Thucydides

The Peloponnesian War started when Sparta the leader of the Peloponnesian league and the largest land power in the region started to become concerned with the rise of Athens powers. Athens was a power in their own right; they were the largest sea power and was the leader of the Delian league. Neither Sparta nor Athens could afford to accept supremacy from the other country. Power can be a dangerous thing, those who have it don’t like letting it go, and those who don’t have it will do anything…

and Sparta, Thucydides was not a neutral observer. He suggests the Spartan victory was due to Athenian errors rather than a result of Spartan strategic skills. Although he was impressed by Sparta 's eunomia and their internal strength and self-sufficiency, Thucydides also accuses them of being outdated – slow, backward-looking and inflexible. Therefore, Spartans who behaved contrary to his expectations may have been misrepresented and underestimated, such as Brasidas whom Thucydides described as…

By the age with which Thucydides is concerned: the age of Pericles, Cleon, and Alcibiades, Athenians may still have reviewed Tellus’ worldview with rose-colored glasses, but despite this lived in conditions that had changed that world in fundamental ways. As the executive midpoint of an Aegean empire and a trading system spanning the Mediterranean, Athens had become more prosperous and powerful than even Solon’s wildest dreams. Tellus’ final combat was a border clash with Eleusis, who lived in…

non-existent. When discussing the weak, Nietzsche believes that those who show pity towards those who are inferior are most harmful to society. These views can correlate to Creon’s views from Sophocles’ Antigone, Athens as a tyrannical empire in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and Aeneas from Virgil’s Aeneid. In each of these novels we can see how certain…

By taking on Sparta they could ensure that their values could be defended against the possibility of being enslaved by the Spartans. Furthermore, Thucydides appears to romanticize Athenian ideologies connoting a sense of superiority when compared to that of the Spartans. This emphasizes the importance of going to war and fighting for their values. Therefore, it stands to reason that Athens’ desire to…

soldier every 27, which is mental. Comparing both “losers” of the war gives a common ground hitting the greatness of the war more close to home. This method also helps because the Peloponnesian War does not have as much evidence to the war besides Thucydides’ accounts, so using other wars to compare the statistics brings in more…

is a document which contains a funeral speech made by Pericles, a prominent Athenian politician. This speech was dictated, edited and transcribed by Thucydides, an Athenian historian and soldier in his written work, History of the Peloponnesian War. The speech was given at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE) and Thucydides fought in the war and lived and therefore wrote his works during the time of Pericles. The speech was made to boost the morale of the Athenian…

permitting them to steal and resort to violent actions. In Thucydides’ description of Spartan childhood, he says that the Spartans dispensed footwear for the children, and only gave them a single garment to wear for the year, and nothing more. To avoid starvation, the children were permitted to steal. This evidently shows that the Spartans indeed essentially promote thievery for a stronger military, but at the expense of an immoral community. Thucydides also notes that the most intelligent young…

431-404 B.C. In the beginning of the war Athens controlled one of the strongest empires, at the end of the war Athens could barely maintain itself. Why? Thucydides, an Athenian general at the time left us with an excessive amount of knowledge on this war, as he wrote a textbook on the war called “History of the Peloponnesian war.” In the text Thucydides elaborates what happened between the Athens and Sparta during the end of the Golden Age of Greece. The war started when both Athens and Sparta…

A notable example of Athens’ economic dominance is the Athenian decrees against Megara. Prior to the outbreak of the Peloponnese War, Thucydides writes that Athens “accused the Megarians of pushing their cultivation into the consecrated ground and the unenclosed land on the border, and of harboring her runaway slaves” (Thucydides I 139) and imposed economic sanctions against the Megarians as a result. Refusing to revoke them, these sanctions banned Megarian traders from all ports…