Why This Book?

The moral unacceptability of war is more widely acknowledged in the UK today than ever. As reaction to Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israeli intervention in Gaza has shown, the use of force to achieve one’s goals is no more acceptable at the level of the state than at the level of the individual. This rejection of war as the answer, more or less whatever the question, has had its effect on the study of past history. Wars have been moved out of their central position in histories of Greece and Rome, as historians have moved their focus from critically retelling history according to the themes and questions of Greek and Roman historians to insisting on answering their own questions by reading against the grain of those historians. Warfare has increasingly become confined to specialist studies in which study of armies and soldiers, military tactics and strategy take the central place, and the study of wars themselves gets lost in the concern for how wars were fought and what it was like to fight.Footnote ¹ Historians’ teaching and research, in turning to other topics – topics of social and religious history as well as topics of politics – largely leave wars out of the account, as if they were so routine that economic, cultural, social and religious life were not impacted by them.

This book is intended both to further and to buck this current trend. It is intended to further the trend in as far as this ‘rewriting’ of what Thucydides created – the notion that the hostilities between Athens and Sparta between 431 and 404 should be treated as a single war – and called ‘the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians’, which has become our ‘Peloponnesian war’, is a rewriting against the grain of Thucydides’ history, putting our questions of religious and social history, not Thucydides’ questions and not the narrative or the technical details of war, at the heart of our understanding. It is intended to buck the trend, however, by putting the war as a war back into the centre of our considerations. Whether we like it or not, wars were a major feature of Greek and Roman history, and, whether we like it or not, they created the most stressful situations that Greek states, or Rome, faced. In war, we find communities under pressure, and the effect of the pressure is to make the values, and fragilities, of the community more vividly apparent. If we want to understand a society, we have more chance of doing so if we look at that society at war. So our rewriting of the Peloponnesian War, far from writing the war itself out of the story, puts the impact of the war at the centre of its considerations.

Fifty years ago, major scholarly contributions set the terms for discussion of the Peloponnesian War. Donald Kagan’s series of publications, starting with The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 1969 and continuing through The Archidamian War (Reference Kagan1974), The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition (Reference Kagan1981), and The Fall of the Athenian Empire (Reference Kagan1987), offered a retelling of Thucydides on a massive scale, putting the Peloponnesian War into terms which those interested in international relations, in particular, could relate to.Footnote ² In particular, as in his famous On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (Reference Kagan1995), which compared a number of different ancient and modern conflicts, Kagan illuminated the Peloponnesian War from modern parallels: ‘Perhaps we can understand the matter best by analogy with another famous military disaster and its equally famous author, the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 urged by Winston Churchill.’Footnote ³ Kagan’s Peloponnesian War is a modern war where nations clash over foreign policy and long-term political and economic threats, and ‘it was the lessons Kagan drew from ancient times and applied to our own that made his thinking a part of the intellectual foundation of Bush-era foreign policy’.Footnote ⁴

Written from the other end of the political spectrum, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s The Origins of the Peloponnesian War grew out of two decades teaching Greek history at Oxford in a tradition in which the history of the sixth and fifth centuries was a matter of extended commentary on Herodotos and Thucydides. The book covered a lot more ground than its title might lead the reader to expect and had a particular influence on studies of classical Sparta, not least through its insistence on the importance of the helots. But de Ste. Croix’s book was particularly powerful in setting up the presumption that understanding the causation of the war was a matter of establishing who legally was to blame and in sidelining issues of the economy.Footnote ⁵

Scholars have not, of course, left the Peloponnesian War alone since the 1970s. Out of the Oxford tradition, George Cawkwell and John Lazenby offered their accounts, Cawkwell’s explicitly a commentary on Thucydides (Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War (Reference Cawkwell1997)), while Lazenby focused very directly on military aspects (The Peloponnesian War: A Military Study (Reference Lazenby2004)). In the same year Field Marshal Sir Nigel Bagnall produced an account of the Peloponnesian War from the perspective of a soldier and commander with extensive experience of combat operations and a desire to ‘learn from the experience of others and avoid their mistakes’.Footnote ⁶ In the US tradition, and predominantly from the political right,Footnote ⁷ Victor Davis Hanson, John Lendon and Paul Rahe – the last two, graduates of Kagan’s Yale – have all offered narratives of all or part of the Peloponnesian war (Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (Reference Hanson2005), Lendon, Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins (Reference Lendon2010), Rahe Sparta’s Second War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta 446–418 b.c. (Reference Rahe2020) and Sparta’s Sicilian Proxy War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta 418–413 b.c. (Reference Rahe2023)), and Strauss and McCann edited a collection War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War (Reference Strauss and McCann2001), dedicated to Kagan.Footnote ⁸ Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, another of Kagan’s students, has been one of few female scholars to venture into the field, incorporating a narrative of the Peloponnesian War into an account which tells the story of Greek military history from 431 to the battle of Leuktra in 371 (The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta and the Struggle for Ancient Greece (Reference Roberts2017). Nevertheless, these works all belong firmly in the scholarly traditions of de Ste. Croix and Kagan.

Two books deserve mention as standing aside from these traditions, at least in intention. One of these is Philip de Souza’s brief account The Peloponnesian War 431–404 bc (Reference de Souza2002) in Routledge’s Essential Histories series. De Souza makes a serious attempt to think about the war not simply as a series of political and military decisions and outcomes that need to be explained but as an event that had an impact on ordinary people. In the other, Larry Tritle’s A New History of the Peloponnesian War (2010), the author complains of other recent accounts that they pay too little attention ‘to the traumas and anxieties people were then facing. Such military oriented accounts … I would argue give a false impression of life at the time’ (Tritle Reference Tritle2010: xxi). But any reader who expects that Tritle’s will be an account ‘from below’, highlighting ‘life at the time’, will be disappointed. Despite its occasional brief discussions of particular Euripidean tragedies, this is another politico-military narrative.Footnote ⁹

Alongside these, there are many books that deal with some aspect of the war or with some phenomenon during the war – so a collection of papers edited by Olga Palagia is devoted to Art in Athens during the Peloponnesian War (Reference Palagia2009a), and Keith Sidwell subtitled his Aristophanes the Democrat (Reference Sidwell2009) ‘The Politics of Satirical Comedy during the Peloponnesian War’. The extent to which ‘Peloponnesian War’ refers to more than just ‘the last 30 years of the fifth century’ varies from book to book, but in none of these books does the war itself play the starring role.Footnote ¹⁰ There is a sense in which the war does play a starring role in Lisa Kallet’s two books on money in Thucydides, but the discussion is focused upon Thucydides, rather than focused on the war itself.Footnote ¹¹ Discussions of cultural change in Athens in the late fifth century have often taken the war for granted, and we have made remarkably little progress with understanding the impact of the Peloponnesian War.Footnote ¹²

Although, as Jennifer Tolbert Roberts’ decision to treat the sixty years down to the Spartan defeat by the Thebans at Leuktra as a unit implies, the defeat of Athens in 404 marked no decisive moment in the relations between these Greek superpowers, the Athenian world, and indeed the Greek world, after 404 was quite different from the Greek world before 431. Even in the world of war, the demise of the Athenian navy meant that never again would any single Greek state command the seas as Athens had done; the era of frequent naval battles was over, and such battles became a rare occurrence. Politically, the Athenian democracy restored in 403 worked differently, not just in terms of the constitutional rules but in terms of political behaviour.Footnote ¹³ Intellectually, the world of visiting sophists was supplanted by the world of Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. Dramatically, neither the grand tragedies associated with Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, nor the robust old comedy of Kratinos, Eupolis and Aristophanes, found successors in the fourth century. Demographically, the citizen numbers in the fourth century were only half those of the fifth, and the balance between the citizen population and the enslaved population was arguably significantly different.

But to focus on the Peloponnesian War as a catalyst to change is itself in some ways to belittle the importance of the war. What happened during the war is a subject worth exploration in its own right, whether or not it led to lasting change. And it is worth exploration not simply because spending a generation in a more or less continuous state of stress reveals the nature of a community in unusually stark colours, but because in this case the last thirty years of the fifth century are the years from which more ancient evidence survives than for any comparable period of Greek or Roman history before the fall of the Roman Republic. Thucydides’ history comprises only a small part of the surviving textual evidence, which includes the most important surviving works of Greek ‘old comedy’ (nine of Aristophanes’ eleven surviving comedies, most of Sophocles’ and Euripides’ surviving tragedies, the earliest forensic speeches of the Attic orators, a very large number of Athenian decrees and other official public inscriptions and the pamphlet on The Constitution of the Athenians preserved in the writings of Xenophon, but not by him). What is more, the surviving material evidence is also rich – the completion of the ‘Periklean’ building programme on the Athenian Acropolis with the construction of the temple of Athena Nike and the Erechtheion, the beginning of the enormously rich series of classical sculpted grave stelai (along with decree reliefs and reliefs from public monuments to the war dead) and a ceramic production that includes pottery innovative in its painted iconography and compositional methods.

The richness of these sources enables us to trace the wartime experience of Athenians, at least, in unprecedented detail. For several years, we have extant more than one of the dramas put on at festivals of the Dionysia and Lenaia. We can trace a whole sequence of political decisions made in the Athenian assembly in a single year, sometimes at a single meeting, and we can trace at least a handful of decisions made not by the people as a whole but by individual Athenian demes. We know, almost block by block, exactly what state the Erechtheion was in for those visiting the Acropolis during the period before work on it was restarted in 409/8 (RO 181). All of this without invoking the later memories and reflections on the war years in works written in the fourth century – Plato’s and Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues, law-court speeches and the last of Aristophanes’ comedies. We know exactly what some Athenians were thinking, and by comparison with some other periods of Greek history, the range of Athenians whose thoughts we can recapture is relatively broad.

In the light of this extraordinary breadth and depth of evidence, the narrow focus of all existing discussions of the Peloponnesian War is not merely a matter of missed opportunity, it displays a scandalously blinkered approach to what it might be to write the history of a war. The idea that the only historically interesting war is Thucydides’ war, the war seen from the vantage point of the hypothetical military and political strategist, is one that has been too readily entertained, as scholars have, at best, merely integrated information from other sources into a Thucydidean narrative. There were many who experienced the Peloponnesian War not like that at all, women and those who were enslaved prime among them, but that they did not experience the war like that did not mean that they did not experience the war.

Contesting the War

Even if it is relatively uncontroversial that it should be desirable to see Thucydides’ War from vantage points other than that of the military and political strategist, there are still substantial misgivings about whether there was a ‘Peloponnesian War’ at all. Thucydides created the vision of a single conflict out of what his contemporaries in Athens saw as a series of separate wars.Footnote ¹⁴ He is at pains to emphasise the coherency of the conflict in several places, perhaps in part because he recognises his unitary reading was not the natural position even in his own time and needed a hard sell.Footnote ¹⁵ The great value of using Thucydides’ notion of collecting the various sub-wars and theatres of conflict into a unitary whole is precisely that it permits a much greater variety of analysis than any of its parts and also allows connections to be witnessed that might otherwise remain invisible. Strauss takes a different position, namely that by seeing the war as a unitary event, historians ‘run the risk of obscuring questions of perception by contemporaries and by following generations’.Footnote ¹⁶ In this volume, we recognise this risk, but the implicit withdrawal from talking about the war in historical terms involved in breaking up the conflict would entail losing much of what we can recover about the nature and impact of this conflict.

Even if we can agree on the potential utility of Thucydides’ unitary reading of the conflicts of the final third of the fifth century, the name we give it remains a subject of much hand-wringing. The Peloponnesian War is the most familiar and most used modern label, but it is not uncontroversial. It marks the conflict as focalised from an Athenian perspective – perhaps natural enough given that its progenitor was an Athenian general – but Thucydides never uses the term for the conflict. Instead, he used the ‘war against the Peloponnesians’ from an Athenian perspective, the ‘Attic War’ from the perspective of the Spartan alliance, and he opens his account by saying that he has written the war fought between ‘the Peloponnesians and Athenians’ (1.1.1). The Peloponnesian War did not come into common usage until later in antiquity, and the Athenocentrism at the heart of the study of ancient Greek history has cemented this as the standard and most widely recognised term.

That this has remained a difficult issue is demonstrated by the use of The Peloponnesian War as the title of almost every recent major translation of Thucydides, but its relegation to the subtitle of Hanson’s and Lendon’s books, and its complete omission from the title of Tolbert Roberts’ work (as befits her overall presentation). Hanson recognises the problem and argues that a better name for the conflict would be ‘the Great Ancient Greek Civil War’.Footnote ¹⁷ Lendon, focusing only on the ten-years war (‘Archidamian war’) (431–421), follows Thucydides in his desire to use sub-periodisation in order to focus on specific modalities within parts of conflicts (in the case of his Song of Wrath, focusing on statesmanship and his claim that the Homeric ‘heroic code’ was still a crucial factor in history). Where Hanson and Lendon are happy to use the Thucydidean structure and chronological parameters, Roberts argues that it is time Thucydides was ‘uncoupled from the history of the Peloponnesian War’.Footnote ¹⁸ This volume is in agreement with this uncoupling, but not if that means losing the Peloponnesian War as a focus of historical enquiry with it. The trick is to use Thucydides’ big idea, but not be beholden to his presentation of it.Footnote ¹⁹

Alongside the historical issues that have affected analysis of the war, it has been a guiding principle of this volume that we should see the Peloponnesian War as a historical event. This is partly to create space again for ancient history against the literary turn in Thucydidean studies of the past generation.Footnote ²⁰ That literary turn has been in many ways a welcome development that has enlivened and enriched discussion of his work, but it has also contributed to pushing the history of the war to the peripheries. It is striking that there have been several large handbooks to Thucydides published in recent years, but not one on the Peloponnesian War. And within these works, for instance in the nearly 1,000-page Brill’s Companion to Thucydides, very little space is given to the war, or to warfare, itself. More recently, the Oxford Handbook of Thucydides dedicates 200 pages to ‘Thucydides as Historian’, but again focusing on Thucydides, rather than on the war he describes. Lee and Morley’s Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides, which seeks to understand the extent to which Thucydides has influenced subsequent writers and historians, similarly focuses overwhelmingly on the man, and not the war. We have an Oxford Very Short Introduction to Thucydides, but not one to the Peloponnesian War.Footnote ²¹

The literary turn in the study of Thucydides has operated a formidable pincer movement in conjunction with the attraction of Thucydides to students of international relations (IR). Thucydides’ famed ‘realism’ in relation to politics and international relations has attracted attention from scholars outside as well as within Classics, with distinguished contributions from specialists in politics and in IR.Footnote ²² Their interests, unsurprisingly, have been with the terms of Thucydides’ analysis of how politics works within a state and how politics works between states.

The attractions of these literary and IR treatments of Thucydides in part explain the retreat from using his work as a fertile basis for new histories of the period. In re-committing to the history of the Peloponnesian War, we hope not to push back against other approaches to Thucydides, but to learn from them and enhance their work. Similarly, while we are engaged with revisiting the war as historians, we are aware that new challenges will always present themselves. We might for instance begin to ask with our students how the resource-hungry war affected the plight of already-exploited subordinates. Or perhaps more pointedly, how many people were enslaved, brutalised and killed in the gold mines of the northern Aegean, owned by Thucydides (which presumably funded the time and resources necessary for the composition of the work)? And how might this affect the way we view and interpret the war?Footnote ²³

Against these challenges to the unitary reading of the war, its chronological extent, the favour the work has found within IR scholarship and literary studies, the war itself has been partially obscured as a war that needs to be appraised historically. This book has been put together with a purpose to re-establish the Peloponnesian War as a meaningful and coherent event that can illuminate the Greek world in the late fifth century and approaches to Greek history beyond that. We therefore maintain the title of The Peloponnesian War as it is well understood as a concept and hope to demonstrate some of the benefits of revisiting this war with new approaches.

What Does This Book Do?

So what does this book actually do? There would have been no war without military activities, and no military activities without political clashes between cities. Understanding what the Peloponnesian War was, for anyone, is always going to involve understanding politics and military strategy. And not just for that reason, but because his History represents a whole way of understanding the world, understanding the Peloponnesian War also involves engaging with Thucydides. In seeking to show how much more there is to be said about the Peloponnesian War than what Thucydides chooses to discuss, we have sought also to show how much more revealing his text becomes when we engage critically with his understanding of the war, its causes, its strategies, its politics. As a highly intelligent participant observer in the events of the war, himself anxious to tell us that he was of a suitable age to appreciate what was going on throughout the war (5.26.5), Thucydides’ own reactions to and construal of events are themselves evidence for how the events of the war shaped the historical understanding of those who lived through it. Thucydides therefore continues to bulk large in this discussion, but we seek more to contextualise his analysis than to assume it and annotate it.

We open with Kostas Vlassopoulos’ rethinking of what we need to know to understand the war (Chapter 2). Thucydides thought that what we needed to know was how, and why, no earlier war had been on a comparable scale. Vlassopoulos suggests, rather, that what we need to know is rather just how entangled the relationships between Greek cities were, and how entangled were the discourses of politics and violence with the discourses of honour and wealth. And we need to know also how the war intervened in the lives of individuals whowere not identical products of some ideological sausage machine but whose course to involvement in the war was various, and whose hopes and fears for what the war would do to them might be quite contrasting.

In Chapter 3, Robin Osborne revisits the fraught question of the causes of the Peloponnesian War. His aim is not to substitute one blame game for another but to understand why the issue of what caused the war was so important for Thucydides, and on all accounts also for Thucydides’ contemporaries. He argues that what demanded a clear causal narrative was not the politics of the day so much as the desire to think that this was a big thing. It was because both Athenians and Spartans wanted to be engaged in an epic struggle that there had to be a causal story, and it was because of Thucydides’ own desire to exhibit the war as a model of how international relations work that this causal story had to involve long-term developments, not turn on individuals’ actions. Comparison with other historians’ accounts of other wars shows up the politics of all claims to unravel the causes of war.

One way of understanding Thucydides’ emphasis on Athens’ growing power is with reference to her empire, and to see the dismantling of that empire as the end of the war. But treatments of the Athenian Empire have traditionally ignored the role of the empire in the war, and remarkably little attention has been devoted to that. Polly Low (Chapter 4) proceeds to unpick what exactly Athens’ empire contributed to her war effort, not only in terms of manpower but in terms of the allies’ own ambitions and their share in Athenian imperialism. Low argues for the allies as actively, not passively involved in the war, and, as a consequence, involved in its effects, both in terms of losses and in terms of the destabilisation caused by the absence of the fighting-age section of the population. She also shows how the Thucydidean picture of Athenians becoming gradually more brutal towards their allies is significantly moderated if the non-Thucydidean evidence, and the evidence from the war years after Thucydides’ narrative breaks off, are taken into consideration.

If discussion of war’s causes inevitably focuses on discussion of Thucydides, so too does discussion of war strategy. But whereas in the case of the causes of the war, other accounts of the Peloponnesian War and of other wars put Thucydides’ account and its politics into perspective, in the case of war strategy it is not, in the main, the preservation of events unmentioned by Thucydides that raises questions about his interpretation, but the very events he himself records. Thucydides’ own assumption of omniscience often leads to criticisms of his account for distorting what went on. But what we can see is an historian whose vision of events was partial in the more basic sense. Our own position allows us to reconstruct quite different possible strategies on the basis of the facts that Thucydides records because we are in a position to see more clearly the significance of particular moves. Hans van Wees (Chapter 5) offers a compelling war narrative significantly at odds with Thucydides’ own.

But (General) Thucydides is at least as interested in the Peloponnesian War as a politician’s war as he is in it as a general’s war. When we turn to politics, a single chapter of Thucydides was already influential in antiquity and has dominated modern accounts: the ‘obituary’ of Perikles with its suggestion that Perikles’ death brought a rupture in Athenian political life and that politicians after Perikles were different in aims, ability and style from Perikles and those who came before him. Vincent Azoulay (Chapter 6) re-examines Athenian politics and argues for continuity rather than rupture as far as political leadership was concerned, but for increasing contestation about how the constitution should work and an increasing sense of an exclusive citizen body. That concentration on abstract exclusivity came in the face of the need that the war created for all the residents of Attica to become more mobile and to mix together in different ways – not least in sheltering behind the Long Walls from Peloponnesian invasions, and in turn that mixing up of people of all sorts led particular groups to seek out spaces that would be exclusive to them. Along with all of this went an increase in emotional investment: political decisions manifestly had an impact on individual lives, and individuals inevitably responded to that, as evidenced in both the reaction to the mutilation of the Herms and the reaction to the failure to pick up the dead and shipwrecked after Arginousai.

Azoulay ends his chapter with an allusion to Thucydides’ identification of the Peloponnesian War as a great kinesis, and this is where Lynette Mitchell begins her exploration of the war and constitutional thought (Chapter 7). Where discussions of Athenian politics inevitably focus attention on the working of democracy, Mitchell focuses rather on oligarchy, stressing the way in which oligarchy was not one thing, but many, and exploring the practical consequences of this (in)conveniently baggy idea. The Peloponnesian War, she suggests, sharpened awareness of just how baggy the idea of oligarchy was, and significantly refined abstract political thinking, paving the way for the sophisticated political thought of the fourth century.

In Chapter 8, Samuel Gartland considers how the pre-existing spaces of the Greek world played a role in the type of war we get, but also how those spaces themselves were changed by the warfare that took place. Gartland considers how the Long Walls of Athens were among the most potent elements in this and could perhaps offer a remedy to the problems of unitarian readings of the war. If the war is seen as an event that had the power to reshape the Greek world (a thoroughly Thucydidean concept), where are the changes visible, and how far did this war affect spatial experience?

Gartland also sees the Peloponnesian War irrupting into urban spaces and into the night, but violence in warfare is rarely limited to the battlefield. Defeat and dishonour were closely linked. The rape of the inhabitants of a sacked town is already a feature of the story of the sack of Troy, and violence against women is very much the theme of the famous Mykonos pithos, which dates from the seventh century. Greeks knew well what war meant for women. But Thucydides is notoriously as uninterested in women as his Perikles is made to be in his Funeral Oration, and even when describing the mutilation of the Herms desexualises the action by limiting the defacement to the face alone. Alastair Blanshard (Chapter 9) brings sex and sexual violence back into the Peloponnesian War, revealing both the violence recorded by other historians in other wars and the violence against women in the context of war that was played out on the Athenian stage during these years. Whatever the incidence of actual violence against women during the war, for a woman the stresses of living through a prolonged period of warfare were quite different from the stresses of peacetime life.

One measure of the disruption brought by war is the disruption to the regular rituals of religious life. The possibility or impossibility of carrying out the sacrifices and festivals to which the community was accustomed at their normal times and in their normal places was a very visible indicator of whether a city had ceded control to its enemies. Thucydides’ own views of the gods and religion have been much debated, but Athenian religious life during the Peloponnesian War is something for which we have a great deal of evidence outside Thucydides’ text, and in epigraphic and monumental form as well as in other literary texts. That evidence, as Hannah Willey shows in Chapter 10, reveals a great deal of religious activity, both reactive and pre-emptive, as the various states involved in the war sought to access as much divine support as they could, whether from the Olympian gods or from heroised war leaders. What is more, war created social groups as well as breaking them up, and we can see in groups like the Athenian fleet the creation of new worshipping units that both reflected and encouraged the fellow feeling on which effective military action relied. The way in which shared ritual activities both create and reflect feelings of belonging together renders particularly interesting, and important, the Athenian development of new festivities of the Thracian goddess Bendis spectacular enough, as the opening of Plato’s Republic famously makes clear, to attract the admiring attention of Athenian citizens. This both draws the Thracians into the Athenian worshipping community and emphasises their distinctness. A further aspect of this two-sidedness is seen in the sensitivity to disruption of the regular religious life occasioned by the actions of those within the community. War not only brought enhanced sensitivity to high-visibility irreligious acts, like the mutilation of the Herms, but to possible unfortunate coincidences. War moved the gods somehow closer to the human world.

In the final chapter, we return to the question of what Thucydides made of the war. With the dimensions of the war which Thucydides neglected or left under-developed more clearly laid out in the previous chapters, we are able to see more clearly the choices that Thucydides made, and the way in which the reception of Thucydides has effectively increased Thucydidean selectivity. Provoked by Marshall Sahlins’ famous engagement with Thucydides, James Davidson encourages us to stand back from the history of events in order to place the war into its broadest context in Greek history – offering in a sense an alternative ‘archaeology’ of the war to that offered by Thucydides, and one concerned not so much to big up the war but to see the war as continuous with earlier history. This is a salutary reminder that the temptation which the exceptionally rich source material for the Peloponnesian War makes hard to resist is the temptation to myopia. True historical understanding demands that we understand the big patterns of history.

If our rich knowledge of what Athenians, in particular, were thinking and doing in the last thirty years of the fifth century makes it hard to see the big patterns, it makes it possible to see very many different small patterns. This book has explored only a small range of those patterns. Our aim has not been to offer a comprehensive coverage of every aspect of the Peloponnesian War.Footnote ²⁴ Such a coverage would be interminable and serve no useful purpose. Rather, our aim has been to be exemplary, to offer models of what can be achieved once we forsake the omniscient narrator whom Thucydides bequeathed to us and accept that every different group, if not every different individual, in the Greek cities of the time experienced a different Peloponnesian War. And not simply those in the Greek cities. Non-Greeks too had a Peloponnesian War – whether we think of the Thracians or Persians or whether we think of the non-Greeks who lived out their lives enslaved in Greek cities. War changed the opportunities both for the non-Greek rulers, looking for opportunities to strengthen or enlarge their own power base, and for enslaved subjects, whose foreign exoticism was alternately their asset and their curse. If foreigners and enslaved people have largely lingered in the shadows and not stepped into the limelight in this book, that is not because there is not a story to tell or because theirs is an unimportant story. If this book proves a provocation to tell their story, and the story of the farmer and the merchant, of the powerful and the powerless Athenian ally, of the armour manufacturer and the potter, of the doctor and the builder, it will have done its job. For our attempt here has been to turn the Peloponnesian War inside out, and to see it not simply as one particular event in Greek history to be explained but as the aperture through which the whole of Greek history, and what it is to write Greek history, can be reviewed.