Book 1, Chapter 4 — From the end of the Persian to the beginning of the Peloponnesian War—The Progress from Supremacy to Empire
Thucydides inserts fifty years of history in one compressed chapter to show how Athens became what Sparta fears.
Summary
Themistocles, Aristides, and Cimon are the architects of Athenian power in the decades after Marathon and Salamis. Themistocles persuades Athens to rebuild its walls over Spartan protest — the decisive act that establishes Athenian autonomy. Aristides organizes the Delian League and establishes the tribute assessments that will fund Athenian power for the next half-century. Cimon leads the campaigns against Persia that expand Athenian reach east and south. By the time of Cimon's ostracism and the rise of Pericles in the 460s, the Delian League has been transformed from a voluntary defensive alliance into something that looks increasingly like an empire with Athens at its center.
The transformation of the League into empire is documented by Thucydides through a series of incidents that each individually have a plausible justification and collectively reveal a structural pattern. Allied states that prefer to pay tribute in cash rather than provide ships gradually lose their fleets and hence their capacity for independent military action. When they then attempt to revolt, Athens suppresses them, and their subject status is confirmed by force rather than agreement. The treasury moves from Delos to Athens in 454 BCE — officially for security after an Athenian disaster in Egypt, practically because the move makes Athenian control of the funds total.
The Pentecontaetia ends with the tensions between Athens and Sparta that preceded the Thirty Years' Peace of 446 BCE, which was supposed to govern relations between them for the next generation. By the time the present war begins, the treaty has fourteen years left to run. Thucydides's compressed account of the fifty preceding years is the explanation for why neither side found it possible to honor the peace. The structural forces that produced the empire also produced the fear, and the fear produced the war.
- 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.