A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

by Victor Davis Hanson

a critique of Pericles’ strategy, see Kagan, Archidamian War, 352–

The Athenians had come to Sparta’s help thirty years before the outbreak of the war, to put down the helot uprising of 462 on the slopes of Mount Ithome, in Messenia. Both their skill and their revolutionary character frightened the Spartans, who abruptly sent the Athenians home lest they become more of a problem than part of the solution.

Thucydides’ statement on the plague is quite astonishing; what he implies is that the disease was the greatest disaster to befall the Greeks during the war—worse than Sicily, the chaos at Corcyra, the carnage of the Ionian War, and a variety of other catastrophes from Decelea to Melos. Perhaps the reason why we find that generalization hard to believe is that the plague broke out in the second year of a conflict that, nevertheless, went on for another quarter century.

On evacuation in general, see Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 112–21. Many argue that the refugees gave city folk their first real intimacy with the rustics of Attica, a rather different picture from the usual view that ancient Greek cities drew little distinction between city and country, rural and urban citizens.

Socrates did not get the plague:

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