Book 1, Chapter 5 — Second Congress at Lacedaemon—Preparations for War and Diplomatic Skirmishes—Cylon—Pausanias—Themistocles
Sparta issues ultimatums it knows Athens will refuse; Athens answers with Pericles's strategy laid bare.
Summary
The Spartan demands escalate from the indirect to the direct. First: expel the Alcmaeonid curse, a religious taint associated with Pericles's family and therefore a demand for his political destruction disguised as a religious requirement. Thucydides notes that the Spartans knew this would not be accepted and intended merely to discredit Pericles publicly. Athens counters by demanding that Sparta expel its own ancestral curses — the stain of Pausanias's treason and the violation of suppliants at the sanctuary of Athena. Second: lift the Megarian decree excluding Megara from Athenian markets. Third: restore autonomy to the Greek states in Athens's empire. Each demand is genuinely offensive to Athenian interests; together they add up to dismantling the empire.
Pericles's response to the assembly, which Thucydides renders in indirect statement rather than direct quotation at this point, is the first clear articulation of his strategy for the war: reject all demands, avoid pitched land battles with Sparta's superior infantry, rely on the navy and the empire's tribute, and endure the annual ravaging of Attica without being provoked to fight on unfavorable terms. The logic is defensive and long-term: Athens cannot win by fighting Sparta in the open field, but Sparta cannot reduce Athens's maritime empire by land power alone. Patience will win.
The digressive accounts of Pausanias and Themistocles serve a structural purpose in the History: they establish the pattern by which great men, unchecked by institutional restraint, tend toward treachery. Pausanias, the Spartan victor of Plataea, negotiated secretly with Persia for personal power. Themistocles, the Athenian architect of Salamis, fled to Persia when accused of the same and died there as a pensioner of the Great King. Both men were the greatest military minds of their generation; both were destroyed by the very qualities that made them great. The pattern will recur.
- 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.