The war was started by a dispute between Corinth (member of Peloponnesian League) and its colony Corcyra (island of NW coast of mod. Greece) in 435. The Corcyraeans naturally invoked the aid of Athens. For a while it was only a local affair, but things escalated until in 432 the Peloponnesian League declared war on Athens. This war is known as the Peloponnesian War (the book confusingly calls it the "Great Peloponnesian War," a purely modern designation), and is particularly famous because the Greek historian Thucydides wrote about it in the first proper work of history in the Western tradition.

It was an odd two-fold war. On one hand, one has the Peloponnesian League, which was militarily predominant, but lacked a common fund and had no naval force. On the other hand, Athens had a huge maritime empire which could feed it, but not a sufficient army to defeat the League. So lo

In 431 and 430 the Spartans invaded Attica, achieving nothing. They plundered the countryside, but this made no difference. In 430 a plague broke out in Athens. The Athenians blamed Pericles for their travails (the plan to abandon Attica seemed a bit cowardly) and for the first time in decades failed to elect him general, but they soon repented. In 429 he died.

In the same year (413), the Spartans took Decelea in Attica, which allowed them to maintian a permanent presence there and to force the closure of mines in Attica. (One has to wonder about the Spartan grasp of strategy if it took them so long to figure this out.) The Athenians were now in desperate shape, but they still managed to rebuild their fleet. (While expensive to maintain, ancient fleets were comparatively easy to rebuild.) In 412 most of the Athenian allies revolted, and even worse, the Spartans got a subsidy from the Persians to build a fleet. This ultimately doomed Athens, but Athens still held out for several years.

In 415 the Athenians sent out a great fleet, and in 414 besieged Syracuse, the main Greek city in Sicily. The Spartan Gylippus was summoned to command the defences and put everything in order. In 413 the Athenian siege began to go badly. Nicias was advised to retreat but wouldn't until it was too late. Superstitions about an eclipse postponed the retreat, which became a complete debacle since the delay allowed Gylippus to make preparations against it. The entire Athenian force was wiped out.

ng as Athens' navy remained intact, the Peloponnesians could inflict on the Athenians no decisive defeat. The Athenians could use their fleet to move their forces around with impunity, but found it difficult to do any major damage to the Peloponnesians. One of the great Athenian defeats, the Sicilian campaign, began in an effort to find some way to get an advantage over the Peloponnesians. The war only ended when, after two decades of war, it finally dawned on the Spartans that Athens could only be defeated through the destruction of her fleet.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Athens Athenians, Aegospotami Athenian, Peloponnesian League, Decelea Attica, Peace Nicias, Spartan Gylippus, Persia Spartans, Alcibiades Nicias, League Spartans, Leuctra Spartan, peloponnesian league, destroyed spartan, spartans fleet, peloponnesian war, athenian defeat, athens athenians, pericles decided, major damage,
Approximate Word count = 1482
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)