When war broke out between Athens and Sparta, few Greeks foresaw that it would be different from any war they had ever experienced or even imagined. The twenty-seven-year conflict cost thousands upon thousands of lives and proved a stern teacher. It enhanced many of the worst features of Greek society-competitiveness, jingoism, lack of compassion, and gross disregard for human life. At the same time, a number of extraordinary thinkers sought to focus attention on the problems people face in their attempts to live together: the writings of Thucydides, Sophocles, and Euripides showed vigor and spirit throughout the war years, and the comic dramatist Aristophanes continued to produce enchanting plays through three decades of fighting and for a generation afterward--though a biting sorrow is often evident beneath the madcap facade. The Peloponnesian War would alter the world the Greeks knew in many respects. Comfortable assumptions about the citizen-fighter and his role in the polis would break down, and conventional morality and piety would face many challenges. Much, however, would stay the same--the polis as a political unit, the primacy of agriculture, the rivalries of the city-states, and the worship of the Olympian gods. The trauma occasioned by the war and its aftermath was also strikingly fertile, for the war supplied the impetus for many of the social, political, and intellectual changes we identify with the fourth century and the period after the death of Alexander in 323 BC that we call the Hellenistic Age.

Thucydides writes with such eloquence and certainty that historians have had to struggle hard to challenge his conclusions and strike out on their own paths. His History is our principal source for the war. Although Thucydides tried to write each year up as it happened, understandably he began to fall behind as the war progressed, and at the time of his death around 395 BC he had gotten only as far as 411. Rumor had it that his daughter preserved the unfinished manuscript and gave it to Xenophon to edit. Whatever the truth of this, Xenophon, who picked up where Thucydides left off and wrote the history of Greece down to 362 (in the work called the Hellenica), equaled Thucydides in neither analytical capacity nor narrative skill. Shortly after the war, however, Xenophon did have the advantage of friendship with leading Spartans including their king Agesilaus. In the course of the trek through Asia Minor that he described in the Anabasis, he certainly would have heard war stories of soldiers and officers from cities other than Athens. After he returned to Greece, moreover, he was exiled from Athens and was settled by Agesilaus in Scillus near Olympia. His sons were apparently educated according to the Spartan system; thus Xenophon certainly understood the Spartans' methods of training soldiers and waging war.

The workings of Athenian democracy were explored in a pamphlet called The Constitution of the Athenians, whose unknown author is sometimes called the Old Oligarch; he is also sometimes called pseudo-Xenophon, since before the twentieth century historians believed he really was Xenophon. Hostile to democracy, the essay makes an interesting contrast with the happier view of Athenian government and society set forth in the famous funeral oration for the war dead that Thucydides ascribed to Pericles, and it offers a keen analysis of the distinctive dynamic of naval imperialism and its relationship to Athenian government.

Diodorus and Plutarch continue to be useful. Diodorus' treatment of the war survives intact, and Plutarch wrote the lives of the Athenian politicians Nicias and Alcibiades and of the Spartan commander Lysander. The sources Diodorus and Plutarch used include the fourth-century historians Theopompus and Ephorus, as well as Timaeus, who lived around 300 BC, and Philistus, who had been a boy in Syracuse at the time of the Athenian siege. Speeches delivered in court-or at least written for such delivery--throw considerable light on the later years of the war. Andocides, who was implicated in the religious scandals of 415, described his subsequent imprisonment in his speech On the Mysteries. Lysias, who came from a wealthy metic family and knew Socrates, wrote a number of speeches early in the fourth century that touched on events during the war and its aftermath; one ( Against Andocides) attacked Andocides, and another ( Against Eratosthenes) detailed his own misfortunes at the hands of the "Thirty Tyrants" whom Sparta set up in Athens at the end of the war.

Although Sophocles produced Oedipus Tyrannus during the first years of the war and continued to write until his death in 406, the two playwrights who reveal most about what it was like to live in Athens during this war were the tragedian Euripides and the comic dramatist Aristophanes. Plays like Euripides' Trojan Women dealt with the sufferings occasioned by war through the vehicle of the Trojan War, and several of Aristophanes' wartime comedies made plain the immense deprivation of noncombatant men and women and their yearnings for peace. Some of the flavor of intellectual life in Athens can be gathered from Plato's and Xenophon's dialogues, which offer imaginative reconstructions of conversations Socrates held in Athens during the war with fellow Athenians, with metics, and with visiting luminaries such as the rhetorician Gorgias of Leontini, or the sophist Protagoras of Abdera.

Finally, inscriptions continue to shed light on the workings of the Athenian empire, and archaeological and topographical investigations have been of some use in illuminating particular military campaigns--that, for example, at Pylos on the west coast of the Peloponnesus in 425. On the whole, however, our ability fully to understand the war is compromised severely by the lack of authentic Spartan sources. The Spartans' aversion to writing literature has placed them at a great disadvantage in history. One consequence of their choice has been the fact that the Spartan-Athenian War derives the name by which it is known from the perspective of Sparta's enemy: though most of the battles were fought outside the Peloponnesus, for Athens it was the war against the Peloponnesians, and it has been known for centuries as the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans' decision not to record their own story about the war has made it necessary for us to reconstruct it for them, working entirely from non-Spartan sources and largely from the writings of Thucydides, who may-or may not-have enjoyed contacts at Sparta after (or even before) his exile. Spartans miraculously brought back to life in our own time might be very surprised to learn how their wartime strategies have been imagined.

To many Greeks alive at the time, the decade of fighting that stretched from 431 to 421 seemed like a discrete entity in itself, and in fact this war has been given its own name the Archidamian War, after the Spartan commander Archidamus. We owe the concept of a single Peloponnesian War extending from 431 to 404 to Thucydides. Another historian might have seen a continuous war extending from 460 to 404, or three wars-one from 460 to 446, one from 431 to 421, and another beginning somewhere between 418 and 415 and continuing to 404. Students of historiography (the writing of history) use the expression "colligation," that is, "tying together," to describe the way historians "create" an event or a process by linking together separate events in such a way that they form a coherent whole. Joining what others might construe differently, Thucydides, the earliest and most important source for the history of this period, has by colligation successfully persuaded most people of the reality of what is today commonly called "the" Peloponnesian War, the war of 431-404.

The first year of the war was relatively uneventful. The Athenian fleet busied itself around the Peloponnesus. Archidamus moved on Attica with his troops, but nobody came out to meet them, so they had to content themselves with cutting down olive trees. In the fall, when the Peloponnesians had gone home, the Athenian army ravaged the territory of Megara (something they continued to do annually for several years). Though this year saw few casualties, by tradition the Athenians held a public funeral for those who had died in the war. This much we know: Pericles was chosen to offer the eulogy. How closely the stirring paean to Athens that appears in Thucydides' history approximates what Pericles actually said is another question. We have no other versions of this speech. It could represent Thucydides' accurate recollection of what was said, or a faulty recollection, or a composition of his own; and even if Pericles said these things, his speech could have been written by someone else. In any event, the speech we have focuses not on the dead themselves but on the city of Athens and the way of life it represents--a way of life that is defined as the antithesis of everything Spartan.

The next year saw two entirely predictable events and one unexpected development. The invasion of Attica by the allied forces of the Peloponnesian League and the harassment of the Peloponnesian coast by the Athenian navy were becoming routine, but nobody could have foreseen the horrific plague that attacked the population of Athens. Its origin is unknown, as is its precise nature--typhus, probably, or perhaps smallpox or measles--but it spread rapidly in the crowded, unsanitary environment of a city packed to capacity and beyond. Probably about a third of the populace died. Thucydides, who himself fell ill but recovered, took pains to record everything he could about the course and symptoms of the illness so that it would be possible for readers to recognize the disorder should it ever reappear.

In many ways Thucydides' meticulous account of the disease and its behavior is a microcosm of his history as a whole, revealing his passionate interest in chronicling events that seem to him to have broad significance, reflecting as they do patterns in events. Beginning with a detailed account of the symptoms of the disease--the oral bleeding, the bad breath, the painful vomiting, the burning skin, the insomnia, the memory loss, the often fatal diarrhea--he goes on to describe the way in which people reacted to the disease. Those who recovered from the illness, sensing that they were now proof against it, not only nursed the sick but "in the jubilance of the moment held the vain belief that they would never die from any other disease in the future, either." Most, however, took a darker view of life, as the overwhelming catastrophe seemed to obviate the necessity for observing customary moral and religious norms. The disease, Thucydides wrote, "initiated a more general lawlessness in the city" as people

         decided to go for instant gratifications that tended to sensuality because they regarded themselves and their property as equally short-lived. No one was willing to persevere in received ideas about "the good" because they were uncertain whether they would die before achieving it. Whatever was pleasurable, and whatever contributed to pleasure, wherever it came from, that was now the good and the useful. Fear of the gods? The laws of man? No one held back, concluding that as to the gods, it made no difference whether you worshipped or not since they saw that all alike were dying; and as to breaking the law, no one expected to live long enough to go to court and pay his penalty. The far more terrible verdict which had already been delivered against them was hanging over their heads--so it was only natural to enjoy life a little before it came down.

( The Peloponnesian War 2.53; Blanco 1998 )

Demoralized by the plague and frustrated by being forbidden to march out and offer battle, some Athenians tried to open negotiations for peace with the Spartans. Pericles mustered one last effort to persuade them to abandon this project. In a tough speech markedly less idealistic than the funeral oration, he argued that though the empire might be a tyranny and might have been wrong to acquire, still the Athenians, having a tiger by the tail, would put themselves in great danger by letting it go. Though embassies to Sparta did cease, the citizenry voted to depose Pericles (bringing forward some charge against him, as was common in Athens when politicians had ceased to please their constituency) and indeed to fine him. Nothing much happened when Pericles was out of office except the long-awaited surrender of Potidaea. Finding that other leaders conducted the war no better, the Athenians returned Pericles to office at the next elections. Then he caught the plague and died...