This chapter explores the ways in which the Athenian Empire influenced and was influenced by the Peloponnesian War. First, it investigates the ways in which the Athenians made use of allied military resources, arguing that there was no formal system which governed this practice. The Athenians drew on allied manpower when it was convenient to do so, perhaps for punitive reasons, and perhaps as a way of encouraging or allowing visible demonstrations of loyalty to the Empire. The impact of military service on allied communities is hard to reconstruct, but it is likely that it was very unevenly felt: some states might have had little or no active involvement in the war; some might have lost significant proportions of their (male, fighting-age) populations. The second part of the chapter explores Athenian representations of allied military service. For the most part, the Athenians consistently under-represent the contributions made by allied states, or by individual allies. However, some changes in this approach might be visible in the final phase of the war and should perhaps be connected with a wider shift in Athens’ style of imperial leadership, one which becomes based less on coercive force and more on cooperation and concession.

One distinctive feature of the Peloponnesian War is the intimacy of its violence. The war is characterised by the sacking of cities, civil war and the impoverished existence of vulnerable communities living their lives as refugees in exile. In every other recorded conflict, this is a recipe that leads to high rates of sexual violence against women and children. Yet our historical sources are almost entirely silent about the occurrence of such abuse. This chapter explores the implications of the premise that there was a significant rate of unrecorded sexual violence during the Peloponnesian War. It details all the various circumstances in which such abuse was likely to occur and draws upon comparative material from other conflicts to show the strong likelihood of sexual violence. It also explores ways in which the topic of sexual abuse was addressed indirectly in art and drama through the metaphor of the sacking of Troy and the sexual violation of women in myth. The messages of these cultural products gain greater resonance and vitality when placed against a backdrop in which sexual violation is a regular occurrence as part of the nature of war.

Study of ancient warfare has become increasingly the domain of specialist historians of war. This book sets itself against that, insisting that wars are political, social and cultural events, not simply military events – and that this war, in particular, because we have such rich source material in Athenian literature, epigraphy and archaeology beyond Thucydides, provides an exceptionally good lens through which to examine a society, polity and culture under pressure. In this, this book differs from past studies of the Peloponnesian War which, almost without exception, have essentially rewritten Thucydides. By contrast this book tries to examine the Peloponnesian War not only as a textual event but as an historical event. The book therefore looks at the war as a war, with causes and a course, but also as a manifestation of the entanglement between Greek cities, as a product and shaper of empire, as a political upheaval, as a challenge in political thought, as a reshaping of the way the local and wider world was understood and as a religious crisis.

The Peloponnesian War has been seen as a fundamental struggle between old power and new power, conservative power and innovative power, oligarchy and democracy, oppression and freedom. How has this ‘beautiful object’ been constructed? Part of the answer lies with the persuasiveness and attraction of Thucydides’ ‘lifelikeness and factualness’ and of his ‘brutal realism’ – manifested in recent years in the claims about the ‘Thucydides Trap’. Part of the answer lies in the decisions Thucydides takes over where to situate the beginning and end of the war, and his insistence on a single war. Part again comes from Thucydides’ fondness for creating oppositions and seeing binary alternatives. In contrast to this Sahlins has insisted that meanings are determined by cultural contexts, that culture organises history and that Thucydides’ insistence on a universal human nature is fundamentally misleading – in this way emphasising Thucydides’ history as a polemic about history itself. In truth there were deep structural contrasts between Athens and Sparta – contrasts partly embedded in the division between Dorians and Ionians. It was Thucydides’ perception of this that caused him to predict the magnitude of the Peloponnesian War even as it began.