According to Thucydides, it was bound to happen. ‘The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon [as ancient Sparta was known], made war inevitable,’ wrote the 5th-century BC Athenian historian and general in his History of the Peloponnesian War – the classic, eight-volume account of the conflict, which would later earn him the sobriquet the ‘father of scientific history’ for its impartial, evidence-based approach.
It was, of course, a civil war, stretching from 431 to 404 BC – an epic feud between the two leading city-states of the age that would go on to engulf almost the whole of the ancient Greek world, eventually spreading beyond the borders of modern-day Greece even as far as Sicily, the Dardanelles, and Cyprus. But the way it began, as a power struggle between ambitious rivals, with each pursuing influence through a complex system of armed alliances, has led some modern historians also to draw comparisons with other conflicts – not least, the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
On one side were the conservative, agrarian Spartans – or, rather, the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League, founded in the 6th century BC, whose members included not only the major powers of the great Peloponnese peninsula but also those of central Greece. On the other was the fast-rising, democratic, Athenian-dominated Delian League, founded in 478 BC as a defence against Persian aggression, whose power was concentrated among the many islands and coastal states of the Aegean Sea.
Surveying Verulamium