In the second half of the 5th century BC the two leading powers in Greece were Athens, which was democratic and innovative and whose navy built up an empire in the Aegean Sea and Sparta, which was oligarchic and conservative and whose army of heavy infantry enabled it to dominate the southern part of the Greek mainland.
It was fought between 431 and 404 BC, Athens foresaw the war, and knew they could not defeat the Spartan Army in a straight up battle.
So they constructed a walled corridor between Athens and their port of Piraeus. When the Spartans invaded, the Athenians withdrew behind their walls and the Spartans could not successfully storm the long walls.
War came on a winter in early March 431. Some three hundred men from Thebes, a city allied with Sparta’s Peloponnesian League, made a treacherous attack upon neighboring community of Plataia an ally of Athens.
The Thebans were natural enemies of the Plataians,since they had long been striving to bring all the Beotian towns under their direct overlordship.
This neighborly clash quickly touched off hostilities all around Greece, and soon a Spartan was marching on Athens, while Athenian fleets were sailing and raiding around the Peloponnesos.
At the same time that Athens was under attack from Sparta, the city state also suffered a terrible plaque, beginning in 430s BC.
The plaque killed about a third of Athens’s citizens, This contributed to Athens’s eventually defeat at the hands of its Spartan rivals during the Peloponnesian War.
The conflict marked the end of Athenian command of the sea. The war between the two city-states ended in a victory for Sparta.
Peloponnesian War
