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The Peloponnesian War: How Athens and Sparta Destroyed the Alliance That Saved Greece
Paperback
Series: The Ancient Greece Library, Book 5
Ancient GreeceAncient RomeMilitary Strategy
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 21 2026
Pages: 166
Weight: 0.88
Height: 0.35 Width: 8.50 Depth: 11.00
Language: English
They defeated the greatest empire the ancient world had ever seen. Then they turned on each other.
In 480 BC, Athens and Sparta stood together against Xerxes and the full might of Persia, and against impossible odds, they won. Within a generation, that same alliance had collapsed into twenty-seven years of war that would consume everything both cities had fought to protect.
The Peloponnesian War tells the complete story of this conflict, from the uneasy decades of rivalry that followed the Persian Wars to the final surrender that left Athens's walls in ruins. It follows the plague that devastated Athens and claimed Pericles himself, the political assembly that came within hours of exterminating an entire allied population, and the catastrophic Sicilian expedition that destroyed an entire generation of Athenian soldiers in the stone quarries of Syracuse. It traces the brilliant, treacherous career of Alcibiades, a man who advised Athens, Sparta, and Persia in turn, and the slow return of Persian power that would ultimately decide the war's outcome from behind the scenes.
This is a war with no clean heroes. Athens, the birthplace of democracy, voted to annihilate a neutral island simply because it could. Sparta, which claimed throughout the war to be liberating Greece from Athenian tyranny, ended the conflict by selling the freedom of the Ionian Greeks to Persia. Drawing on the account of Thucydides, an Athenian general exiled during the war, this book follows the conflict through all four of its major phases, from Pericles's strategy of endurance through the war's exhausted and bitter conclusion.
Readers will come away with a clear understanding of how a fifty-year alliance unraveled into mutual destruction, how democratic institutions can fail as catastrophically as any tyranny under sufficient strain, and why a war fought more than two thousand years ago continues to shape how historians and strategists think about power, fear, and the fragility of even the most capable civilizations.
For readers of ancient history, military history, and the history of Greece and the Mediterranean world, this book offers a complete and carefully researched narrative of one of antiquity's most consequential conflicts, a story of two great powers that had the strength to rule together and instead chose war.
Begin the story where Athens and Sparta's brotherhood was forged, at Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis, and follow it to where that same brotherhood ended, in the ashes of a war neither side could truly win.
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