48 Fun Facts About Peloponnesian War

Which light, fast oared warship formed the backbone of the Athenian fleet in the Peloponnesian War?

Trireme. Its 170 oarsmen sat in three tiers and drove a bronze-clad ram into enemy hulls at the waterline, so a well-drilled crew was the real weapon.

Which alliance did Athens lead against Sparta in the Peloponnesian War?

The Delian League. It was named for the island of Delos, where its treasury was kept until Athens moved the money home in 454 BC and the alliance hardened into an empire.

Which foreign power bankrolled a new Spartan fleet late in the Peloponnesian War, tipping the balance against Athens?

Persia. Its gold paid for the fleets that finally beat Athens at sea, and the price was Spartan recognition of the Persian king's claim to the Greek cities of Asia Minor.

The opening phase of the Peloponnesian War is named after which Spartan king, who led the first invasions of Attica?

Archidamus II. He had warned the Spartans not to rush into the conflict, was outvoted, and then had to lead the invasions that gave the Archidamian War his name.

Athens lost to Thebes at which battle, fought near a temple of Apollo it had fortified?

Delium. The victors then burned the Athenian garrison out of the fortified temple with a giant bellows-driven fire tube, a primitive flamethrower.

The treaty that paused the Peloponnesian War in 421 BC is known as the Peace of which Athenian general?

Nicias. The cautious general who brokered it was later put in command of the Sicilian Expedition he had argued against, and was executed when it failed.

Which Sicilian city did Athens try to conquer in the disastrous expedition of 415–413 BC?

Syracuse. Some 7,000 prisoners from the beaten army were penned in the city's stone quarries, where exposure, hunger and thirst killed them in crowds.

Which Spartan commander built a fleet with foreign gold and won the decisive sea battle of 405 BC?

Lysander. After four days of refusing battle in the Hellespont, he pounced on the fifth and surprised the Athenian fleet at its anchorage, taking almost every ship.

Which naval battle of 405 BC cost Athens its last fleet and effectively decided the Peloponnesian War?

Aegospotami. When the state galley Paralus brought the news by night, one contemporary wrote, a wail spread up the Long Walls to the city and no one slept.

What was the Spartan-installed oligarchy that ruled Athens after its surrender in 404 BC called?

The Thirty Tyrants. Led by the hardliner Critias, they had perhaps 1,500 people killed in a bloody purge before exiled democrats returned and drove them out.

Who wrote the main historical source for the war, the History of the Peloponnesian War?

Thucydides. An Athenian general himself, he was exiled for twenty years after failing to save a city in time, which let him gather accounts from both sides.

In the comedy Lysistrata, staged in Athens in 411 BC, what do the women of Greece withhold to end the Peloponnesian War?

Sex. Lysistrata persuades the women of the warring cities to refuse their husbands until peace is made, while the older women seize the Acropolis and the war treasury kept there.

Which younger historian continued the unfinished main history of the Peloponnesian War in his Hellenica?

Xenophon. His Hellenica opens with the words 'After these events' and no introduction at all, as if turning the page of the history that had broken off.

Which Greek biographer of the Roman era wrote Parallel Lives of four Peloponnesian War commanders?

Plutarch. Writing some 500 years after the fighting, he paired each Greek life with a Roman one to compare their characters, drawing on earlier histories that are now lost.

Which Athenian comic playwright set his plays Peace and Lysistrata during the Peloponnesian War?

Aristophanes. In his earlier Acharnians, staged six years into the fighting, a fed-up farmer simply signs his own private peace treaty with the enemy.

What did the main historian of the Peloponnesian War call the real cause that made it inevitable?

Spartan fear of Athens's rise. He listed the quarrels each side cited, then wrote that the real cause was the growth of Athenian power and the alarm it inspired in Sparta.

Before the Peloponnesian War, Sparta sent home an Athenian army that came to help crush a revolt by whom?

The helots. Sparta feared the Athenians might take the rebels' side and dismissed them alone among its allies; insulted, Athens tore up the alliance.

The First Peloponnesian War ended in 446/5 BC with which treaty between Athens and Sparta?

The Thirty Years' Peace. It held for less than half its term: within fifteen years Sparta voted that Athens had broken it, and the two were at war again.

Before the Peloponnesian War, Athens made a defensive alliance with which sea power, a colony at odds with Corinth?

Corcyra. Athens sent just ten ships with orders to fight only if the island itself was threatened; at Sybota they were drawn in, and twenty more arrived in time to make the Corinthians back off.

Before the Peloponnesian War, Athens ordered which Corinthian colony in Chalkidiki to pull down a defensive wall?

Potidaea. It revolted instead, and the siege that followed dragged on for more than two years, draining the Athenian treasury before the city gave in.

Which Athenian ban of about 432 BC shut a neighbouring city's traders out of every allied port?

The Megarian decree. Sparta's envoys said there need be no war if Athens simply revoked it, and the Athenian assembly refused.

Sthenelaidas, who pushed Sparta's assembly into voting for the Peloponnesian War in 432 BC, held which powerful annual office?

Ephor. After a blunt speech he claimed he could not tell which shout was louder, so he made the Spartans walk to opposite sides to be counted, and the war party won easily.

The Peloponnesian War opened in spring 431 BC with a Theban night raid on which small city allied to Athens?

Plataea. About 300 Thebans were let in at night by sympathisers, but the townspeople rallied before dawn, trapped them in the streets and later executed their 180 prisoners.

In the Peloponnesian War, the Long Walls linked Athens to which port?

Piraeus. When Athens surrendered in 404 BC, the victors tore the walls down to the music of flute-girls, calling it the first day of freedom for Greece.

Early in the Peloponnesian War, Sparta marched an army of which soldiers into Attica most summers?

Hoplites. Athens refused to meet them in open battle, so the invaders ravaged the farmland and went home after a few weeks; the longest stay, in 430 BC, was about 40 days.

Work on what in 1990s Athens uncovered a mass grave from the plague of 430 BC?

Metro station. Archaeologists had to dig the pit beside the ancient Kerameikos cemetery in a hurry before bulldozers moved in, and the station was cancelled anyway.

Which Athenian politician boasted he would capture the Spartans trapped on Sphacteria within twenty days, and did?

Cleon. He held no command and made the boast to mock the generals, who called his bluff; the surrender of 292 men, 120 of them full Spartan citizens, stunned Greece.

Sphacteria is a small island off which Peloponnesian site, fortified by Demosthenes in 425 BC?

Pylos. A storm drove the Athenian fleet ashore there, and the soldiers, bored with waiting it out, built the fort within days.

In 424 BC a Spartan army seized which Athenian colony in Thrace, prized for mines and ship timber?

Amphipolis. The Athenian general sent to save it arrived hours too late and was exiled for the failure, then used his exile to write the history of the war.

Which two war hawks, one Spartan and one Athenian, were both killed in the same Peloponnesian War battle in Thrace?

Brasidas and Cleon. Brasidas won the battle but died of his wounds, Cleon was cut down as his army fled, and with both gone the peace parties on each side got their treaty.

Which battle of 418 BC was the largest land clash in Greece during the Peloponnesian War?

Mantinea. Victory there wiped out the shame of the surrender on Sphacteria seven years earlier: fortune had humbled the Spartans, Greeks decided, but the men were the same as ever.

Which independent Peloponnesian state led a democratic coalition against Sparta after 421 BC?

Argos. It had sat out the first ten years of fighting and grown rich on its neutrality, so Sparta's oldest rival in the Peloponnese entered the contest fresh.

Which neutral island did Athens besiege in 416 BC, then kill its men and enslave the rest?

Melos. In the talks beforehand, as the war's main historian tells it, the Athenian envoys said bluntly that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Before the Sicilian Expedition sailed, which religious statues in Athens were mutilated?

The hermai. These stone pillars sacred to Hermes guarded Athenian doorways, so finding nearly all of them defaced in a single night looked like a dire omen for the fleet.

Which Spartan general was sent to Sicily in 414 BC and turned the tide of the campaign against Athens?

Gylippus. He raised an army from Sicilian towns on his march and slipped into the besieged city just before the Athenian siege wall closed around it.

What omen delayed the Athenian withdrawal from Sicily in 413 BC, with fatal consequences?

A lunar eclipse. The soothsayers prescribed a wait of thrice nine days, the devout Athenian commander agreed, and in that time the enemy sealed the harbour and trapped the fleet.

The Athenian expedition that sailed for Sicily in 415 BC was dangerously short of what?

Cavalry. Only about thirty horses made the crossing, in a single transport, so enemy riders could harass the Athenians at will and cut off anyone who strayed from camp.

On a defector's advice, Sparta fortified which village in the hills near Athens in 413 BC?

Decelea. With a Spartan garrison there all year, Athenians lost their farmland for good, and more than 20,000 slaves, many of them skilled craftsmen, ran away.

In the Peloponnesian War, proposing to spend Athens's 1,000-talent emergency reserve carried what penalty?

Death. The fund sat untouched for nearly twenty years, until allies began to revolt after the Sicilian disaster and the assembly repealed the penalty to man new ships.

Which force defied the oligarchs who seized Athens in 411 BC?

Samos fleet. Its crews swore an oath to uphold the democracy, sacked their officers and elected new generals, acting as Athens in exile until the oligarchy fell within months.

At which naval battle of 410 BC did an Athenian fleet wipe out Sparta's navy and kill its admiral?

Cyzicus. The stranded Spartans sent home a famously terse dispatch, which Athens intercepted: 'Ships gone; Mindarus dead; the men starving; at our wits' end what to do.'

Which prince handed his Asia Minor revenues to Sparta's admiral in 405 BC?

Cyrus the Younger. Sparta repaid the favour in 401 BC by backing his march to seize the throne from his brother; he was killed in the battle, stranding his Greek mercenaries deep in Asia.

Which philosopher was the one presiding councillor to oppose the illegal mass trial of Athens's generals after Arginusae?

Socrates. The generals had won the battle but a storm stopped them rescuing crews from wrecked ships; six were tried together and executed, and Athens soon regretted it.

The Spartan fleet sailed to the Dardanelles in 405 BC to cut off Athens's supply of what?

Grain. Athens could not feed itself and lived on imported wheat shipped through those straits, so its fleet had no choice but to follow.

Which exiled Athenian left his castle to warn the fleet's generals before the defeat of 405 BC?

Alcibiades. He urged them to move from the open beach to a proper harbour; they answered that they were the generals now, and the fleet was soon caught on that same beach.

After Athens surrendered in 404 BC, what did Corinth and Thebes urge Sparta to do to the city?

Destroy it. Sparta refused, saying it would never enslave a Greek city that had done such service in Greece's hour of greatest danger, and made Athens a subject ally instead.

Who overthrew the Spartan-backed oligarchy and restored Athenian democracy in 403 BC?

Thrasybulus. He seized the border fort of Phyle with only about seventy exiles, saw his band grow to a thousand, and beat the oligarchs' army in a battle at the port.

Who signed a symbolic treaty ending the Peloponnesian War for Athens and Sparta in 1996?

Their mayors. Meeting in Sparta, they signed a proclamation expressing grief for the devastating war between the two cities and declaring it over.