ABSTRACT
The war between Sparta and Athens and their respective allies, which broke out in 431 and ended definitively in 404, is generally known today as The Peloponnesian War’. The very title is not the least remarkable achievement of its historian. For that it should be viewed as a single war temporarily interrupted by a ‘phoney’ peace, that this was ‘the’ war of the two fought in the fifth century between these antagonists, and that it should be seen primarily from the Athenian side – these are the legacies of ‘Thucydides the Athenian’ (1.1.1; 5.26.1 – where no other indication is given, the references in brackets in this chapter are to Thucydides), who undertook his history ‘at the very beginning of the war in the belief that it was going to be a great war and more worth writing about than any of those which had occurred in the past’. As M.I. Finley has observed in his introduction to the 1972 reissue of the Penguin Classics translation of Thucydides, ‘no other historian can match this achievement; no other war, for that matter no historical subject, is so much the product of its reporter.’
