Marked Athens

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The Peloponnesian War

Athens and Sparta, allies against Persia, fought each other for 27 years. Plague killed perhaps a quarter of Athens, and Thucydides, an Athenian general, wrote a history of the war that is still read by politicians.

Date
431 to 404 BCVI · The classical world
Place
Athens · Sparta · Pylos · SyracuseEurope
Laid out as
A warTwo sides, a front line, and the turns the fighting took.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

Athens and its sea empire

  1. ITwo ways of life
  2. IIThe plague of Athens
  3. IIIThe Melian dialogue
  4. IVDisaster in Sicily
  5. VAthens surrenders
  6. VIThucydides

Sparta and the Peloponnesian League

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Pericles
  • Alcibiades
  • Lysander
  • Thucydides

Objects

  • The Spartan shields from Pylos
  • Casualty lists in stone

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

431 BC to 404 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?