ABSTRACT
On a rainy, moonless night in the spring of 431, a force of a few more than 300 Thebans entered Plataia at about the time of ‘first sleep’ (2.2-3).1 Twenty-seven years later, almost to the day (5.26.1-3), a starving Athens, blockaded by land and sea, was forced to accept Sparta’s terms. During those years, war raged the length and breadth of the Greek world, from Byzantion in the north to Crete in the south, and from Asia Minor in the east to Sicily in the west. Since at least the first century this conflict has been known as the ‘Peloponnesian War’, and only
a pedant would now seek to call it something different.2 It was also the subject of one of the greatest of all historical works, by the Athenian, Thucydides.3
