The Peloponnesian War

The War That Broke the Greek City-States

von Rupert Haversham

252 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Athens and Sparta went to war in 431 BC over quarrels at the edges of their alliances. Twenty-seven years later one of them had lost its fleet, its empire and its walls, and the other had won nothing it could keep.This account treats the conflict as the breakdown of a system rather than as the work of great commanders. It follows the money that paid the rowers, the grain that came down through the Hellespont, the tribute lists cut into stone, the oaths that tied small towns to large ones, and the assembly votes that turned a border dispute into a general war. Generals appear where those structures put them, and not as the subject of the story.It also counts the people the classical city left out. Spartan order rested on the helots. Athenian silver came out of the mines at Laurion, dug by enslaved people. Women held neither vote nor office and kept the households that carried the war. When more than twenty thousand enslaved workers walked out of Attica in 413 BC, the record notices, and the moment is given its weight here.Plague, revolution inside besieged cities, the killing at Melos, the catastrophe in Sicily and the hunger of the final winter are set down from the evidence. What binds them is a single argument: a world of states with no way to settle its own quarrels fought until both its centers were spent, and the bill was paid by people who were never asked.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798175852296
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 20.09.2026
• Größe: 203 x 127 mm
• Verlag: Independently published