The Peloponnesian War   Term Paper ID:27843 Click to get this paper

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Paper Abstract: Overview & analysis of the Peloponnesian War. Focus is on historical writings of the time. Paper Introduction: War is a devastating human activity, one that decimates populations, destroys property, and alters political and social structures for both victor and vanquished. The history of mankind has been a history of warfare to a great extent, and few civilizations have been able to avoid war for long. At certain points in history war has been aggrandized as a glorious effort to promote a social or political agenda, while at other times society has frowned on war and has resorted to it only when all else fails. The world of ancient Greece produced some of the most important philosophical concepts in human history, ideas that have continued to prevail to this day. Yet, the Greeks as well were subject to war both with outside forces and among themselves. An example of the latter was the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, an event that had major consequences for the development Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. Spartan supremacy was also threatened in 464 by a revoltof helots and perioikoi called the Third Messenian War, which wassuppressed with difficulty. This last stage of the war iscalled "Decelean" from the name of a town in Attica, Decelea, which Spartafortified, to the enormous cost of the Athenians. Although overshadowed by the rise of Rome, it remained acity of social and intellectual importance during the Roman Empire. 66-88, 169-237). Aided by Persian resources, Sparta became a naval power andencouraged the rebellion of Athens's allies. However, the war was wonon the sea. Sparta's agrarian and stagnant economy also played a role. The war was chronicled by the ancient historianThucydides, who stated in his great history of the war that the underlyingcause was Spartan fear of Athens's expansive power. Sparta's martiallife eventually disappeared as stronger powers prevailed, while thephilosophical and artistic accomplishments of Athens outlasted thepolitical dominance of the city-state and even the existence of the ancientGreek world itself. Thucydides'History of the Peloponnesian War is the principal source for the events ofthe war up to 411 (Sealey, 1976, pp. St.Paul visited Athens, and the Emperor Hadrian lavished money on its publicbuildings. War had an impact on the development of the ancient world, butit cannot be said that the victor is necessarily the one to achieveascendance. In 12 4, Athens was occupied by the Crusaders and remained underWestern rule until its capture by the Turks in 1456. 446-445)with Athens terminated indecisively, the Peloponnesian War broke out in 431and ended in 4 4 with Sparta's conquest of Athens. Modern Athens developed to the north and east ofthe old city. Parallel walls, called the Long Walls,made a protected thoroughfare between the city and its port of Piraeus(Sealey, 1976, pp. Berkeley: University of California.Thucydides. Athens was most damaged by the onset in 43 of plague, which removedperhaps a quarter of the Athenian population and caused Pericles' death in429. These actions, along with an Athenian-imposedembargo on commerce from Megara, led Sparta to declare war on Athens whennegotiations failed. Yet, the Greeks as well were subject to war both withoutside forces and among themselves. Tyrtaeus was an activeparticipant in the war and described it in his poetry, so we have a goodaccount of it today. Some elements of the "new" Spartaseem to be primitive survivals paralleled elsewhere, notably in Crete,while others seem to derive from its need to control its subjectpopulation. (1972). By the mid-6th century Sparta had taken possession of Argiveterritory along the southeastern Peloponnesian coast in a battle forsupremacy that soon left Argos a second-class power. Sparta's strategy was to invade yearly, as it did from 431 to425 (except in 429 and 426), hoping to break Athens's will and to encourageAthens's subjects to rebel. Because the Spartans had the superior army, theAthenian leader Pericles employed a strategy that avoided land battles andrelied instead on control of the sea. Inany case, Sparta was transformed into a collectivist warrior society.Seven-year-old boys of the ruling class were removed from their familiesto be trained for war. New York: Penguin.----------------------- 4 He approved of thecurtailment of the democracy in 411, for instance, and he even found theoligarchic constitution of Chios admirable. The History is incomplete as far as the war isconcerned because it ends abruptly with the narrative of the events of 411BC (Finley, 1972, pp. However, the war wasactually triggered by hostility between Athens and Corinth, Sparta's majorally. He returned from exileafter the war ended in 4 4. By the end of thecentury Sparta headed a confederation of all major Peloponnesian citiesexcept Argos - the Peloponnesian League, which in 48 -479 became thebulwark of the Greek defense against Persia in the Persian Wars. Although hewas a relative of the great soldier and statesman Cimon, Thucydides wasalso an admirer of Cimon's political opponent, Pericles. These events did not end war for all time but indeedshow that a victory generally only means a temporary balance of power, tobe overturned when tensions increase once more and lead to another battle.The Peloponnesian War's strongest effect was its contribution to historicalwriting. The first stage of the war, called Archidamian from Archidamus, theSpartan king, ended in a stalemate in 421 with the Peace of Nicias. The imperial city never recoveredfrom the blow, although the Thirty Tyrants were deposed in 4 3. The war resulted in Athens beingdefeated and stripped of its empire and in Sparta becoming the acknowledgedleader of the Greek world. He served as ageneral in 424 but was banished from Athens in that same year for hisfailure to protect Amphipolis from the Spartans. The Peloponnesian War (431-4 4 BC) was a struggle between Athens andSparta and their respective allies. Spartans became thebest warriors in Greece, and as a result the word Spartan has since becomea byword for endurance and rugged simplicity. Many of theconquered pre-Dorians became helots, or serfs, and members of variousneighboring groups in Laconia were granted the semiautonomous status ofPerioikoi, though they were required to serve in the Spartan army. The most glorious period in the city's historywas the 5th century BC, when it was the cultural and artistic center of theclassical world. 8-32). An example of the latter was thePeloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, an event that had majorconsequences for the development of the ancient world. In 415, a year after destroying the inoffensive island-state ofMelos, Athens attempted to conquer Syracuse, largely at the urging ofAlcibiades. He is considered bymany to be the greatest of the ancient Greek historians, and his work had aprofound influence on the development of historical writing. Athens was quite a different sort of society and would become thebirthplace of philosophy, drama, and other artistic and intellectualmovements. In 1833, Athens was a small urban settlementof less than 4, people located north of the Acropolis in a districtknown today as the Plaka. Athens gained an advantage in the war in 425 by capturing a Spartanforce on the island of Sphacteria, but this victory was canceled the nextyear when the Spartan Brasidas captured Amphipolis. Athenshad remained firm and had suppressed the dangerous rebellion of Mytilene in427. At certain points in history war has been aggrandized as aglorious effort to promote a social or political agenda, while at othertimes society has frowned on war and has resorted to it only when all elsefails. Athens was named for the city's patron goddess,Athena, and the ancient city developed mainly to the north of this hill,around the Agora, or marketplace. The expedition ended disastrously in 413, and the debacleenticed Sparta into fighting once more. Thereafter, the city declined in importance. The Spartans gradually conquered Laconia, the lowersoutheastern quarter of the Peloponnesus, and pre-Dorian Amyclae, the lastholdout, was absorbed into Sparta by the 8th century. Although an admirer of Pericleandemocracy, Thucydides was not a democratic ideologue. When the war broke out, mostAthenians crowded into the city, leaving the outlying areas of Attica opento invasion. Generally, his History is remarkable for itsobjectivity, although his treatment of Sparta and Athens shows that hegreatly admired the qualities attributed to the Athenians - inventiveness,daring, and aggressiveness. In the aftermath, Athens gave up its fleet,submitted to the destruction of its fortifications, and suffered the ruleof an oligarchy, the Thirty Tyrants. A history of the Greek city states 7 -338 B.C. What sort of city-states were Sparta and Athens before they foughtwith one another and changed history? It was subject toattack by Slavs and was reduced to a petty provincial town in the ByzantineEmpire. Thucydides was the firstGreek to write contemporary history but was deeply indebted to Herodotusfor his conception of the fundamental importance of historical writing.Unlike Herodotus, however, who considered it his duty to repeat whatpeople said without necessarily subscribing to it, Thucydides made everyeffort to authenticate the facts he reported, and he shows unusualsophistication in his awareness of the way that witnesses oftenmisremember what they have seen. Greece gainedindependence from the Turks in the war of 1821-32, and in 1833 Athensbecame the capital of Greece. In some ways, hewas as much a journalist as a historian. The relationship between these events and Sparta's amazing social andmilitary reorganization is obscure. (1976). The speeches he inserted into his history, brilliantlyconceived and written, probe deeply into human motivation and explain thepolicy of states in terms of human psychology. Clearly, while Sparta was victorious in the war, Athens retained animportant place in the ancient world and achieved greatness that lasted farbeyond the loss in the Peloponnesian War, while Sparta declined and isremembered largely for that war and not for anything that occurredthereafter. The deaths in 422 ofCleon and Brasidas, both of whom were prowar, led to a truce the next year. In statesmen he valued aboveall intelligence and foresight, qualities possessed by his heroesThemistocles and Pericles. History of the Peloponnesian War. He believed that the war wouldprove epochal and that his account would possess permanent value becausesuch significant conflicts were bound to occur in future epochs "so long as human nature remained the same," and he was clearly correct in theseassessments. Proceeding north from Chiosto the Hellespont, Sparta gradually overcame the Athenian navy in spite ofeffective countermeasures taken by Alcibiades and others. Sparta resumedleadership of all of Greece, but Spartan predominance did not last (Sealey,pp. The war changed the nature of politics in Greece by elevating Spartaand bringing down Athens. The world of ancient Greece produced some of the most importantphilosophical concepts in human history, ideas that have continued toprevail to this day. BibliographySealey, R. It altered Athenian political life for a timewith the imposition of the oligarchy, but that time passed and Athensproduced a democratic form of government much imitated. 89-1 6). Thucydides began writing his History of thePeloponnesian War in 431 when the great war broke out. TheSpartans acquired the western portion of the lower Peloponnesus byconquering Messenia in the First Messenian War in the late 8th century.The Messenians, who were also Dorians, rebelled and were suppressed in theSecond Messenian War in the mid-7th century. The history of mankind has been a history ofwarfare to a great extent, and few civilizations have been able to avoidwar for long. The eventual fusion ofthese separate villages into a polis, or city-state, may explain Sparta'sdouble kingship. 238-385). War is a devastating human activity, one that decimates populations,destroys property, and alters political and social structures for bothvictor and vanquished. Athensheaded a similar alliance of Ionian states, the Delian League, and arose tochallenge Sparta. The war itself has remained in our consciousness in part because ofthe work of Thucydides in writing his History of the Peloponnesian War.Thucydides lived c.46 -c.4 BC and was an Athenian. Athens concluded an alliance with the Corinthian colony Corcyra (themodern Corfu) in 433 even though that city was at war with Corinth.Furthermore, the next year Athens demanded that Potidea, a Corinthiancolony north of modern Fourka, tear down its sea defenses and expel itsCorinthian magistrates. They were educated by the state and grew up inbarracks, where they learned discipline and austerity. Lysander won thedecisive battle of Aegospotami in 4 5, and Athens was blockaded andsurrendered in April 4 4. After an initial confrontation (pp. The peace was unstable because, although there were no significanthostilities, neither side fully complied with the terms of the agreement. The earliest settlement dates from before 3 BC and wassituated on the summit of the Acropolis, protected on all sides except thewest by its steep slopes. Dorian Sparta grew out of fourvillages settled in and after the 11th century BC. 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