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the city, the women and children to seek refuge at Salamis (today’s Salamina) and the men to sea with the Athenian naval fleet, while the Persians razed Athens to the ground. The Persian naval campaign, however, was not successful. By skilful manoeuvring, the Greek warships trapped the larger Persian ships in the narrow waters off Salamis, where the smaller, more agile Greek vessels carried the advantage. Xerxes returned to Persia in disgust, leaving his general Mardonius to subdue Greece. The result was quite the reverse; a year later the Greeks, under the command of the Spartan general Pausanias, obliterated the Persian army at the Battle of Plataea.

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The Trial of Socrates by IF Stone frames in a contemporary investigative light Plato’s version of events surrounding the philosopher Socrates’ life and death.

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The Peloponnesian Wars

The Peloponnesian League was essentially a military coalition governed by Sparta, who maintained political dominance over the Peloponnesian region. Athens’ growing imperialism threatened Spartan hegemony; the ensuing power struggle was to last almost 30 years.

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In The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides sets out a historical narrative of the quarrels and warfare between Athens and Sparta.

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FIRST PELOPONNESIAN WAR

One of the major triggers of the first Peloponnesian War (431–421 BC) was the Corcyra incident, in which Athens supported Corcyra (present-day Corfu) in a row with Corinth, its mother city. Corinth called on Sparta to help and the Spartans, whose power depended to a large extent on Corinth’s wealth and allegiance, duly rallied to the cause.

Athens knew it couldn’t defeat the Spartans on land, so it abandoned Attica and withdrew behind its mighty walls, opting to rely on its navy to put pressure on Sparta by blockading the Peloponnese. Athens suffered badly during the siege; plague broke out in the overcrowded city, killing a third of the population – including Pericles – but the defences held firm. The blockade of the Peloponnese eventually began to hurt and the two cities negotiated an uneasy truce.

SECOND PELOPONNESIAN WAR

The truce lasted until 413 BC, when the Spartans went to the aid of the Sicilian city of Syracuse, which the Athenians had been besieging for three years. The Spartans ended the siege, and destroyed the Athenian fleet and army in the process.

Despite this, Athens fought on for a further nine years before it finally surrendered to Sparta in 404 BC. Corinth urged the total destruction of Athens, but the Spartans felt honour-bound to spare the city that had saved Greece from the Persians. Instead, they crippled it by confiscating its fleet, abolishing the Delian League and tearing down the walls between the city and Piraeus.

The Rise of Macedon

The Greeks were by now engineering their own decline. Sparta began a doomed campaign to reclaim the cities of Asia Minor from Persian rule, bringing the Persians back into Greek affairs where they found willing allies in Athens and an increasingly powerful Thebes (Thiva). The rivalry between Sparta and Thebes culminated in the decisive Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, where Thebes, led by Epaminondas, inflicted Sparta’s first defeat in a pitched land battle. Spartan influence collapsed and Thebes filled the vacuum. In a surprise about-turn, Athens now allied itself with Sparta, and their combined forces met the Theban army at Mantinea in the Peloponnese in 362 BC. Thebes won the battle, but Epaminondas was killed; and without him, Theban power soon crumbled.

However, the political influence of the major city-states had by now been significantly eroded. Their strength waning, they were unable to combat the new power in the north, Macedon – geographically the modern nomós (prefecture) of Macedonia – which was gathering strength under its monarch, Philip II.

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Philip II engaged the philosopher Aristotle to tutor the teenage Alexander, who was greatly inspired by Homer’s ‘Iliad’. Alexander retained a strong interest in the arts and culture throughout his life.

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