zweites Ereignis des Altertums informiert. Bruno Bleckmann erläutert die Kriegsgründe, die verschiedenen Etappen der Auseinandersetzung, den Ausgang sowie die historische Bedeutung dieses Konflikts.

In: P. Fraňo - M. Habaj (eds.), Antica slavica, Trnava 2018, pp. 61-76.
After a discussion of three minor discrepancies in Thucydides, I deal with Thucydides’ description of the relationships between Athens and Sparta in 420 (and the supposed promise that one side should make neither war nor peace without the other) and with Thucydides’ views on Pericles and the Sicilian expedition.

Sparta’s naval victory in the Peloponnesian War depended on ship contributions from Peloponnesian and central Greek allies and funding from the Persian empire.  At the end of the war, Lysander’s acquisition of captured enemy triremes allowed Sparta to break free from its reliance on allied warships, but not without long-term consequences.  In the Persian War of the following decade, although Sparta was now able to launch a fleet without Corinthian or Theban participation, it lacked resources to maintain its aging ships’ seaworthiness, and its loss of Persian financial support doomed its efforts to recruit and pay adequate naval crews.  The logistical and financial consequences of the breakdown of Sparta’s Peloponnesian War alliances brought about the collapse of its short-lived naval dominance.

In Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War there are fourteen references to oracular responses published not only by the oracles but also by several diviners during the war period. Although certain people under the influence of the Sophist movement cast doubt upon the possibility of having any kind of real knowledge about deity, which was the source of all oracles, the public opinion of that time took the traditional religion and the published oracles into account. The result of this situation was the involvement of the religious authorities –especially of Delphi and other oracles- in the politics of the city-states.

IG V 1,1 should not be dated to the beginning of the Archidamian War. Connections with an
allusion in Thuc. 2,8,4 and the explication of the beginning of the War in the Peace of Aristophanes are not
very firm. Datation at the Decelean War remains possible.

Scholars have disagreed about whether the Great Dionysia was celebrated in 404 bce, despite the grim circumstances in Athens on the eve of the city’s surrender to Sparta. This article reconsiders the problem and reviews the positive documentary evidence for the festival’s celebration. The
evidence indicates that the festival was indeed held, which speaks to the centrality of the Great Dionysia to Athenian civic life. The article then re-examines the conditions in Athens in the spring of 404, the practical consequences that these may have had for the festival, and the celebration of other festivals during times of war and crisis. Despite the evidence that the Great Dionysia was celebrated, the scale of its festivities must have been reduced. The first regular celebration after the war did not likely take place until 402/1, when the posthumous premiere of Sophocles’ Oidipous at Kolonos would have served partially as a symbolic proclamation that Athens’ great theatrical tradition would continue undiminished.

The purpose of my dissertation is to analyse the negative comments concerning Pericles; the 5th Century BCE Athenian statesman and general. This will involve an assessment of both ancient and modern writers. It will include an exploration of his early career as well as the decisions he made whilst in high office. His personal life will also be examined to clarify to what extent it affected his judgement in politics. Larger themes such as Athenian Imperialism and financial greed will also be taken into account to confirm if Pericles' actions were all just simply part of the current social-political landscape of the polis of Athens. The eventual aim of my dissertation is to evaluate these various assessments and judge if there is substantial weight to them.

En el presente estado de la cuestión se abordará el estado actual de la investigación en torno a la infantería ligera griega en el siglo V. Las fuentes del periodo no prestan atención a las tropas ligeras y existen importantes vacíos, lo cual ha dado lugar a diferentes interpretaciones sobre su aparición, modo de actuar y eficacia. La investigación, desde finales de la década de 1960, está marcada por puntos de vista diferenciados en torno a la cuestión de si hubo un empleo frecuente o relevante de la misma en los conflictos del siglo V o, por lo contrario, es desde el siglo IV en adelante cuando esta cobra mayor importancia en el modo de librar la guerra en en el mundo griego. El objetivo de este trabajo de fin de grado será, por lo tanto, identificar aquellos puntos de la investigación que han  suscitado un debate mayor entre los investigadores y en los que no hay un consenso a día de hoy, pudiendo señalar líneas de argumentación a las que adscribir a los diferentes académicos que han abordado esta cuestión.

The Delian League was formed as a buffer against further Persian aggression into Greece.  It was also formed to exact revenge for the two invasions of Greece by Persia in 490 and 480 BCE.  The league began with good intentions but ended up becoming a way for Athens to grow in power and strength.  Its demise came about with the beginning of the Peloponnesian War.

The following text is an English translation of Vandewalle, A. (2019). 'Assassin's Creed Odyssey: een speelbare versie van klassiek Griekenland' in Hermeneus 91 (4), 146-152 originally published in Dutch. The translation is my own. The purpose of this short, popularizing article was (i) to present Assassin's Creed Odyssey and the study of antiquity in video games to a non-gamer audience of classicists unfamiliar with the Assassin's Creed franchise, (ii) to discuss how the game treats the Greek world and its literature, and (iii) to briefly list some of the many applications of this game in educational use. As such, this text considerably lacks theoretical foundation, academic references and terminological reflection, and provides but a mere first step on the road to a fuller understanding of how the ancient world is represented in this game. I hope to keep traveling that road in future research.

Course Description:
This course offers an introduction to the history of ancient Greece from the Bronze Age to Alexander the Great, drawing on both source materials and modern works. This is a student-driven seminar based on readings and in-class discussions on the societal, religious, and political developments of the Greek world in antiquity. Students will become familiar with the Bronze, Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic ages of Greek history. The foundation of this course is the geopolitical history of the expanding Greek world; however, students also will engage the importance of ancient Greek culture, literature, religion, art, and gender roles. Through the investigation of texts, architecture, and archaeology, students will gain an appreciation of not just the ruling classes of the ancient Greek world, but also of the daily lives of normal Greeks and Hellenized native peoples.

This article provides an in-depth analysis of Gorgias's Funeral Oration. The chapter shows that Gorgias’s Epitaphios was most likely composed and disseminated at some point in the last quarter of the fifth century; that the text was intended to be received primarily by a literary audience (it was certainly not presented orally in the public funeral ceremony); and that Gorgias’s Epitaphios conveyed a tenor critical of the Athenian power politics in the later fifth century. Also, Gorgias’s Epitaphios seems to have played a role when Thucydides wrote the Periclean funeral oration in the Histories; and Isocrates in the Panegyricus took over the central message from Gorgias and developed it further.

Aristophanes’ oeuvre is inextricably tied to the life and the fate of his native city Athens. The history, the political issues, and the people of Athens have always provided the central themes of his comic fictions. Aristophanes opposed the Peloponnesian War from the beginning, partly because of his upper-class origins. At first glance, he adopted the viewpoint of the ordinary farmers and smallholders of Attica, who were severely afflicted by the war; his celebration of peace is closely connected with the pleasures of the countryside. In reality, Aristophanes himself probably belonged to an aristocratic family of rich landowners and shared the deep conservatism and the antipathy towards radical demagogy that were typical of his class. His description of rural life concentrates exclusively on the joyful and hedonistic aspects and omits the hard labours of agricultural work; this is the characteristic attitude of a man who enjoyed the countryside as a place of holiday.

Aristophanes is an enemy of extreme democracy and advocates a more moderate constitution, which should be ruled by well-educated aristocrats. He defends the conservative and oligarchic leaders of his time and mercilessly attacks the radical populist demagogues, such as Cleon and his collaborators. In the final years of the Peloponnesian War, he similarly criticized the disastrous Cleophon, who misled the people of Athens to fatally wrong decisions, resulting in the total defeat and humiliation of Athens.

Even the imaginary and utopian worlds, which Aristophanes constructs in his fantastic comedies, such as the aerial city of Nephelokokkygia in the Birds and the world of Hades in the Frogs, are created by analogy to the city and culture of Athens, as inverted or distorted mirror images of the Athenian polis. Nephelokokkygia, an autonomous creation of fantasy, also serves as a kind of open and holistic parable of the unquenchable imperialistic ambition of Athens at the time of the Sicilian expedition. The underworld of the Frogs replicates the pessimistic atmosphere of the besieged Athens, a city on the verge of disaster, in which death prevails. Only the rituals of the Eleusinian Mysteries provide a source of joy and a hope of salvation in this brilliant and profoundly bitter play.

Sparta had long been Greece’s dominant land power, because its hoplites, as full-time professionals, fought much better than its enemies and it could force its allies to provide further hoplites for its wars without the need to pay them. Yet in the Peloponnesian War’s first two phases the enormous army that Sparta could raise proved ineffective against Athens; for whenever it entered Athenian territory, the Athenians simply withdrew within their fortifications, imported food-supplies by sea and waited for their enemies to leave. Now Sparta realised that they could only defeat Athens if it became a major sea power. But to become one it too had to find a way to meet a fleet’s astronomical costs. Sparta found a way in 413/2, after the destruction of the enormous expedition that Athens had sent to Sicily. Persia saw this destruction as the best opportunity in decades to get rid of the Athenian empire. In exchange for re-gaining the right to levy tribute on Anatolia’s Greeks it thus provided Sparta with enough gold to build and to maintain a fleet. In the course of the Ionian War, which is the name of the Peloponnesian War’s last phase, this Spartan fleet came in time to surpass what was left of the Athenian fleet. In 405/4 Sparta easily destroyed the last of the Athenian triremes in the Hellespont and so was able to force the surrender of Athens by a land and sea blockade. With its full control of the Aegean Sea it subjugated the last of the Greek states that supported Athens and so could bring the Athenian empire to an end.

The fifth-century BC played a crucial role in the formation of Greek identity, during which the Greeks developed both a unified and a divided Hellenic consciousness. The Persian Wars (490-479 BC) encouraged the formation of a Pan-Hellenic identity while the Peloponnesian War (431-411 BC) between Athens and Sparta fractured the unity of Greek identity. During both wars, the Greeks used wine as a marker of their collective and individual identities. The Greeks identified the Persians as “barbarians” because they did not consume wine. The Peloponnesian War revealed divisions within Hellenic identity, as shown in the Athenian attitude toward Spartan drinking practices. Examining both Greek writings and material culture reveals that wine played an important part in Greek society. Herodotus’ Histories and Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War shed light on these two major fifth-century BC conflicts. Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists, from the second-century AD, possesses an assortment of cultural details about the Greeks and “barbarians.” Ancient Greek historians, such as Athenaeus, described the practices and social rules regarding wine consumption. The numerous discoveries of wine paraphernalia demonstrate the spread of wine and wine culture throughout the Greek world. Dionysus, the god wine in Greek mythology, reveals the cultural importance of wine and its relation to the East. Modern scholarship of the fifth-century BC has neglected to make an explicit connection between Greek attitudes toward wine and the formation of their multi-layered identities.

In diesem Beitrag wird die Rolle von religiösen Phänomenen des klassischen Griechenlands auf die im Geschichtswerk des Thukydides geschilderten Ereignisse, welche Vorgeschichte und Verlauf des Peloponnesischen Krieges beschreiben, untersucht. Zunächst wird hierzu auf den Forschungsstand und die historiographische Methode des Thukydides, sofern sie für die Themenstellung relevant erscheint, dargelegt. Im Anschluss daran wird anhand zahlreicher Fallbeispiele aus dem Primärwerk, welche skizziert und interpretiert, sowie phänomenologisch gemäß den jeweils politisch zum Tragen kommenden kultisch-religiösen Aspekten typologisiert werden, die komplexe Wechselwirkung zwischen der politischen und religiösen Sphäre beleuchtet. Es zeigt sich hierbei, dass Religion und Kult teils mit bemerkenswertem Pragmatismus als politische „Stilmittel“ eingesetzt werden, teils aber auch dann politisch wirkmächtige Faktoren darstellen, wenn man den traditionell-religiösen Vorstellungen und Praktiken Folge leistet. Ferner reicht die Bandbreite von Begebenheiten, bei welchen religiöse Phänomene politisch wirksam werden, von räumlich wie personell sehr begrenzten Fällen bis hin zu zwischenstaatlichen Auseinandersetzungen größter Tragweite. Zudem lassen sich in Hinblick auf den Umgang mit Religion und Kult bei den hauptsächlichen Konfliktparteien des Peloponnesischen Krieges merkliche Unterschiede konstatieren. Die antike griechische Religion tritt also auch im thukydideischen Geschichtswerk als geradezu omnipräsentes Politikum zutage.

This is my translation of Thucydides 5.84-116, "The Melian Dialogue," from two Greek classes I had at Berk with Profs. Leslie Threate (Spr. 1994) and Ron Stroud (Fall 1996).  After 10 years of fighting, in 421 BC, Athens made peace and an alliance with the Lacedaemonians (Spartans) by the "Peace of Nicias" and turned on the small neutral powers and attacked them. Melos tried to persuade Athens to be decent and leave them alone, but Athens explains this is not about morals, it is because you have $ and we want it. Hand it over or suffer the consequences of futile resistance. The strong do whatever they want and the weak must accept that if they wish to survive. This section is a study in bullies and power politics in Greece, 421 BC.

Between records of political speeches, descriptions of military tactics, and insight into the inner workings of Athenian democracy, Thucydides inserts heralds, messengers, and ambassadors. While these individuals did not receive prominent attention in Thucydides' text, they nevertheless had a key role throughout the Peloponnesian War. This paper examines the effects of their decisions and their negotiations on diplomacy as well as the limits of their influence.

While Brasidas is often singled out as a particularly un-Spartan Spartan and is clearly presented as such by Thucydides, there were many other Spartans, including in the pages of Thucydides, who matched Brasidas' innovation, energy and ambitious foreign policy. Thucydides overemphasizes Brasidas' un-Spartan characteristics and downplays his similarities to other Spartans such as Gylippus in order to make Brasidas the exception that proves the rule. Thucydides' treatment of Brasidas is therefore another important element in the historian's methods of characterizing states and individuals.