Book 5, Chapter 16 — Feeling against Sparta in Peloponnese—League of the Mantineans, Eleans, Argives, and Athenians—Battle of Mantinea and breaking up of the League
Six years of Peace of Nicias end at Mantinea, where Sparta's army reminds everyone why it was feared.
Summary
The post-peace maneuvering is driven primarily by Alcibiades, who was twenty-three years old at the time of the peace and furious at not being included in the negotiations. His resentment at Nicias and at Sparta produced one of the more audacious diplomatic operations of the period: he persuaded Argos, Mantinea, and Elis to join Athens in a quadruple alliance directed against Sparta, using the provision in the Peace of Nicias that allowed either party to conclude additional agreements with other states. The coalition, if it held, would have put Sparta under pressure from all sides; the allied cities of the Peloponnese might have been detached; the basis of Spartan power might have been undermined without another general war.
The battle of Mantinea in 418 BCE was the collision that the coalition maneuvering made inevitable. The Argive and allied army caught a Spartan force in an exposed position near Mantinea; there was a moment when the Spartans were genuinely in difficulty. Then their king Agis recovered the situation with a redeployment that realigned his line while the battle was beginning, and the battle was decided by the simple superiority of Spartan infantry in close fighting. The allied line broke; the Mantineans and Argives fought bravely but were defeated in detail; Sparta's allied cities, which had been wavering, returned to the fold. The quadruple alliance collapsed within weeks.
Thucydides's assessment of Mantinea is among his most precise military judgments. He notes that the Spartan performance restored to Sparta the reputation for courage and competence that Sphacteria had damaged — though the Spartans had lost that reputation largely because they had been caught in an impossible tactical position and failed to die rather than surrender, while at Mantinea they performed exactly as expected in conditions that favored them. The lesson Thucydides implies but does not state is that military reputation, being partly a psychological phenomenon, can be won back more quickly than strategic realities change. Athens had not in fact lost the structural advantages Pericles had identified; it had lost, temporarily, the narrative.
- Book 1Book 1 opens not with battle but with argument.
- Book 1The immediate causes of the war begin with Epidamnus — a small colony on the Adriatic whose civil strife triggers a chain of interventions that pulls Corinth against Corcyra and Corcyra toward Athens.
- Book 1The congress at Lacedaemon is the Peloponnesian War's diplomatic overture.
- Book 1The Pentecontaetia — the fifty years between the Persian Wars and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War — is Thucydides's compressed account of how Athens turned from war-leader to empire.
- Book 1Chapter 5 is the last diplomatic chapter before war breaks out.
- Book 2The war formally begins with the Theban attack on Plataea.
- Book 2The plague of Athens is the History's most famous sustained passage outside the Funeral Oration.
- Book 2Chapter 8 covers the third year of the war across multiple theatres.
- Book 3Book 3 opens with the revolt of Mytilene, the largest and most strategically significant of the Athenian allied cities.
- Book 3Two episodes in Book 3's second half illustrate what civil and inter-state war does to the norms that normally govern violence.
- Book 3Chapter 11 follows the Athenian general Demosthenes through a remarkable arc: from the catastrophic defeat in Aetolia, where he led light-armed Athenian troops into wooded hill country they were utterly unequipped to fight in and lost the greater part of them, to the brilliant campaign in Acarnania, where he used his knowledge of irregular warfare, learned at severe cost, to ambush and nearly annihilate a Peloponnesian and Ambraciot force.
- Book 4The Pylos campaign is the tactical and psychological turning point of the war's first decade.
- Book 4Chapter 13 moves across multiple theatres in the war's seventh and eighth years.
- Book 4Book 4's final chapter belongs to Brasidas — the one Spartan commander who combined military brilliance with political intelligence, the qualities Sparta as an institution consistently undervalued.
- Book 5The tenth year of the war produces one of history's more striking coincidences of elimination.
- Book 5The peace after Cleon and Brasidas is a peace in name only.
- Book 5The Melian Dialogue is ten pages in most editions and has been discussed for two and a half thousand years.
- Book 6Book 6 opens with the debate and vote on the Sicilian Expedition — one of the History's great scenes of collective irrationality.
- Book 6While the Athenian expedition crosses the sea, Syracuse holds its own debate about whether to believe the threat.
- Book 6With Alcibiades gone and Lamachus increasingly the operational commander, the Athenian force finally moves seriously against Syracuse in the expedition's second year.
- Book 7Book 7 opens with the Athenian position deteriorating on every front simultaneously.
- Book 7Demosthenes arrives with the reinforcements and immediately does what Nicias had been unable to do: he assesses the situation, decides on a bold stroke, and acts.
- Book 7Book 7's final chapters are the most sustained tragic narrative in classical literature.
- Book 8Book 8 opens with Athens after Sicily — a city that could not believe what it had done to itself, then could not stop the consequences.
- Book 8Chapter 25 covers one of the strangest episodes in Athenian history: the oligarchic revolution of 411 BCE, in which a conspiracy of four hundred men overthrows the Athenian democracy at the city's moment of maximum strategic vulnerability.
- Book 8The History's final chapter covers the collapse of the Four Hundred, the restoration of a modified democracy in Athens, the recall and rehabilitation of Alcibiades, and the Athenian naval victory at Cynossema — a victory that demonstrates Athens's ability to recover even now.