The ancient Greek historian Thucydides called it "a war like no other"—arguably the greatest in the history of the world up to that time. The Peloponnesian War pitted Athens and her allies against a league of city-states headed by Sparta. Thucydides himself was an Athenian general in the fighting, sentenced to exile partway through the 27-year struggle, after losing a key battle to one of Sparta's leading commanders.
In this course, Professor Kenneth W. Harl draws on this masterpiece as well as other ancient sources to give you a full picture of the Greek world in uneasy peace and then all-out war in the late 5th century B.C.
Robert Morkot traces the growth of Greece from a series of often conflicting city-states, each with its own colonial outposts as far from home as Spain and Tunisia, to loosely knit alliances that waged huge conflicts against the Persian empire--and, as in the case of the Peloponnesian War, against each other. CORRECT LINK added by hermanomax
Course No. 3372
