Why Did Athens Lose The Greek War

In Ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta were rivals. Athens’ power relied mainly on its navy while Sparta relied mainly on land power. The warriors of Sparta were the most powerful land army of the time. This rivalry both on land and at sea led to the Peloponnesian Wars in 431 BC. This war lasted 27 years and was the cause of the fall of Athens. The two main factors that caused Athens to lose the war were the failure to capture Sicily in 415 BC and the mysterious plague that ravaged Athens in 430 BC. Approximately one third of the population of Athens was killed by the plague over its 4-year course. There are many different theories about what that plague could have actually been, but the descriptions that have been found don’t exactly fit …show more content…
He wrote a comprehensive history of the Peloponnesian War that many historians still refer to today since there weren’t very many historical records that were kept throughout that period of history. This is where most of the information historians have gathered about the plague came from. Thucydides had the plague but he did not die from it, so he gives an inside view of the symptoms and how it felt. This is really helpful because at this time they didn’t have a lot of good medical care so no medical journals or similar items were kept. Thucydides said that the disease began in Ethiopia, then moved into Egypt, then Libya, and then slowly over Greece. This is hard to prove because stories like these were passed around by word of mouth without any real proof at this time. The place where it was said to have hit the hardest was Athens, but this also could have been said since they lived in Athens and rarely traveled very far so they wouldn’t know how bad it had affected other places. There are not any documents found in other civilizations that refer to this plague. The main reason that the records of the plague were kept in Athens is because it was a factor in the outcome of the