The Peloponnesian War
Athens and Sparta destroy each other over twenty-seven years.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 27 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
The war between the Athenian and Spartan alliances from 431 to 404 BCE ruins both. Athens loses a third of its population to plague in 430, gambles catastrophically on invading Sicily in 415, and finally surrenders after its fleet is destroyed. Thucydides, an exiled Athenian general, writes it up with an insistence on evidence and causation, and with speeches that lay out the logic of power — the Melian dialogue states that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.