The Peloponnesian War has been seen as a fundamental struggle between old power and new power, conservative power and innovative power, oligarchy and democracy, oppression and freedom. How has this ‘beautiful object’ been constructed? Part of the answer lies with the persuasiveness and attraction of Thucydides’ ‘lifelikeness and factualness’ and of his ‘brutal realism’ – manifested in recent years in the claims about the ‘Thucydides Trap’. Part of the answer lies in the decisions Thucydides takes over where to situate the beginning and end of the war, and his insistence on a single war. Part again comes from Thucydides’ fondness for creating oppositions and seeing binary alternatives. In contrast to this Sahlins has insisted that meanings are determined by cultural contexts, that culture organises history and that Thucydides’ insistence on a universal human nature is fundamentally misleading – in this way emphasising Thucydides’ history as a polemic about history itself. In truth there were deep structural contrasts between Athens and Sparta – contrasts partly embedded in the division between Dorians and Ionians. It was Thucydides’ perception of this that caused him to predict the magnitude of the Peloponnesian War even as it began.

How did the Peloponnesian War change the way in which spaces were arranged and experienced, and how did the pre-existing spaces and spatial imagination of communities play a role in the type of war that was fought? Athens provides a lens through which to see wider changes: the Propylaia was left visibly unfinished to mark the outbreak of war, the temple of Athena Nike exaggerated Athenian infantry competence, and the Long Walls reshaped interstate relationships at the same time as redefining Athenian social experience. They allowed for the evacuation of the Athenian countryside, and the housing of thousands of refugees for long periods of the war. This synoikism was paralleled elsewhere during the war in Thebes, Olynthos and Rhodes with significant and long-lasting effects. The accounts of the variety of ways in which the war tested and frayed the political fabric of Athens make us aware of how communities’ experiences of their own spaces could be transformed by the pressures of war, for instance in the terror of frequent night-time attacks. Finally, the Aigospotamoi monument at Delphi gives a contemporary perspective on the moment of victory and speaks articulately across spatial aspects of the Peloponnesian War as a whole.

The pressure of war often drives change. This was no less true of the Peloponnesian War in its effect on constitutional thinking at the end of the fifth century. While Thucydides in his analysis of the Peloponnesian War suggests that it was differences between constitutional types that lay behind the conflict (democracy versus oligarchy), it was in fact the war that clarified these differences. Thus it was that ideas around democracy became more clearly defined. However, it was thinking about oligarchy which experienced the most radical changes. Earlier in the fifth century, oligarchy had been recognised as a constitutional form but had been fairly loosely defined. By the end of the war, however, some Athenians in particular, who wanted to effect regime change, played with ideas of oligarchy in a fairly imprecise way based on number, wealth or class. Initially, this lack of clarity worked in the favour of the reformers, but eventually it led to the downfall of both the oligarchies of 411 and 404/3. Nevertheless it was the war itself which ultimately forced the conceptual opposition between oligarchy and democracy, which Thucydides was then able to write retrospectively into his analysis of the Peloponnesian War.