How did the Peloponnesian War change the way in which spaces were arranged and experienced, and how did the pre-existing spaces and spatial imagination of communities play a role in the type of war that was fought? Athens provides a lens through which to see wider changes: the Propylaia was left visibly unfinished to mark the outbreak of war, the temple of Athena Nike exaggerated Athenian infantry competence, and the Long Walls reshaped interstate relationships at the same time as redefining Athenian social experience. They allowed for the evacuation of the Athenian countryside, and the housing of thousands of refugees for long periods of the war. This synoikism was paralleled elsewhere during the war in Thebes, Olynthos and Rhodes with significant and long-lasting effects. The accounts of the variety of ways in which the war tested and frayed the political fabric of Athens make us aware of how communities’ experiences of their own spaces could be transformed by the pressures of war, for instance in the terror of frequent night-time attacks. Finally, the Aigospotamoi monument at Delphi gives a contemporary perspective on the moment of victory and speaks articulately across spatial aspects of the Peloponnesian War as a whole.

This chapter argues for and interprets allusions to the invocation before the Catalogue of Ships (Il. 2.484-93) in Ibycus’ ’Polycrates Ode’, Pindar’s Paean 6 and Paean 7b, and Simonides’ ’Plataea Elegy’. It then considers these four poems together as a unique case study for the early reception of Homer. For no other passage from the Iliad or the Odyssey can we trace an equally extensive afterlife in early Greek lyric. The author argues that the unusual prominence of the narrator’s personality and the exceptionally emphatic claim to objective truth in Il. 2.484–93 made these lines a privileged point of reference for subsequent explorations of the nature of poetic authority.