At about the same time Marius defeated the Libyan kings Bocchos [I] and Jugurtha in a great engagement, and killed myriads of Libyans, and later took Jugurtha prisoner, who had been captured by Bocchos and was thus pardoned by the Romans for what had brought him into the war.1 Moreover, the Romans, at war with the Kimbrians, were stumbling greatly in Galatia and were exceedingly demoralized.2 Also, at about the same time, certain people came from Sicily and reported an uprising of slaves numbering tens of thousands. When this was announced, all of Rome found itself in a continual crisis, since about 60,000 soldiers had died in the Galatian war against the Kimbrians, and there was a lack of chosen troops to send out.

Epikouros the philosopher said in his treatise Principal Doctrines that the just life is calm but the unjust is mostly full of disturbance.1 Thus in a short statement he completely encompassed true wisdom, which, on the whole, has the power to correct the evil in men. Injustice, being the mother city of evils,2 causes the greatest misfortunes, not only for private citizens but collectively for peoples, populations, and kings.

Those in the Carthaginian army were Iberians,3 Kelts,4 Balearians,5 Libyans, Phoenicians,6 Ligystinians,7 and mixed Hellenic slaves.8

It is an ancestral custom among the Epeirotes not only to fight for their own territory but to face dangers for the sake of their friends and allies.

The Peloponnesian War affected how mass and elite interacted at Athens and how the public sphere worked there. The Athenians themselves thought in terms of two ruptures, one at the death of Perikles, one at the end of the war. But the degree of rupture in both cases has been exaggerated, and it is better to think in terms of how power was exercised. Here we see various ways in which the people’s control of the elite was strengthened during the war, and indeed the use of exile and atimia (disenfranchisement) as penalties fatally weakened Athens by causing factional strife. The Peloponnesian War concentrated the people inside Athens and the Long Walls and increased the number of spaces in which Athenians were mixed up with metics and enslaved people, enhancing the deep politicisation of Athenian culture, which affected the wealthy as well as the poor and promoted the hetaireiai and, eventually, concentration of political factions into particular spaces. War enhanced the Athenians’ emotional investment, and this came out in particular over the Sicilian Expedition. It was because war affected the Athenians in a variety of different ways, each with their own timescale, that the traumatic effects emerged only after fifteen years.

The modern study of the Peloponnesian War has suffered from a double blind spot. On the one hand, the traditional study of political history based on events has shown little interest in the great development in the study of ancient Greek economic, social and cultural history. On the other hand, social, economic and cultural history has shown little interest in the study of events like the Peloponnesian War. In this chapter I want to discuss an alternative framework that can incorporate the full wealth provided by Thucydides and bridge the gap between economic, social and cultural history based on static analysis and political history based on dry narrative. The key for accomplishing this task is the concept of entanglement. The Peloponnesian War can be understood as a history of three different kinds of entanglements. The first entanglement is that between different levels: local communities, micro-regions, macro-regions and the Panhellenic world. The second entanglement concerns a series of processes put into motion by certain key factors: violence, honour, wealth and political discourse. The third entanglement concerns the variety of actors involved in the Peloponnesian War: state apparatuses, alliances, empires, potentates, factions, networks, exiles, mobile humans, the enslaved.

Thucydides identified the period of the Peloponnesian War as one in which a concern with divine engagement in the affairs of mortals was particularly intense. This chapter explores a variety of evidence for this heightened concern and asks what forms it took. On the one hand, we find extravagant investment in religious festivities and display. Faced with the uncertainty of war, states and individuals lean into these elements of cultic life and seek thereby to create or claim the sort of prosperity and ease of engagement with the gods chiefly possible in times of peace. On the other hand, we find dissenting voices and worries about the neat picture of prosperity and cohesion such festivities promote. The heightened stakes of the War, where divine favour or displeasure could bring victory or destruction, provide a particular impetus for divergent voices and divergent attitudes to how engagement with the gods should be approached and represented. The chapter explores these dynamics at three levels from the macro to the micro. First, it tackles interstate discourse and competition. Second, it examines the internal dynamics within a single city-state: Athens. Third and finally, it zooms in further to discuss a single cult: the Eleusinian Mysteries.

The Archidamian War was in Thucydides’ view caused mainly by Sparta wanting to ‘take down’ the power of Athens, while its course was shaped largely by Sparta’s reliance on conventional tactics and limited resources, compounded by its ‘slowness’ to act. This notion of a mismatch between highly ambitious strategic objectives and deeply inadequate tactical means remains pervasive in scholarship on the war. However, Thucydides’ record of Spartan actions is open to a different interpretation: Sparta’s main strategic goal was merely to preserve its hegemony over its allies, and accordingly it needed to support the military ambitions of the latter, especially Corinth and Thebes on whose military resources Sparta was dependent. Sparta initially did the minimum necessary to keep Corinth and Thebes onside but, in the face of Athens’ refusal to compromise, gradually developed more ambitious strategic goals of its own. When Sparta applied conventional tactics and limited resources it was in pursuit of specific, restricted strategic aims, but when Sparta pursued more ambitious strategies it developed new, complex and often daring tactics to match. Their ultimate lack of success was largely the result of Sparta having to make concessions to the mutually incompatible strategic interests of Corinth and Thebes.