The Peloponnesian War

The ancient Greek historian Thucydides called it "a war like no other"—arguably the greatest in the history of the world up to that time. The Peloponnesian War pitted Athens and her allies against a league of city-states headed by Sparta. Thucydides himself was an Athenian general in the fighting, sentenced to exile partway through the 27-year struggle, after losing a key battle to one of Sparta's leading commanders. Although Thucydides lived to see the end of the war, his history breaks off in its 21st year. Other ancient writers completed the record but without Thucydides's sense of drama and matchless insight—for he is the first historian to seek the true causes of events. His eyewitness account of the war has been a classic for 24 centuries and is still studied for its profound truths about the nature of human strife.