The Wars of Classical Greece: The History of the Conflicts that Led to the Rise and Fall of the Greeks’ Dominance

The ancient Greeks have long been considered the forefathers of modern Western Civilization, but the Golden Age of Athens and the spread of Greek influence across much of the known world only occurred due to one of the most crucial battles of antiquity: the Battle of Marathon. In 491 B.C., following a successful invasion of Thrace over the Hellespont, the Persian emperor Darius sent envoys to the main Greek city-states, including Sparta and Athens, demanding tokens of earth and water as symbols of submission, but Darius didn’t exactly get the reply he sought.

The Peloponnesian War, as the great historian Thucydides wrote in the introduction to his eponymous book, which has become one of the greatest historical treatises of antiquity, was an event of such calamitous magnitude that Greece had never witnessed its like in all of recorded history. Not the Trojan War, not the Dorian Invasion, not even the recent Persian invasions – which had devastated mainland Greece and seen Athens herself evacuated and put to the flame, the buildings on her Acropolis razed into dust – could compare to the scale of the devastation that engulfed all of Greece for almost three decades, causing the deaths of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands.

Entire populations were displaced, whole cities destroyed, and mountainous sums of money spent, all in order for Greece’s two most famous city-states to establish who had dominion over Greece. Sparta, whose invincible armies had recently led the Greeks to victory against Xerxes’s hordes at Plataea was at the head of the Peloponnesian League. Their opponents were led by proud Athens, possessor of a fleet that virtually dominated the entire Mediterranean and decimated the Persian navy at Salamis and Mycale, at the head of the Delian League. Sparta was insular and old-fashioned, while Athens was dynamic and democratic, but both were bent on imperialistic expansion.

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