ABSTRACT
For modern historians, the issue of war is sometimes posed in terms of the need to understand it in order to help future statesmen prevent it. The usual Greek word for violent inter-communal conflict is polemos, correctly rendered in English, depending on the context, as ‘war’, ‘warfare’, or ‘wartime’. The Peloponnesian war looks like a particular occurrence of a general social phenomenon; the name makes the reader think, consciously or unconsciously, of other wars. Definitions of the events called ‘wars’ are relative, and the choice of a particular one carries ideological baggage with it. This will be as true of the Greeks as of modern people; and it is no less true of the nature of civic existence in wartime than of the chronological delimitation of a particular war. The term ‘causes’, so often used in connection with anciet wars, can be a misnomer. War in general can reasonably be said to be caused by various factors.
