From my notes on Thucydides:
The Peloponnesian War (431-404):
* Both sides expected to win the war, with optimists in both Athens and Sparta believing that the war would come to an end in one or two campaign seasons.
* Athens, with commerce & tribute from its empire, had more money than Sparta, and it held an undisputed advantage at sea; Sparta, whose citizens spent their whole lives in daily preparation for the hour of battle, had no match for its troops in infantry battles by land.
* To keep lesser city states in their respective spheres of influence, Athens & Sparta each supported opposed factions in other states, whose political orientations were similar to their respective political structures: Athens supported democrats, and Sparta aristocrats. However, many times during the war, non-Athenians & non-Spartans revolted against the empires; and each time, Athens & Sparta put down the anti-imperial revolts (see, for instance, the accounts of the Spartans' destruction of Plataea and the Athenians' repression of Mytilene in Book 3 of The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides).
* Pericles' strategy was that (a) the Athenians should abandon the countryside to the enemy and retreat behind the Long Walls, for the Athenian navy could secure a steady supply of foodstuffs from the cities of its empire -- hence no possibility of a siege; and (b) meanwhile, the Athenians should attack the enemy coasts. Pericles' plan, however, was frustrated by the dreadful plague that entered the city and spread quickly in the overcrowded urban area. After Pericles' death (from the plague), the Athenians chose to march out and meet the Spartans in infantry battle.
* In June of 415, Athens attacked Syracuse in Sicily, ostensibly in response to an appeal from Athens' Sicilian ally Egesta, but in reality to expand the Athenian empire to include this very fertile island. Young Alcibiades, whose good looks charmed many Athenians, encouraged the Sicilian expedition. Nicias, the conservative older general, opposed the expedition, but the Athenians decided to send Nicias as Alcibiades' colleague. The Spartans supported Syracuse, and the expedition ended in disaster for Athens; Nicias was put to death, thousands of his fellow soldiers were killed or enslaved, and the huge fleet was lost.
* By this time, Alcibiades, under suspicion at home for "scoffing at time-honored religious customs" (which in effect meant scoffing at democratic conventions), had defected to Sparta.
* Beginning in 412, the Persians consented to back Sparta financially, in exchange for the promise that the Peloponnesian League would return the Greek city states on the western coast of what is now Turkey to Persian rule.
* In 405, the Persian-backed Spartans (led by the Spartan general Lysander) defeated the Athenians decisively in the battle of Aegospotami, and by 404, the war was formally brought to an end.
After the Peloponnesian War:
* Sparta won, but what did the Spartans gain by the painful loss of their fighting men? Sparta suffered from the severe depopulation of male citizens lost in the war. Besides, Sparta did not retain hegemony in Greece for long. In the 390s, Sparta alienated its allies one by one, with the result that in 395 Corinth and Thebes joined the Athenians in making war on the Spartans. (By 377 Athens built a new naval alliance, the Second Athenian Confederacy, organized on a more egalitarian basis than the earlier fifth-century league.)
* Athens lost not only the war and much of its empire but also its democracy. During the war, the plague killed as many as 50,000 (including women and slaves). War casualties included at least 5,000 infantry soldiers and 12,000 sailors (including some 3,000 executed by Lysander after Aegospotami) -- a huge number, when one considers that in 431 Athens' male citizen population was probably about 43,000. A puppet government of thirty pro-Spartan oligarchs was set up in Athens -- the so-called "Thirty Tyrants." Eventually, the Tyrants (who killed about 1,500 citizens) proved so unpopular that Athenian democrats overthrew them, supported by the young Spartan king Pausanias, who feared the alliance of the murderous oligarchs with General Lysander (architect of the Spartan victory at Aegospotami).
* By the 360s, both Sparta and Athens declined in power, and now Thebes occupied the most prominent position in Greek inter-city politics.
* In 338, the crafty Macedonian king Philip II defeated a hastily formed coalition of Greek city states, bringing the freedom of the poleis to an end. Philip II, however, got assassinated two years later.
* Philip II's son Alexander succeeded him, conquering large chunks of western Asia as well as Egypt. With the death of Alexander in 323, the classical Greek world came to an end. Alexander's empire was divided by various generals. In this world, there was no room for sovereign city states, whose citizens argued passionately about the matters of war and peace, right and wrong. -- Yoshie
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