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Peloponnesian War Essay

585 Words3 Pages

“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”, said Thucydides, the Greek historian and author of the History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides described the conflict between Athens and Sparta that ended the Golden Age. The war is called Peloponnesian, because it corresponded Sparta’s alliance against Athens and the Delian League. According to historical records, there are enough reasons to say that it was more Athens’ fault. The evident includes emergence of innovation ideas that significantly affected the Athenian society, rejecting the ultimatum by Pericles, failure to negotiate peace with Sparta, rejecting a peace and attacking Spartan allies, …show more content…

These intellectual changes led to a political tension by harsh treatment of its own allies and economic sanctions against Sparta’s allies (Hunt 90). Athenians started to connect philosophical ideas to a nature of justice that influenced the perception of its foreign policy in general.
The second fault from Athens’ that eventually became the reason of a beginning of the Peloponnesian War was a rejecting the ultimatum from Sparta. Sparta was alarmed by Athens’ rapid growing and started to get complaining from Corinth and Megara, crucial Spartan allies. Sparta’s leaders therefore gave Athens an ultimatum- stop mistreating our allies. However, Pericles convinced the Athenian voters to reject the ultimatum. Some Pericles’ critics claimed he was insisting on war against Sparta (Hunt 100). These disputes had shattered the peace treaty between Athens and Sparta.
The next reason is the Athens’ failure to negotiate peace with Sparta when it had the chance. When Sparta made the first strike of the war, Pericles advised two strategies to win. The first one was using the navy to raid the lands of Sparta. Another one required a sacrifice of a valuable property. Athens’s people were supposed to stay behind the impermeable walls, but emergence of plague killed thousands of population as well as Pericles himself (Hunt

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