The Athenian historian, Thucydides, was born about 471 B.C.,
within ten years of the great repulse of the Persian invasion.
Before he was thirty, the great political ascendancy of
Pericles was completely established at Athens, and the
ascendancy of Athens among the Greek states was unchallenged,
except by Sparta. He was forty at the beginning of the
Peloponnesian War. Thucydides was appointed to a military
command seven years later, but his failure in that office
caused his banishment. From that time he remained an exiled
spectator of events; the date of his death is uncertain. His
great work is the history of the Peloponnesian War to its
twentieth year, where his history is abruptly broken off. To
Herodotus, history presented itself as a drama; Thucydides
views it with the eyes of a philosophical statesman, but
writes it also with extraordinary descriptive power, not only
in pregnant sentences which have never been effectively
rendered in translation, but in passages of sustained
intensity, of which it would be vain to reproduce fragments.
The abridged translation given here has been made direct from
the Greek.

_I.--The Beginning of the War_

I have written the account of the war between Athens and Sparta, since
it is the greatest and the most calamitous of all wars hitherto to the
Greeks. For the contest with the Medes was decided in four battles; but
this war was protracted over many years, and wrought infinite injury and
bloodshed.

Of the immediate causes of the war the first is to be found in the
affairs of Epidamnus, Corcyra, and Corinth, of which Corcyra was a
colony. Of the Greek states, the most were joined either to the Athenian
or the Peloponnesian league, but Corcyra had joined neither. But having
a quarrel with Corinth about Epidamnus, she now formed an alliance with
Athens, whose intervention enraged the Corinthians.

They then helped Potidaea, a Corinthian colony, but an Athenian
tributary, to revolt from Athens. Corinth next appealed to Sparta, as
the head of Hellas, to intervene ere it should be too late and check the
Athenian aggression, which threatened to make her the tyrant of all
Greece. At Sparta the war party prevailed, although King Archidamus
urged that sufficient pressure could be brought to bear without actual
hostilities.

The great prosperity and development of Athens since the