Peloponnesian War Trivia
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48 free Peloponnesian War trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Peloponnesian War set Athens and its Delian League against Sparta and the Peloponnesian League from 431 to 404 BC. It began with Thebans attacking Plataea and Spartan kings marching into Attica, was reshaped by a plague that killed Pericles and a third of Athens, swung to Athens at Sphacteria, paused with the Peace of Nicias, and then broke Athens in Sicily and at Aegospotami once Persian gold built Lysander a fleet. Thucydides, exiled for losing Amphipolis, wrote it all down — until his text stops in 411 BC and Xenophon picks up the thread. This quiz covers the causes — Corcyra, Potidaea, the Megarian decree and the debate at Sparta — the Archidamian War and the Long Walls, Cleon and Brasidas, Mantinea, the massacre at Melos, the mutilated herms, Alcibiades's defections, the fortification of Decelea, the Four Hundred, Cyzicus and Arginusae, the Thirty Tyrants and the symbolic peace the mayors of Athens and Sparta finally signed in 1996. Fifty questions, four options each, with a short explanation after every answer. Play on your phone or print it for a history quiz night.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which light, fast oared warship formed the backbone of the Athenian fleet in the Peloponnesian War?
Trireme
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.
Q 02Which alliance did Athens lead against Sparta in the Peloponnesian War?
The Delian League
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.
Q 03Which foreign power bankrolled a new Spartan fleet late in the Peloponnesian War, tipping the balance against Athens?
Persia
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.
Q 04The opening phase of the Peloponnesian War is named after which Spartan king, who led the first invasions of Attica?
Archidamus II
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.
Q 05Athens lost to Thebes at which battle, fought near a temple of Apollo it had fortified?
Delium
Delium. The victors then burned the Athenian garrison out of the fortified temple with a giant bellows-driven fire tube, a primitive flamethrower.
Q 06The treaty that paused the Peloponnesian War in 421 BC is known as the Peace of which Athenian general?
Nicias
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.
Q 07Which Sicilian city did Athens try to conquer in the disastrous expedition of 415–413 BC?
Syracuse
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.
Q 08Which Spartan commander built a fleet with foreign gold and won the decisive sea battle of 405 BC?
Lysander
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.
Q 09Which naval battle of 405 BC cost Athens its last fleet and effectively decided the Peloponnesian War?
Aegospotami
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.
Q 10What was the Spartan-installed oligarchy that ruled Athens after its surrender in 404 BC called?
The Thirty Tyrants
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.
Q 11Who wrote the main historical source for the war, the History of the Peloponnesian War?
Thucydides
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.
Q 12In the comedy Lysistrata, staged in Athens in 411 BC, what do the women of Greece withhold to end the Peloponnesian War?
Sex
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.
Q 13Which younger historian continued the unfinished main history of the Peloponnesian War in his Hellenica?
Xenophon
Q 21Which Athenian ban of about 432 BC shut a neighbouring city's traders out of every allied port?
The Megarian decree
The Megarian decree. Sparta's envoys said there need be no war if Athens simply revoked it, and the Athenian assembly refused.
Q 22Sthenelaidas, who pushed Sparta's assembly into voting for the Peloponnesian War in 432 BC, held which powerful annual office?
Ephor
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.
Q 23The Peloponnesian War opened in spring 431 BC with a Theban night raid on which small city allied to Athens?
Plataea
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.
Q 14Which Greek biographer of the Roman era wrote Parallel Lives of four Peloponnesian War commanders?
Plutarch
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.
Q 15Which Athenian comic playwright set his plays Peace and Lysistrata during the Peloponnesian War?
Aristophanes
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.
Q 16What did the main historian of the Peloponnesian War call the real cause that made it inevitable?
Spartan fear of Athens's rise
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.
Q 17Before the Peloponnesian War, Sparta sent home an Athenian army that came to help crush a revolt by whom?
The helots
The helots. Sparta feared the Athenians might take the rebels' side and dismissed them alone among its allies; insulted, Athens tore up the alliance.
Q 18The First Peloponnesian War ended in 446/5 BC with which treaty between Athens and Sparta?
The Thirty Years' Peace
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.
Q 19Before the Peloponnesian War, Athens made a defensive alliance with which sea power, a colony at odds with Corinth?
Corcyra
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.
Q 20Before the Peloponnesian War, Athens ordered which Corinthian colony in Chalkidiki to pull down a defensive wall?
Potidaea
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.
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.
Q 24In the Peloponnesian War, the Long Walls linked Athens to which port?
Piraeus
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.
Q 25Early in the Peloponnesian War, Sparta marched an army of which soldiers into Attica most summers?
Hoplites
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.
Q 26Work on what in 1990s Athens uncovered a mass grave from the plague of 430 BC?
Metro station
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.
Q 27Which Athenian politician boasted he would capture the Spartans trapped on Sphacteria within twenty days, and did?
Cleon
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.
Q 28Sphacteria is a small island off which Peloponnesian site, fortified by Demosthenes in 425 BC?
Pylos
Pylos. A storm drove the Athenian fleet ashore there, and the soldiers, bored with waiting it out, built the fort within days.
Q 29In 424 BC a Spartan army seized which Athenian colony in Thrace, prized for mines and ship timber?
Amphipolis
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.
Q 30Which two war hawks, one Spartan and one Athenian, were both killed in the same Peloponnesian War battle in Thrace?
Brasidas and Cleon
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.