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Peloponnesian War: Spartans
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The Peloponnesian War, 431–404 BC, was a decisive struggle in ancient Greece between Athens and Sparta. It ruined Athens. The rivalry between Athens' maritime domain and Sparta's land empire was of long standing. Athens under Pericles, had become a bastion of Greek democracy with a foreign policy of regularly intervening to help local democrats. The Spartans ... favored oligarchies like their own.
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The Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) was a territorial, economic, and political conflict between the Spartan-led Peloponnesian league and the Athenian-led Delian League. While the war began with minor conflicts of allegiances in two expanding city-states, it inflamed a struggle for power between the two dueling leagues.
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The Peloponnesian War was different. When the Greek world tore itself apart in national suicide for almost three decades, some Greek thinkers — in the manner of the postwar 1920s generation, who recoiled at the trenches of World War I — began to associate their own dissatisfaction over the conduct of this particular war with the nature of war itself. Thus, wartime plays such as Aristophanes' Acharnians, Peace, and Lysistrata, as well as Euripides' Andromache, Helen, Hecuba, and Trojan Women, while they betray no love for the Spartans, seem to offer a new wrinkle in Greek attitudes toward war: such conflicts themselves are awful human experiences that transcend the reasons for hostilities. The farmers and women of Aristophanes' Acharnians, Peace,and Lysistrata, like the captured and suffering civilians of Euripides' Hecuba, Trojan Women, and Andromache, reveal that everyday Greeks found shared experiences across the battle line. Thus the playwrights offer the idea that there is something wrong with war per se — not just with the Spartans.
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What is now known as the Peloponnesian War was actually the second war between the Athenian and Spartan coalitions. The conflict between Athens and Sparta had its roots in the Persian Wars earlier in the fifth century B.C. After the Persian expedition led by Xerxes against Greece had been repulsed in 479, the Athenians assumed the leadership of the war against Persia in the Greek coastlands of Asia Minor. The Delian League, formed in 478 as an alliance against Persia, assumed the form of an empire as the Athenians began using force to prevent any of their "allies" from withdrawing from the League.
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Fourth-century Greeks... realized that the Peloponnesian War had been something uniquely awful in the Hellenic experience. It destroyed the idealism and spirit of Panhellenic unity that was so critical in the defense of Greece against the Persian invader. The war left in its wake the more self-interested idea that Greeks, if they were going to kill so savagely, should at least kill Persians, the mantra that Philip and Alexander would soon so brilliantly manipulate. In any case, to win the war the Spartans had used Persia to destroy Athens — a strategy brilliant in the short term but calamitous in the conflict's aftermath, when Spartan hoplites were stationed in Asia Minor to check the Persian resurgence in Ionia that they had ensured by earlier bringing the satraps into the war effort.
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The History explains that the cause of the Peloponnesian War was the "growth in power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta" (1.23.6). Thucydides traces the development of Athenian power through the growth of the Athenian empire in the years 479 B.C. to 432 B.C. in book one of the History (1.89-118). The legitimacy of the empire is explored in several passages, notably in the speech at 1.73-78, where an anonymous Athenian legation defends the empire on the grounds that it was freely given to the Athenians and not taken by force. The subsequent expansion of the empire is defended by these Athenians, "...the nature of the case first compelled us to advance our empire to its present height; fear being our principal motive, though honor and interest came afterward." (1.75.3) The Spartans represent a more traditional, circumspect, and less expansive power. Indeed, the Athenians are nearly destroyed by their greatest act of imperial overreach, the Sicilian expedition, described in books six and seven of the History.
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