When Greek met Greek

This book is an abridged version of one of the great works of modern classical scholarship, Donald Kagan’s four-volume history of the Peloponnesian war, which originally appeared between 1969 and 1987. This crisis in the affairs of the Greek world in the fifth century BC was seen, even at the time, as a turning point in human civilisation.

Nearly half a century before, the Greeks had united against the great continental power of Persia. Led by Athens and Sparta, the two principal Greek powers, they had driven the fleets and armies of Xerxes from Europe and recovered control of their colonies on the coast of Asia Minor. Now the Greeks turned against each other. The Persian war had been followed by a period of astonishing literary and artistic achievement. The Parthenon and the monuments of Olympia, the plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus, the teachings of Socrates all date from this time. It coincided with the great age of Athens, and the high point of the city’s democratic constitution and its maritime empire.

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All of this fell apart in the savage wars of Athens and Sparta between 431 and 404 BC. After 27 years of almost continual fighting, Athens was humbled by an alliance of Sparta and the old common enemy Persia, left with less than half its prewar population and deprived of its empire. In most of Greece, democracy was eclipsed by oligarchy. Shared habits and beliefs which earlier generations of Greeks had regarded as the foundations of civilised life were abandoned. If the Peloponnesian war acquired something of the apocalyptic character which nostalgic historians now ascribe to the first world war, this was partly a trick of the light. History has sided with the Athenians, who lost.