Peloponnesian War
The Peloponnesian War ended in 404 BC, yet a symbolic peace treaty between its two chief combatants was signed only on the 12th of March 1996. The mayors of modern Athens and Sparta put their names to it, almost 2,400 years after the fighting stopped.
The quarrel they were settling pitted the Athenian-led Delian League against the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League. The prize was hegemony over Ancient Greece, and the struggle ran from 431 to 404 BC.
How did a contest between a naval empire and a land power drag on for so long? Why did one side nearly collapse and then recover, only to fall in the end? And what did the Persian Empire have to do with the result? One man's unfinished account supplies most of the answers, and his own story is where we begin.
Thucydides says he began writing his history as soon as the war broke out. He relied on first-hand accounts, including events he saw himself. An Athenian, he fought in the early part of the war. In 423 BC he was exiled and settled in the Peloponnese, where he spent the rest of the conflict collecting sources and writing.
Scholars regard him as reliable and neutral between the two sides. The partial exception is the lengthy speeches. Thucydides admits they are not accurate records of what was said but his interpretation of the general arguments. His narrative starts several years before the war to explain why it began, then follows events year by year. It stops abruptly in 411 BC, seven years before the war ended.
Xenophon, a younger contemporary, took up the thread. The first book of his Hellenica begins right where Thucydides' final sentence stops. Born in Athens, Xenophon spent his military career as a mercenary, fighting in the Persian Empire and for Sparta in Asia Minor, Thrace and Greece. Athens exiled him for this, and he retired to Sparta. He wrote Hellenica around 40 years after the war, and his account is generally considered favourable to Sparta.
Two later writers add more. The Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus covered the whole war in books 12 and 13 of his Bibliotheca historica, in the first century BC. These books appear to rest heavily, perhaps entirely, on a lost history by Ephorus. In the first century AD, Plutarch wrote biographies of four commanders: Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades and Lysander. He cared more about their character and morality than about campaigns, yet he preserves some details found nowhere else.
Stone and soil help a little. Excavations in the 20th century uncovered the walls of Amphipolis and the grave of Brasidas. The Erechtheion temple and the Grave Stele of Hegeso, both in Athens, survive from the war years and show civilian life rather than combat. Aristophanes set plays such as Peace and Lysistrata in this period, but they are comic fiction with little historical value.
Among all these voices, only Thucydides offers a verdict on why the war began, and he delivers it in a single sentence.
"The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable." That is how Thucydides summed up the cause. The roots lay in the nearly 50 years before the war, when Athens rose to become a major power.
Its empire began as the Delian League, a small group of city-states named for the island of Delos, where they kept their treasury. The league formed to make sure the Greco-Persian Wars were truly over. After the Greeks defeated the second Persian invasion in 480 BC, Athens led the coalition in attacks on Persian territory in the Aegean and Ionia. Thucydides called the following era the Pentecontaetia, a period in which Athens increasingly dominated other city-states.
By the middle of the century the Persians had been driven out of the Aegean and had given up vast territories to Athens. Former allies were reduced to tribute-paying subjects. The tribute paid for a powerful fleet and, after mid-century, for massive public works in Athens. Resentment grew.
Sparta's irritation started early. When the Persians left Greece, Spartan ambassadors urged Athens not to rebuild its walls. Athens refused. Without walls, the city would have been defenceless against a land attack and open to Spartan control. According to Thucydides, the Spartans did nothing then but "secretly felt aggrieved".
A helot revolt in 465 BC brought a sharper insult. Sparta called on all its allies for help, Athens included, and Athens sent 4,000 hoplites. On arrival, the Spartans dismissed the Athenians while letting every other ally stay. Thucydides says they feared the Athenians might switch sides to the helots. Offended, Athens repudiated its alliance with Sparta. When the rebels finally surrendered and were allowed to leave, the Athenians settled them at Naupaktos, on the Gulf of Corinth.
In 459 BC, a war between Megara and Corinth gave Athens an opening. It allied with Megara and gained a critical foothold on the Isthmus of Corinth. A 15-year struggle followed, now called the First Peloponnesian War. For a time Athens controlled both Megara and Boeotia. A massive Spartan invasion of Attica forced it to give up those mainland gains, and each side recognised the other's right to lead its own alliance. The Thirty Years' Peace, signed in the winter of 446/5 BC, was supposed to hold for a generation.
The Thirty Years' Peace was first tested in 440 BC, when Samos rebelled against Athens. The rebels quickly won support from a Persian satrap, and Athens faced the prospect of revolts across its empire. Sparta called a congress of its allies to weigh war. Corinth, a powerful Spartan ally, spoke against intervening, and the congress voted no. Athens crushed the revolt.
The immediate chain of events began with Corinth and its colony Corcyra, a sea power allied to neither great state. After a defeat by Corcyra, Corinth started building an allied naval force. Alarmed, Corcyra sought help and made a defensive alliance with Athens. At the Battle of Sybota, the Athenians were told not to fight unless Corinth was clearly about to invade Corcyra. Their ships joined the battle anyway. The arrival of more Athenian triremes was enough to dissuade the Corinthians from pressing their victory.
Athens then turned on Potidaea, on the Chalkidiki peninsula. It was a tribute-paying ally of Athens but also a colony of Corinth. Athens ordered it to tear down its walls, send hostages, dismiss Corinthian magistrates and refuse any future ones. Outraged, the Corinthians urged Potidaea to revolt and promised to back it. During the Battle of Potidaea they smuggled men into the besieged city. That broke the treaty rule that each league would respect the other's internal affairs.
In 433/2 BC Athens imposed trade sanctions on Megarian citizens, the so-called Megarian decree. The stated reason was an alleged desecration of the Hiera Orgas. Thucydides largely ignored the decree. Some modern economic historians note that barring Megara from the rich Athenian empire would have been disastrous, and they count it as a contributing cause. Historians who blame Athens for the war point to it as the main one.
At Corinth's request, Sparta summoned its league to a meeting in 432 BC, especially members with grievances against Athens. An uninvited Athenian delegation also asked to speak. The Corinthians condemned Spartan inactivity and warned that Sparta would soon be outflanked and friendless. The Athenians answered by pointing to their military record and their opposition to Persia. They urged Sparta to seek arbitration, as the Thirty Years' Peace provided.
King Archidamus II argued against war. The hawkish ephor Sthenelaidas carried the Spartan assembly instead, and a majority voted that Athens had broken the peace. The king who opposed the war would soon lend his name to its opening phase.
On the 4th of April 431 BC, Thebes attacked the Athenian outpost at Plataea, and the fighting began. The two sides were badly matched for a decisive clash. Sparta and its allies, except Corinth, were almost entirely land-based and could field nearly unbeatable armies. Athens drew its wealth from tribute paid by Aegean islands and held its empire by sea.
Sparta's plan was to ravage the land around Athens. Many people of Attica abandoned their farms and moved inside the Long Walls, which linked the city to its port of Piraeus. Athens still had the sea, so it suffered little. At the end of the first year, Pericles delivered his famous Funeral Oration.
Spartan invasions were short. In keeping with earlier hoplite warfare, soldiers were expected home for the harvest, and the helots could not be left unwatched for long. Occupations lasted three weeks at a time. The longest, in 430 BC, ran just 40 days.
Pericles, as strategos, told the Athenians to avoid open battle against the more numerous and better trained Spartan hoplites. He wanted them to rely on the fleet, which won at Naupactus. Then in 430 BC plague struck the crowded city. It killed over 30,000 citizens, sailors and soldiers, including Pericles and his sons. Estimates say between one-third and two-thirds of Athenians died. Even foreign mercenaries refused to hire themselves to a diseased city, and Spartan troops were so afraid of contact that they abandoned their invasion.
After Pericles, Athens drifted toward bolder war. Cleon rose as a leader of the hawks, and the clever new general Demosthenes led naval raids on the Peloponnese. One fortified post stood near Pylos, facing a tiny island called Sphacteria. It preyed on Sparta's weak point, because it drew runaway helots. Fear of a helot revolt pushed the Spartans to attack it. In 425 BC Demosthenes outmanoeuvred them at Pylos and trapped a group of Spartan soldiers on Sphacteria, then proved unable to finish the job weeks later.
Cleon, inexperienced, boasted in the Assembly that he could end the affair, and he won a great victory. In a shock, 300 encircled Spartan hoplites surrendered. Sparta's image of invincibility was badly damaged. Athens jailed the captives and resolved to execute them if a Peloponnesian army invaded Attica again.
Then came the Spartan general Brasidas. He raised an army of allies and helots and marched the length of Greece to Amphipolis, an Athenian colony in Thrace. Nearby silver mines supplied much of Athens's war fund. A force led by Thucydides arrived too late to stop the capture. Both Brasidas and Cleon died in Athenian efforts to retake the city. The two sides then swapped the hostages for the towns Brasidas had taken and agreed a truce, the Peace of Nicias of 421 BC. Athens had also lost to Thebes at Delium in 424 BC, and both alliances faced rebellions of their own.
The Peace of Nicias lasted six years, but it was far from quiet. Argos, a powerful Peloponnesian state independent of Sparta, led a coalition of democratic states that included Mantinea and Elis. Athens backed it with a small force under Alcibiades. At Mantinea in 418 BC, the largest land battle in Greece during the war, the coalition scored early gains and failed to follow them up. Elite Spartan forces then won a complete victory and broke the democratic alliance.
In the summer of 416 BC, during a truce, Athens invaded the neutral island of Melos. It demanded that the Melians ally with Athens against Sparta or be destroyed. They refused. After a siege, the city fell in winter. The Athenians executed every adult man and sold the women and children into slavery.
In the 17th year of the war, an Athenian ally in Sicily appealed for help against Syracuse, the island's main city. Syracuse was Dorian, like the Spartans, while Athens and its ally were Ionian. Alcibiades urged the Athenians to dream bigger and conquer all of Sicily. Syracuse was not much smaller than Athens, so victory promised immense resources.
Just before departure, the hermai, religious statues of Athens, were mutilated by unknown persons. Alcibiades was charged with religious crimes. He demanded an immediate trial, but the Athenians let him sail, and many thought they wanted to plot against him in his absence. Once in Sicily he was recalled to stand trial. Fearing unjust condemnation, he defected to Sparta, and Nicias took charge. Alcibiades told his new hosts that Athens meant to use Sicily as a springboard against Italy and Carthage, then the Peloponnese.
The Athenian force numbered over 100 ships and some 5,000 infantry and light troops. Its cavalry was about 30 horses, no match for the Syracusan cavalry. Several cities joined Athens on landing. But Nicias procrastinated, and the 415 BC campaigning season ended with Syracuse barely scratched. The Athenians spent winter gathering allies, which gave Syracuse time to appeal to Sparta. Sparta sent Gylippus, who raised a force from Sicilian cities and defeated the Athenians in a series of battles.
Nicias asked for reinforcements, and Demosthenes arrived with another fleet of about a hundred ships and another 5,000 troops. More defeats followed. Demosthenes urged retreat, and Nicias at first refused. He then seemed to agree, until a lunar eclipse, taken as a bad omen, delayed the departure. That delay forced a major sea battle in the Great Harbor of Syracuse, and Athens lost it. Gylippus had urged the Syracusans to build a navy, which now struck. The survivors marched inland, where Syracusan cavalry rode them down. The entire fleet was destroyed and virtually the whole army sold into slavery.
Sparta meanwhile followed Alcibiades's advice and fortified Decelea, near Athens. This cut off overland supplies, forcing everything to come by sea at greater cost. It also disrupted the nearby silver mines, and Spartan hoplites freed as many as 20,000 Athenian slaves. With its emergency reserve of 1,000 talents dwindling, Athens demanded more tribute from subject allies, raising the threat of rebellion. Many believed the empire was finished, with a nearly empty treasury, depleted docks and much of its youth dead or captive.
Ionia rose in revolt after Sicily, and Sparta encouraged Athens's tributary allies to follow. Yet Athens survived. Its enemies lacked initiative: Corinth and Syracuse were slow to bring their fleets into the Aegean, and Sparta's other allies dragged their feet. Some rebel Ionian states rejoined Athens. At the start of the war the Athenians had also set aside money and 100 ships for a last resort. Released now, those ships became the core of the fleet for the rest of the war.
The empire's other great enemy sat in Susa. Darius II of the Achaemenid Empire had resented Athenian power in the Aegean since 414 BC. Only the Sicilian disaster pushed him to act. He told his satraps in Asia Minor, Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus, to collect overdue tribute from the Greek towns and begin a war with Athens. They allied with Sparta, and in 412 BC Persia reconquered most of Ionia. Tissaphernes helped fund the Peloponnesian fleet but preferred cunning negotiation to action. Alcibiades persuaded him that Persia was best served by keeping Athens and Sparta balanced, and rivalry with Pharnabazus further dulled his zeal.
At home, a group of 400 seized power in an oligarchical revolution in Athens. The fleet, now based on Samos, refused to accept the change. In 411 BC it fought the Spartans at the Battle of Syme and appointed Alcibiades as its leader. Democracy returned to Athens within two years. Alcibiades, though condemned as a traitor, still carried weight. He stopped the fleet from attacking Athens itself and pressed the Athenians instead. In 410 BC they destroyed the Spartan fleet at Cyzicus. Between 410 and 406 BC Athens won a continuous string of victories and recovered large portions of its empire.
In 408 BC Darius sent his son Cyrus the Younger to Asia Minor, as satrap of Lydia, Phrygia Major and Cappadocia and commander of Persian troops. Cyrus allied with the Spartan general Lysander. Each man hoped the other would help make him a ruler: Cyrus a king, Lysander the absolute master of Greece. When Cyrus was recalled to Susa by his dying father, he handed Lysander the revenues of all his Asia Minor cities.
The tide turned at Notium in 406 BC, where Lysander won a minor victory. Alcibiades's enemies triumphed in Athens, and he was not re-elected general. He exiled himself and never again led Athenians in battle. At Arginusae the Athenians beat a Spartan fleet under Callicratidas, who lost 70 ships to Athens's 25. But bad weather prevented them from rescuing stranded crews or finishing off the enemy. Outrage at home produced a controversial trial and the execution of six of Athens's top naval commanders.
Lysander was no member of a Spartan royal family. He was formidable at sea and an artful diplomat, and he had won the friendship of Cyrus. His fleet sailed to the Dardanelles, the source of Athens's grain. Threatened with starvation, the Athenian fleet had to follow. In 405 BC, at Aegospotami, Lysander destroyed 168 ships. Only 12 escaped. Several fled to Cyprus with the general Conon, who did not want to face the Assembly's judgment.
Athens held out under siege, starving and sick, until it surrendered on the 25th of April 404 BC. The terms stripped it of its walls, its fleet and all overseas possessions. Samos's democrats held on a little longer, then were allowed to flee with their lives. Corinth and Thebes demanded that Athens be destroyed and its people enslaved. Sparta refused, saying the city had served Greece well in its greatest danger. Athens was instead to "have the same friends and enemies" as Sparta.
Sparta kept all the Athenian tribute for itself, and its allies, who had sacrificed more than Sparta had, got nothing. Democracies in the old league were replaced with Spartan-style oligarchies. In Athens that meant the Thirty Tyrants, a reactionary regime set up by Sparta. In 403 BC Thrasybulus overthrew the oligarchs and restored democracy.
Spartan hegemony was short-lived. Sparta tried to protect the Greek cities of Asia Minor after Cyrus the Younger died, but the Achaemenid Empire allied with Thebes, Athens, Corinth and Argos. That led to the Corinthian War, in which Athens recovered its independence. The peace of Antalcidas, in 387 BC, handed the Greek cities of Asia Minor to Persia and acknowledged Spartan dominance in Greece. Persian control there lasted until Alexander the Great.
Thebes then beat Sparta at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC. That ended the old rivalry, and by the Battle of Mantinea in 362 BC, Athens and Sparta were allies against Thebes.
The war had left deep marks. Athens lost its Aegean empire and maritime dominance, and never regained its pre-war prosperity. Whole cities and wide stretches of countryside were destroyed, which made poverty widespread in the Peloponnese. Greek warfare had once been limited and formalised, held back by religious and cultural taboos. The clash between a democratic alliance and an oligarchic one turned it into total war between political ideologies. The divisions and destruction helped invite foreign domination and closed the golden age of Greece.
That foreign domination came from Macedon. A few decades after the war, Philip II unified the Greek world except Sparta. His son Alexander the Great subjugated Sparta in 331 BC, after the Battle of Megalopolis.
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Common questions
Who fought in the Peloponnesian War?
The Athenian-led Delian League fought the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League. The war ran from 431 to 404 BC and was a contest for hegemony over Ancient Greece.
What was the main source for the war?
The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, an Athenian who fought early in the war and was later exiled. His text ends abruptly in 411 BC, and Xenophon's Hellenica continues from there.
How did Persia affect the outcome?
Persia backed Sparta with money and ships after the Athenian disaster in Sicily. Persian funds helped Sparta, under Lysander, build a fleet that destroyed the Athenian navy at Aegospotami in 405 BC.
What happened to Athens after it surrendered?
Athens surrendered on the 25th of April 404 BC and lost its walls, its fleet and its overseas possessions. Sparta imposed the Thirty Tyrants, who were overthrown in 403 BC when Thrasybulus restored democracy.
How did the war change Greek warfare?
Greek warfare had been limited and formalised, with religious and cultural taboos restraining it. The conflict between democratic and oligarchic alliances turned it into total war between competing political ideologies.
All sources
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- 32Athens, Sparta sign peace pact12 March 1996