Thucydides And The Peloponnesian War

The Peloponnesian War pitted the Athenians against the Spartans. The Peloponnesians’ were an alliance of city-states controlled by Sparta. These two powerful city-states became locked in a struggle for dominance of the eastern Mediterranean area. The roots of the conflict and in particular this expedition is highly complex. As Thucydides says in his history of the war, the underlying cause was Spartan fear of Athens' expansive power. But, the triggering event was Athens' aggressive behavior towards Corinth, an ally of Sparta.

Thucydides recounts the events that took place during the civil war in Corcyra. In the year 427 tensions between the Democrats and Oligarchs exploded into civil war, both sides hailing allies from all over the world for aid. At first the Oligarchs received aid from large a Peloponnesian naval fleet, which gave the democrats a scare. However, the Democrats receive back up from an ever-larger Athenian fleet, sending the Democrats into a killing frenzy of all who supported the Oligarchy. Thucydides describes the situation during the civil war

The Peloponnesian war was fought between the two city states in ancient Greece, being Athens and Sparta. These two cities had alliances that, between them, included close to every Greek city-state. The Peloponnesian war was inevitable because Athens was too hungry for power, and tried to take total control of Greece. Athens’s growth in military and economic power led to the beginning of a bloody war.

The Peloponnesian war lasted from 431 to 404 B.C. and was profoundly influenced by two Athenian men, Pericles and Alcibiades. Though Pericles and Alcibiades were related by blood they were quite different. Pericles was a diplomat, he approached matters with a level head and tried to find a solution that did not end in bloodshed. Alcibiades was less stable, he either fought, manipulated, or ran when confronted with a problem. Both men spoke eloquently enough to move almost the entire city of Athens, using their words to bend people to their will.  What was different between them was what their will was, one cared about the city and its wellbeing, the other cared about his own wellbeing.

Promoting Greek unity gave the Greeks greater strength in numbers during the wars. Plutarch states “The greatest of all his achievements was to put an ending to all the fighting within Greece, to reconcile the various cities with one another and persuade them to lay aside their differences because of the war with Persia”. Themistocles’ relationship with naval commander Eurybiades also was very important. With Themistocles’ great foresight and decision making, the value of this working relationship with Eurybiades was the ability of Eurybiades to trust in Themistocles and his opinions. This proved very effective in the battles of Artemisium and Salamis. Thucydides praises this: “This man was supreme at doing precisely the right thing at precisely the right moment.” All of these pre-war efforts are contributions to which Themistocles played a great role in Greek victory.

Action from necessity is a constantly recurring theme in Thucydides’ The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War. A sentiment used to explain the growth of the Athenian Empire which some Athenians espoused to an assembly at Sparta best quantifies necessity, “. . . we were necessarily compelled at first to advance the hegemony to where it is—especially by fear, and then by honor, and later by benefit.” (Selected Passages 1.75.3). This claim, referred to as the Athenian Thesis, is used to advance the two following implications: all states act with the motivations of fear, honor and interest and no one can condemn a state for doing so. The Athenian Thesis influences the way many of the Athenian elite structure their patterns of reasoning in both noticeable and subtle ways.

The battle between Sparta's well-built army and Athens's exemplary navy was like a battle between a bear and a shark. If the bear goes into the water, the shark wins. However, if the shark enters land, the bear will kill it. The Athenian general and military genius Pericles knew this. Therefore, he devised a strategy that was based on the strength of his navy and the Spartan inability to battle him on sea; he devised a strategy of attrition where they would sit at home, and outlast the enemy (Kagan 52). In his mind, if Athens disregarded the Spartan land attacks, and instead survived off sea trade from their allies, the enemy would be unable to cause much damage. He wanted to drain them out psychologically, to get them to surrender from attacking the Athenian Empire (Kagan 52). One of the most important steps in doing this was to connect Athens to its navy city and their port. They did this by building walls that connected them, later known as the Long Walls (Kagan 9). Back then, walls were almost impregnable to attacks, and were one of the best defenses in the ancient world. Therefore, the addition of the Long Walls made both Athens and the port extremely hard to crack; they were ready for any Spartan land attack that would come their way. When the war finally started and the Spartans did come, they found that their attacks were not going to work. Their strategy of totally crushing the Athenian Empire and fighting a battle of annihilation was countered by the

It was at this point in the debates that Sparta's King Archidamus revealed his wisdom in both politics and war fighting. Noting Athens' naval

Pericles (C. 495-429 BC) was a very influential politician and general in Athens. He is said to have brought about a very important time in Athenian history known as ‘The Golden Age of Athens’ where he brought about or placed focus on certain things like art, which gave Athens the reputation as the cultural and educational centre of Ancient Greece, architecture, where he created a project to beautify the city and provide work for Athenians with most of its products like the Parthenon still surviving and giving us an idea of the glory of Athens. He also made valuable contributions to drama, the bringing about of democracy and the establishment of the Greek empire.

Homer’s Iliad and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War ask if death and philotēs can exist simultaneously. In the respective texts, that which Achilles and the Athenians encounter prove they will not exist in harmony for “human nature” is “incapable of controlling passion” and “the enemy of anything superior” (HPW 3.84). When Achilles does not receive his earned honor after battle and death’s toll from the war blurs the Athenians’ identity, their grief causes apathy. Achilles withdraws from his own people with a “rage, black and murderous” causing his own army to buckle which parallels the Athenians who at Pylos become “obsessed with the idea...to attack Spartans” (HPW 4.34). Before these cruel lapses in judgment, both desire

Making use of rhetoric devices and compromising the ideals of democracy breach the ideals of traditions in the Greek society. Unlike that in the “Clouds”, Thucydides does not show any sign of flaws of the traditional values.

The Peloponnesian war (431–404 BC) was an ancient Greek war fought by Athens against the Peloponnesian led by Sparta. Thucydides famously claims that the war started “because the Spartans were afraid of further growth of Athenian power, seeing as they did have the greater part of Hellas was under the control of Athens”. The two main protagonists from opposing sides Lysander and Alcibiades had the most influential impact on the end of the war.

The book written by Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, contains two controversial debates between distinguished speakers of Athens. The two corresponding sides produce convincing arguments which can be taken as if produced as an honest opinion or out of self-interest. The two debates must be analyzed separately in order to conclude which one and which side was speaking out of honest opinion or self-interest, as well as which speakers are similar to each other in their approach to the situation.

The Peloponnesian War was the turning point in Athenian hegemony in Ancient Greece. It was fought in 431 B.C. between the Delian League, led by Athens, and the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta. According to Thucydides, Athens’ imposing hegemonic status and its overwhelming quest for more power made the Peloponnesian War and Athens’s eventual fall from power inevitable. Despite the Athenians having a far more superior navy and being considerably wealthier, they were defeated and made subjects of Sparta. In this paper, I will discuss Thucydides’ and Socrates’ reasons for why

For the realization of the strategy in the first part of the war, Athens used all the available elements of national power. The Athens’s strategy, viewed from today 's standpoint, was based on a comprehensive approach to the defense of vital national interests. In other words, military assets were not the only instrument, because the economy played an important role. The economy, in the context of the Athens strategy, should be viewed in a dual role: as a source of power sufficient to bear the cost of long-term warfare and as a means of influencing other actors in the environment, especially Sparta. Sufficient wealth and money enabled Athenians not to defend Aticca and avoid a direct confrontation with superior Spartan forces. The Athens strategy partly rested on the calculation that the costs of the war would provoke the rebellion of Spartan 's allies and also make Sparta give up his intentions. The primary role of their strong Navy was to secure the free trade of the Athens Empire in order to obtain the necessary wealth for the functioning of the state and the payment of the costs of war. In an offensive role, the Navy successfully attacked the coastal areas under the control of Sparta and its