Athens was the site of an oligarchy called the Thirty after the Peloponnesian War. Democracy was restored after a short time. As Critias became more influential, his loyalty to Sparta was not in doubt, and he was able to remain in power even with an even closer association with Sparta.
As a result, Athenian naval and political hegemony in the Mediterranean ended. After the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks suffered for years, and the Macedonians were able to conquer them in the 4th century BCE thanks to the destruction of the Peloponnesian War.
As a result of the Peloponnesian War, other nations saw Greece as weak and viewed it as a weak nation. Athens and Sparta were engaged in a war to gain control over Athens during the Peloponnesian War. Sparta’s allies fought Athens and its allies.
What happened to Greece after the Peloponnesian War? Greece was not able to control Sparta, which became the dominant power. Sparta, Thebes, and Athens fought for control of the city.
Greece was affected by the outcome of the Peloponnesian War. Sparta became independent after the Greek empire split. The Greek empire doubled in size. There was a time when the Greek Golden Age was coming to an end.
Sparta and its allies won the Peloponnesian War, but it also signaled the end of Athenian naval and political hegemony in the Mediterranean. Athens was briefly overthrown in 411 BCE as a result of its poor handling of the Peloponnesian War.
A decade of warfare followed before Lysander defeated the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami, the first victory for the Spartan general. Athenians surrendered following this defeat. As a result, the Peloponnesian War ended. As a result of this conflict, ancient Greece’s golden age came to an end.
Vocabulary. The Peloponnesian War was a war fought in ancient Greece between Athens and Sparta—the two most powerful city-states in ancient Greece at the time (431 to 405 B.C.E.). This war shifted power from Athens to Sparta, making Sparta the most powerful city-state in the region. The war featured two periods of combat separated by ...
The Spartan army began by raiding lands within an Athenian allied territory, particularly a region near Athens called Attica. The Athenians had built walls stretching from their seaport to the city of Athens.
After years of open warfare, Sparta offered peace and Athens accepted. The agreement was made official with the signing of the Peace of Nicias. The treaty stated that Athens and Sparta would defend each other for the next 50 years. However, the treaty only lasted six.
Instead, the Athenians used their navy to deliver troops into the Spartan territory to conduct raids on settlements.
It would be another decade of warfare before the Spartan general Lysander defeated the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami. This defeat led to Athenian surrender. As a result, the Peloponnesian War was concluded. Simultaneous to the end of this conflict came the end of the golden age of ancient Greece.
One of Sparta’s allies, Corinth , had directly engaged the Athenian army. As a Spartan ally, Corinth resumed hostilities toward Athens when Athens threatened Corinth ’s interests in the region surrounding Corcyra. This eventually drew Sparta into the conflict.
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At the time, Sparta had the most formidable army in the Greek world, yet it continuously refused to commit a significant amount of troops. This angered Athens so much that its leaders at one point threatened to accept Persian peace terms if Sparta didn’t act.
By 460 BCE, Athens and Sparta were essentially at war, although they rarely fought one another directly. Here are some of the main events to take place during this initial conflict known as the First Peloponnesian War.
Because the Athenians had left Attica almost entirely undefended, and also because the Spartans knew they had a significant advantage in land battles, the Spartan strategy was to raid the land surrounding Athens so as to cut off the food supply to the city. This worked in the sense that the Spartans burned considerable swaths of territory around Athens, but they never dealt a decisive blow because Spartan tradition required soldiers, mainly the helot soldiers, to return home for the harvest each year. This prevented Spartan forces from getting deep enough into Attica to threaten Athens. Furthermore, because of the Athens’ extensive trade network with the many city-states scattered around the Aegean, Sparta was never able to starve its enemy in the way it had intended.
The Athenians used their time on the floor to warn the Peloponnesian alliance what could happen if war resumed. They reminded everyone of how the Athenians were the principle reason the Greeks managed to stop the great Persian armies of Xerxes, a claim that is debatable at best but essentially just false. On this premise, Athens argued that Sparta should seek out a resolution to the conflict through arbitration, a right it had based on the terms of the Thirty Years’ Peace.
Athens was part of the Delian League, an alliance of ancient Greek-city states led and funded mainly by Athens that eventually morphed into the Athenian Empire, and Sparta was a member of the Peloponnesian League. This alliance, made up mostly of city-states on the Peloponnese, the southernmost peninsula of the Greek mainland, ...
Fighting between Greek city-states, also known as poleis, or the singular, polis, was a common theme in Ancient Greece. Although they shared a common ancestry, ethnic differences, as well as economic interests, and an obsession with heroes and glory, meant that war was a common and welcomed occurrence in the ancient Greek world. However, despite being relatively close to one another geographically, Athens and Sparta rarely engaged in direct military conflict during the centuries leading up to the Peloponnesian War.
As the name suggests, it was meant to last thirty years, and it set up a framework for a divided Greece that was led by both Athens and Sparta.
The years of fighting that followed can be divided into two periods, separated by a truce of six years. The first period lasted 10 years and began with the Spartans, under Archidamus II, leading an army into Attica, the region around Athens.
Peloponnesian War, (431–404 bce ), war fought between the two leading city-states in ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta. Each stood at the head of alliances that, between them, included nearly every Greek city-state. The fighting engulfed virtually the entire Greek world, and it was properly regarded by Thucydides, whose contemporary account of it is considered to be among the world’s finest works of history, as the most momentous war up to that time.
The end came in 405 when the Athenian navy was destroyed at Aegospotami by the Spartan fleet under Lysander, who had received much aid from the Persians.
The so-called Peace of Nicias began in 421 and lasted six years. It was a period in which diplomatic maneuvers gradually gave way to small-scale military operations as each city tried to win smaller states over to its side. The uncertain peace was finally shattered when, in 415, the Athenians launched a massive assault against Sicily. The next 11 years made up the war’s second period of fighting. The decisive event was the catastrophe suffered by the Athenians in Sicily. Aided by a force of Spartans, Syracuse was able to break an Athenian blockade. Even after gaining reinforcements in 413, the Athenian army was defeated again. Soon afterward the navy was also beaten, and the Athenians were utterly destroyed as they tried to retreat.
The Athenian alliance was, in fact, an empire that included most of the island and coastal states around the northern and eastern shores of the Aegean Sea. Sparta was leader of an alliance of independent states that included most of the major land powers of the Peloponnese and central Greece, as well as the sea power Corinth.
In the following years their respective blocs observed an uneasy peace. The events that led to renewed hostilities began in 433, when Athens allied itself with Corcyra (modern Corfu ), a strategically important colony of Corinth.
Urged on by the demagogue Cleon, the Athenians voted to massacre the men of Mytilene and enslave everyone else, but they relented the next day and killed only the leaders of the revolt. Spartan initiatives during the plague years were all unsuccessful except for the capture of the strategic city Plataea in 427.
The economic costs of the war were felt all across Greece; poverty became widespread in the Peloponnese, while Athens was completely devastated, and never regained its pre-war prosperity. The war also wrought subtler changes to Greek society; the conflict between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta, each of which supported friendly political factions within other states , made war a common occurrence in the Greek world.
After defeating the Second Persian invasion of Greece in the year 480 BC, Athens led the coalition of Greek city-states that continued the Greco-Persian Wars with attacks on Persian territories in the Aegean and Ionia. What then ensued was a period, referred to as the Pentecontaetia (the name given by Thucydides), in which Athens increasingly became in fact an empire, carrying out an aggressive war against Persia and increasingly dominating other city-states. Athens proceeded to bring under its control all of Greece except for Sparta and its allies, ushering in a period which is known to history as the Athenian Empire. By the middle of the century, the Persians had been driven from the Aegean and forced to cede control of a vast range of territories to Athens. At the same time, Athens greatly increased its own power; a number of its formerly independent allies were reduced, over the course of the century, to the status of tribute-paying subject states of the Delian League. This tribute was used to support a powerful fleet and, after the middle of the century, to fund massive public works programs in Athens, causing resentment.
Friction between Athens and the Peloponnesian states, including Sparta, began early in the Pentecontaetia. In the wake of the departure of the Persians from Greece, Sparta sent ambassadors to persuade Athens not to reconstruct their walls (without the walls, Athens would have been defenseless against a land attack and subject to Spartan control), but was rebuffed. According to Thucydides, although the Spartans took no action at this time, they "secretly felt aggrieved". Conflict between the states flared up again in 465 BC, when a helot revolt broke out in Sparta. The Spartans summoned forces from all of their allies, including Athens, to help them suppress the revolt. Athens sent out a sizable contingent (4,000 hoplites ), but upon its arrival, this force was dismissed by the Spartans, while those of all the other allies were permitted to remain. According to Thucydides, the Spartans acted in this way out of fear that the Athenians would switch sides and support the helots; the offended Athenians repudiated their alliance with Sparta. When the rebellious helots were finally forced to surrender and permitted to evacuate the state, the Athenians settled them at the strategic city of Naupaktos on the Gulf of Corinth.
Orange: Athenian Empire and Allies; Green: Spartan Confederacy. Persia regains control over Ionia. unknown number of civilian casualties. The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) was an ancient Greek war fought between the Delian League, led by Athens, and the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta.
Sicily and the Peloponnesian War. The Athenian force consisted of over 100 ships and some 5,000 infantry and light-armored troops. Cavalry was limited to about 30 horses, which proved to be no match for the large and highly trained Syracusan cavalry.
With the death of Cleon and Brasidas, zealous war hawks for both nations, the Peace of Nicias was able to last for some six years. However, it was a time of constant skirmishing in and around the Peloponnese. While the Spartans refrained from action themselves, some of their allies began to talk of revolt.
The Spartans, whose intervention would have been the trigger for a massive war to determine the fate of the empire, called a congress of their allies to discuss the possibility of war with Athens. Sparta's powerful ally Corinth was notably opposed to intervention, and the congress voted against war with Athens.
However, it marked the demise of Athenian naval and political hegemony throughout the Mediterranean. The destruction from the Peloponnesian War weakened and divided the Greeks for years to come, eventually allowing the Macedonians an opportunity to conquer them in the mid-4 th century BCE.
The Peloponnesian War ended in victory for Sparta and its allies, but signaled the demise of Athenian naval and political hegemony throughout the Mediterranean. Democracy in Athens was briefly overthrown in 411 BCE as a result of its poor handling of the Peloponnesian War.
Because Lysander was also directly involved in the selection of the Thirty, these men were loyal to him over Sparta, causing King Agis and King Pausanias to agree to the abolishment of his Aegean decarchies, and eventually the restoration of democracy in Athens, which quickly curbed Lysander’s political influence . Lysander.
This led to a number of Spartan expeditions against Thebes, known as The Boeotian War. The Greek city-states eventually attempted to broker peace, but Theban diplomat Epaminondas angered Agesilaus by arguing for the freedom of non-Spartan citizens within Laconia. As a result, Agesilaus excluded the Thebans from the treaty, and the Battle of Leuctra broke out in 371 BCE; the Spartans eventually lost. Sparta’s international political influence precipitated quickly after their defeat.
Democracy in Athens was briefly overthrown in 411 BCE as a result of its poor handling of the Peloponnesian War. Citizens reacted against Athens’ defeat, blaming democratic politicians, such as Cleon and Cleophon. The Spartan army encouraged revolt, installing a pro-Spartan oligarchy within Athens, called the Thirty Tyrants, in 404 BCE.
During the Thirty Tyrants’ rule, five percent of the Athenian population was killed, private property was confiscated, and democratic supporters were exiled. The Thirty appointed a council of 500 to serve the judicial functions that had formerly belonged to all citizens. Despite all this, not all Athenian men had their rights removed. In fact, 3,000 such men were chosen by the Thirty to share in the government of Athens. These men were permitted to carry weapons, entitled to jury trial, and allowed to reside with the city limits. This list of men was constantly being revised, and selection was most likely a reflection of loyalty to the regime, with the majority of Athenians not supporting the Thirty Tyrants’ rule.
In the aftermath, Athens gave amnesty to the 3,000 men who were given special treatment under the regime, with the exception of those who comprised the governing Thirty and their associated governmental officials. Athens struggled to recover from the upheaval caused by the Thirty Tyrants in the years that followed.