Ancient Greece to the End of the Peloponnesian Wars41Corinthian colony in the Adriatic that had long been
neutral. The Athenians feared that if its powerful fleet fell
into Corinthian hands, their own naval dominance
would be lost. When they allied themselves with the
Corcyrans, Corinth protested to the Peloponnesian
League, claiming again that the Athenians wanted total
hegemony over all the Greeks. Attempts at negotiation
failed, and in 431 B.C. the Spartans invaded Attica (see
map 2.1).
Realizing that the Spartans could not be defeated
on land, Pericles allowed them to occupy the Athenian
countryside. People from the rural demes crowded into
the city. Though the Athenians mounted cavalry raids
against Spartan garrisons, the major thrust of their pol-
icy was to launch amphibious expeditions against
Sparta’s allies. Pericles reasoned that because Athens
was wealthy and its fleet controlled the seas, the city
could survive on imports for up to five years before fur-
ther tribute had to be demanded from the empire.
Sparta’s Peloponnesian allies were more vulnerable and
would, he thought, sue for peace within three years.
Unfortunately, a great plague struck Athens in the
second year of the war and killed a third of its popula-
tion. Pericles was driven from office. He was recalled
briefly only to die of the pestilence, and his defensive
policies were eventually abandoned. The more aggressive
strategy advocated by Cleon, who followed Pericles as
leader of the popular faction, at first succeeded. The
Athenians fomented popular revolutions in a number of
cities and supported democratic factions within them,
while the Spartans predictably backed their opponents.
The Athenians then fortified Pylos on the western coast
of Messenia and defeated a Spartan fleet that had been
sent to drive them out. More than four hundred Spartans
were isolated on a nearby island. This was a significant
portion of Sparta’s fighting elite. Without a navy and fac-
ing yet another helot revolt, the Spartans were desperate
to recover their men and sued for peace.
Once again, the Athenians were undone by over-
confidence. Dreaming of total victory, they refused to
negotiate, but their attempts to recapture Megara and
Boeotia failed. The Spartan general Brasidas easily de-
tached a number of cities from their allegiance and
ended by capturing Amphipolis, the most important
Athenian base in the northwestern Aegean. When relief
efforts failed, it was the Athenian’s turn to ask for a
truce.
The peace of Nicias (421 B.C.) accomplished little,
in part because several important cities on both sides of
the dispute refused to accept it. Hostilities continued,
though Athens and Sparta remained only indirectly in-
volved. Both sides attempted through diplomacy to lure
away each other’s allies. Athens was hampered in its ef-
forts by internal factions and instability. Cleon died in
the attempted relief of Amphipolis. Alcibiades, an un-
scrupulous young aristocrat who had been a pupil of
Socrates, succeeded him as the dominant voice in
Athenian politics. Under his guidance, Athens sup-
ported a Persian governor and his son in their revolt
against the king. Persia, which had remained neutral,
now had reason to back Sparta if hostilities resumed.
Then in 415 B.C., Alcibiades convinced the Athenians
to mount a great expedition against Sicily. It was a
brazen attempt to acquire new resources by broadening
the scope of the war, and it failed. Syracuse alone
proved to be the equal of Athens in wealth, population,
and naval preparedness, and the rest of Sicily backed
Syracuse. The Sicilians, with their superior cavalry, dis-
rupted the Athenian siege and defeated their army on
land. In 413 B.C. they destroyed the Athenian fleet in
the city’s harbor. All told, the Athenians lost two hun-
dred ships, more than forty-five hundred of their own
men, and perhaps twenty thousand of their allies.
Though Athens rebuilt its fleet and continued the
struggle, its allies deserted one by one. The Spartans,
under the command of Lysander and backed by Persian
money, launched a series of naval campaigns against
them. Most were unsuccessful, but in 405 B.C.the
Athenian fleet was destroyed at Aegospotami and
Lysander cut off his enemy’s grain supplies by seizing
the Hellespont. Faced with starvation, the Athenians
surrendered unconditionally in 404 B.C.
The Peloponnesian Wars revealed the tragic flaw at
the heart of Greek society, a flaw that had been ob-
scured by the successful war against Persia. The inde-
pendent, competitive psychology of the polis made it
difficult, if not impossible, for the Greeks to unite or to
live at peace with one another. They had driven off the
Persians, but even then much of the Greek world had
sided with the enemy out of rivalry with either Athens
or Sparta or, in some cases, with one of their allies. The
failure of Athens—or Sparta—to forge an effective
Panhellenic alliance created a power vacuum that
would eventually be filled by the Macedonians, a peo-
ple who, though related to the Greeks, did not share in
the culture of the polis. As a result, the independence of
the polis would be gravely compromised. Athens fell
under the control of the Thirty Tyrants, a group of col-
laborators who ruled with Spartan support. The city’s
empire disintegrated and its trade diminished, though it
remained the cultural heart of the Greek world for cen-
turies to come. The great struggles of the fifth century
B.C. may be regarded as the high-water mark of classi-
cal Greek civilization.