Hello, and welcome to Western civ.
In today's bow.
In this author interview, I'm sitting down and we're talking about a new translation of the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Now, this translation and the original I suppose thousands of years old, so you may be asking yourself, really we need another translation of Thucydides. I actually think this one is very, very good. And the difference for me is that it's one complete volume that's all put together, and it's very understandable in the way that it's written.
You can tell that the translation stays true to the original because I've looked at several other translations and compared them and they're not wildly different, which tells us, okay, we're on the same factual playing field here. But it's it's more readable than some of the other translations that I have picked up. Now, if you've never looked at Thucidides, you know, history of the Peloponnesian War, you might not
realize how long. It is. But this thing clocks on it at about, you know, over six hundred pages long. So it's a big history. And well, I mean it's a thirty year Long War, So I mean, I suppose
that is to be expected. The reason that I've always thought that this, combined with Herodotus, are always some of the most important and critical reads, especially for students of history, is that these are the first and these are the first works that really show us what a historical analysis of an event is supposed.
To look like.
Now, of course, Herodotus and Thucidides, you know, we wouldn't consider them scientific today. To often they go into morality, too often they go back on old tropes. But that being said, our notion of history as storytelling really gets its grounds in those two authors, Herodotus and Fucidities. Of this specific work before then, if you look at accounts of battles and so on and so forth, they're very
one dimensional. You know, as I point out in the text, we just I'd love to know more about let's say, Ramsey's the Great Campaigns. But what we have are some you know, stella, and we have some you know, carvings that give us some indication of what happened, but there's no detail, there's no it doesn't come to life in the way that Thucidites work here does. We don't get
a sense of any characters. We don't get a sense of who did what, other than just simply ramses being great and blessed by the gods and therefore he won you know that. But that's not history. That's just a description. That's just a list of things, and that is why it's so disappointing and why I work like this is so important. Now, before we get to the interview, I do want to confess we did run into technical difficulties
with this one. There were supposed to have been two people on the interview and we only ended up with fifty percent. So information about the translation itself we didn't get into because we couldn't do that. But I was able to talk with historian Polly Low about the Peloponnesian War, which is of particular interest to me. So the interview is a little bit shorter, and I think still interesting
in a lot of ways. And I'm going to throw this out there as a teaser that as we wrap up in twenty twenty six, the actual narrative of Western SIV, one of the first events that I'm going to be looking at in detail in a really long format episode that'll come out after that will actually be the Peloponnesian War. I've decided yet, but it may actually be the first. So this will kind of tease that transition, which is a long ways off yet, but still we'll plant the
seed in your mind if you're interested in the Peloponnesian War. Oh, there's a lot more to come, and I'm going to actually be referencing this translation again in that you know, a year or two down the line. But if you would like to pick it up now you can. It is available for purchase today. You know, you can go ahead and click the link in the show notes and have it at your door in a couple of days if you want, or go down to your local book purveyor put it in order or see if they have
a copy. Either way is fine, but it's there for your convenience if you'd like it. And so, without further ado, after a couple of quick messages, let's just jump in and talk about the Peloponnesian War, all right. So the question that I wanted to ask then, as we sort of inch towards the war itself, the Peloponnesian War itself is setting the stage of let's start with our two principal combatants, which I'm sure most people are going to be aware of the city states of Athens and Sparta.
And of course when I use the word grease, of course that's an anachronism for the time which wouldn't have been used. So everyone forgive me, okay, everybody who is getting angry at the their earphones right now. I am going to use some to mix and match terms for ease of understanding here. But this, when I was growing up, was sort of taught as this almost existential struggle between
two polarly opposite political and social systems. So if you could kind of lay the groundwork of to what extent is that true and to what extent like what was the situation like in I'm putting in air quotes grease at the time of the beginning of the Peloponnesian conflict in war.
Okay, so this is these two at least two really important questions in there. If we start with the second one, the sort of the Greek scare quotes context, I guess the important thing to say, and you already made this alluded to this point, is that there's no single nation state of Greece. So we're dealing with a set of hundreds, maybe even up to about a thousand small sometimes really tiny, independent political communities. So it's a very sort of disperse
disparate system. But these communities feel that they have something in common, they have sort of cultural, linguistic other features in common, so they would think of themselves as Greeks, but also as independent communities. So that's the sort of world that we're living in. Then within that Athens and Sparsa. Again, you're quite right, this idea that they're conceived of as sort of polar opposites. That's an idea which owes a
lot in fact of Thucydides. He constructs this model of Athens and Sparsaer's two very very different communities, and that's almost sort of part of his explanation for why they end up fighting, because they're so different that they can't really coexist. Athens, as depicted by Fusidities, and also, at least to some extent in reality, is a well. It's
a more open community. It has a democratic system of government, democratic in the ancient sense, so men have or free men have political rights, but a large group of the population of Athens have political rights. It's very expansionist in this period, it's built up this very large alliance which has sort of morphed into something closer to an empire. By the time the war breaks out. It's very wealthy. So that's a sort of very quick overview of what
Athens is like. Sparta is depicted by thucidities as a much more small conservative society. It has a very distinctive constantitution, which is has well has a slight democratic aspect in that there is an assembly, but the assembly can't it can sort of rubber stamp decisions. It can't make policy in the way that the Athenian Assembly can. It's probably really run by a small council, a council of old men, thirty thirty men called the Gruzia, which is essentially the
Greek equivalent of the term senate. It also has two kings, very unusually, so it has quite a complicated political structure, but less sort of less popular control over governance and over governmental decisions. It has a smaller citizen body than Athens, probably its total population if we include the enslaved people, but it's probably the same as, maybe even slightly more than Athens, but the cities and the male citizen population of Sparta is vastly outnumbered by the non citizen population,
so it's a different sort of structure of society. It also has an alliance, but it's a rather smaller alliance and it's based really it's more regionally specific, so it's based in the Peloponnese, the area immediately around Sparta, So it's sort of it's always a slightly more old fashioned source of system that Spartans have got going, contrasted by Thucydides, and I think there is some sort of it's not
just Thucididies. I think this is something in this with the more a dynamic sort of go getting Athenian system.
And of course then I mean there's a difference in their military structures, right, And this is again something that sort of was ground into me when I was a student, that the Athenians are this great maritime power that they have, this the fleet that has been extremely successful really stitching together and an empire. I mean then you know it's the Delian League, right, but it's you know, it's an empire really in a lot of the ways that it
functions in reality. And then you have the Spartans, which are of course build oftentimes is the pre eminent land power of the time. You know, they have an army, and we're talking about you know, classical Greek failanx at this point in history. And so the question that I
have is like, is that true? To what extent are there opposing military structures different And if that's the case, if one is saying, well, we're going to be prerominantly a landpower, the other one is saying we're going to be a maritime power, then then what's the need to fight? You know, it doesn't seem like your spheres of influence are the same or that you're necessarily even competing over the same space.
Yeah, so I think it is true, certainly at the start of the war that Athens is a major naval power. Spartan doesn't really have a navy to speak of because they're state. They've never needed to build up a navy. And the amount of just infrastructure that you need to have a navy. You don't just need we need to supply timber, but you also need ship sheds, you need people who can build and maintain the fleet. Is extremely expensive to have to have a navy, much more expensive
than having a land army. Because a land army in this period, in both Athens and Sparta is primarily just your male citizens some of your non citizens who just the in their spare time effectively go out and fight. So that's quite a cheap way to do warfare. Sparta doesn't invest in that until really a late stage of the war. So yeah, So Athens has built up this naval power much earlier, sort of in the fifth century, and has continued to invest in it and has passed
of building up its alliance. One thing that Athenians do is ask, or properly tell compel its allies to give them, rather than sending them men, which would be the old fashioned way of doing an alliance, to give them money. And the Athenians have then been spending that money on lots of things, but one of the things they can spend that money on is building up the fleet. So
this is definitely true. Then your second question in that case, if they've got separate spheres of influence, why do they come into conflicts is a good question, And the impression we get from Thucydides is that in some ways the Spartans get sort of not quite bullied, but prompted into going to war into responding to the growth of Athenian
power by other Greek states. So the Spartans themselves and the picture of Thucidies gives us wood for a long time, and in fact, were for a fairly a lot of time quite happy just to sit back and say this isn't our problem, because we're strong enough. We could fight the Athenians if they ever came for us. But we're not that fussed. But it's other Greek states, in particular Corinth, which is one another one of the larger Greek city states the north of the Peloponnese, but closer to Athens.
Current had been a naval power. Current is interested in trade and it's got interests around the Aegean and the Corinthians are worried that the Athenians are encroaching on areas of Corinthian influenced Corinthian sources of revenue, sources of power. And it's the Corinthians who go to the Spartans and say, you, as the other major power in Greece, you've got to stop the Athenians, because if you don't stop them, then it's game over for all of us, and.
We'll get to the causes causes of the war in a minute. But I kind of want to back up for a second before we get there and talk about, you know, the major conflict that people will know that precedes this, you or the Persian Wars, right, and those come to an end, and if my memory serves plateaeas like four, you know, seventy or three seventy nine, somewhere in that, in that range, and so you know, it's been forty some years roughly, give or take since the
end of the Persian War, you know. But my question has always been, you know, to what extent, even during that conflict, is it fair to characterize Sparta and Athens as allies in the traditional sense or you know, because it seems like their cooperation breaks down almost while that war is still going on. And so I wonder about I wonder about that because everyone, you know, you look at this and you say, oh, oh, the here's the former allies.
Now they're at war. Were they really ever that close even in that conflict.
It's it's a really good question, a really hard question to answer because the sources that we've got for that conflicts are written by people who know what happens in the Peloponnesian War. So if you Herotoesis as narrative of the Persian Wars, there's all sorts of clues, not very subtle in fact, that this is all going to go wrong, and that already during you know, this period where in theory the Greeks are all united, there's beef between Athens and Sparta, and you know, we can already see the
seeds of what's going to become the Peloponnesian War. But Herodotus I think was writing during the Peloponnesian War. Some people would put them a little bit earlier, but he knows about the Peloponnesian War definitely, and so it's it's hard to know how much hindsight there might have been that he's sort of writing into his account of the
Persian War. But I think it's very plausible that already in the in four eighty four seventy nine, I mean, Athens has already built up it's bi clete, it's already been expanding, it's already sort of been developing its interests, particularly up in the northeaster gene. So I think it's entirely likely that the Spartans already might be thinking, hang on, you just need to be a bit a bit careful about how much power they Athenians could be building up here.
And then when it comes to the actual spark of the wars, the official war begins. I think it's usually dated to four thirty one, which I'll say BCE. Whether you say BCE or BC, I don't really care. I mean you're dating it for the birth of Christ either way, so I don't I'm not sure really you know what purpose we're serving by making a huge distinction on that,
but setting that aside for a moment. So the war officially begins in a way that a lot of major wars begin, right, not intentionally almost, and because of these alliances and the alliance systems that have been built up along this patchwork. I think you said one hundreds, maybe the thousand different city states, And so I was wondering if you could walk us through the start of the war and how the alliance system actually caused it.
Okay, So I guess with the big disclaimer that we're fucidity gives us a version of the causes of the war, which is masterful and compelling and very sort of sophisticated, but probably very idiosyncratic, and we actually it's one of the few places where we can see traces and other sources of other versions of explaining the war which look quite different. So we're talking about the Fucidities version and thucididies.
His sort of master stroke is this distinction between the superficial causes and what he thinks is the true, the underlying cause, that is the real reason, and the real reason, he says, is this steady growth of Athenian power and the fear that this caused in Sparta, and that's his sort of core reason that the war was going to break out. So we're just looking at the sort of the trigger factors, and there for the trigger factors, yeah, he identifies these these sort of almost like sort of
proxy conflicts. One of the important ones that I've already mentioned, or actually two of two of them involve corinth. So the issue is that the Athenians are thought to be
encroaching on the Corinthians Corinthian sphere of influence. So they're meddling with a Corinthian settlements called Potterdaea, which is up in the north of Greece, sort of just south of modern Tesloniki and that's sort of that region, so a long way away from Athens, so the Athenians are a sort of a long way out of there where they should be. And then the other area where the Athenians
are getting involved is Corsirah. That's modern Corfu, so out in the west, another place where which had traditionally being part of the Corinthian sphere of influence. And there's a local squabble happening between Corsirah and another city called Epidamnus, which is on the mainland and what's now Albania, and they one party appeals to Athens for help in settling that. Aliens get involved take advantage of this opportunity to establish
their influence, and that annoise the Corinthians. The Corinthians, as I said, a part of the Spartan lights. So they then go to Sparta and say you've got to put a stop to this. Then there's a dispute about Megara, which is athens near neighbor immediately to the north of Athens, but again it's sort of between Athens and corinth So
this is another thing that annoys annoys the Corinthians. And then the last trigger point that the sides identifies involves Athenian really brutal behavior in the treatment of its near neighbor agener and Ireland, just off off the coast of Athens. So sort of two of those triggers really are to do with the Athenians upsetting Corinth, and then that sort of has implications for the Peloponnesian Alliance led by Sparta.
Two of them maybe less direct impacting the Peloponnesian Alliance, but it's reasonable I think that those states, when they're being attacked or disadvantaged by by Athens, might appeal to other powers to try and help them out. And this is a recurring feature of how politics international politics works in the Greek world that small states ask for help when a big state sort of is making trouble for them, they'll look to another big state to try and help them out.
I mean, it's a hallmark of a lot of conflicts even today. I mean, you can point on unraveling situations in the Middle East that tend to draw in some of the peripheral great powers, even though you know many would argue they don't particularly have a direct interest in what's going on there. And so to me, it's a lot of rinsing and repeating throughout a lot of history. And I think that's one of the interesting things about
the pelop Anesian War. Into the question of why do we need another translation or why do we keep talking about it, it's because, well, it's one of the first times that a war is really studied in great detail by someone who's relatively close to it in ways that we just don't. You know, we know about some of the conflicts that you say, Rameses the Great was involved in in you know, New Kingdom Egypt, but we don't
have exhaustive written details on what exactly happened. And this is the first time that we have something about this. And that's why, you know, when it comes to when we talk about history versus archaeology, well we have written texts, and that's and that call goes a long way to explaining, well, why do we care about this? So the war starts, and then I've always been interested in this point, this,
this first point. The war starts, and almost immediately into the war, Athens gets hit by a plague, right, a debilitating sickness, and the word plague is used. Tell me what kind of you know, disease? We think this was that'd be helpful. And a lot of people die, and one of one of them is of course Pericles, who is the leader. And so I've always wondered of just how devastating was that in when it happened to Athens.
And then I have an interesting counterfactual. But I'm always interested to hear what people think about the impact of that specific event on really the rest of the war, which is going to go on for a long time.
Yeah, it's I mean to cities. Clearly thinks this is extremely important. And the sort of placement of it in his narrative is so striking because we have the sort of this great positive vision of Athens presented in the funeral oration of Pericles, and then we go straight into the plague, which is just it's it's, it's it's awful and compelling, the awful. It's one of the really brilliant bits of of his his his narrative. What disease was it?
Nobody knows. People keep trying to find out, and all sorts of suggestions made, some version of TB some just a really version of something like Spanish blue Foot, but worse, no one's been able to map it onto a disease which currently exists, which in many ways makes sense because
it will have mutated in all sorts of ways. So probably there isn't any exact equivalent Moond equivalents with this disease, but it sounds in the simities gives us this very detailed description of what it's like because he himself caught it and was one of the few people who didn't die, and it sounds awful as a disease. But also I think the really compelling thing about his account is also what he says about the effect it has on society and the way it sort of makes people behave in
terrible in terrible ways. We know that it was serious. I think has been one burial site excavated in Athens which has been I think persuasively identified as a plague pit. You know, just a large number of bodies in one place without any any real any of the normal sort of trappings of a few NONI rituals that we would expect in and it's of about the right date, So it seems persuasive plausible that this this is you know, wasn't making this up, that this was a serious, a
serious thing. As for yeah, yeah, how whether he's making it up the impact that it has on Athens again, probably not. We know that the Athenians start introduce a new healing cult at around this time, and it seems again quite likely that that's connected with the plague. And
this is a response to the plague. And there's various religious rituals that Fucides doesn't put a lot of weight on because he's not a great belief for in the importance of religion a sort of historical explanation for things. But there's probably some sort of religious developments in this period as well that can be explained as an Athenian response to the plague, because the normal way of explaining a plague in this period is that you've done something
to upset the gods. You know, theories of disease exist that people knew certain about and about how infections happened. But normally, if a plague hits your city is because you've done something to annoy Apollo or a similar god, and the way to solve it is to get the gods back on your side.
Kind of the counterfactual that I've always been interested in here is this question of I'm always interested in timing in history, like, there are some events that just seem to come at the worst possible moment, and I would put this in that category.
Question.
I don't even know if we can answer it, but I always wonder if, let's say, if the plague hit three years earlier, like you know, is this a scenario where the Athenians are still willing to go to war, where they're still willing to support their allies. I tend to think no, But if you think I'm wrong, I mean, you tell me. I mean it seems, you know, they at this point in its history, Athens is feeling very good about itself in four point thirty one going into
the war. I'm not sure that they feel the same way. But maybe I'm also just misunderstanding how decisions are made in Athens too.
I think it's a really good and interesting and also impossible question. But yeah, I think it's so hard to tell. Again, because we're so reliant on Thucydides, who, particularly because of the way he portrays Paricles and Paricle's influence over the Athenian people, I think makes the decision to go to war seem relatively uncontroversial in Athens, whereas I suspect and this is the slight hints we get from other sources. It was much more controversial than thro these lets on.
And yeah, it could well be that it wouldn't have taken much to make the Athenians not vote for war. And that I mean the impression that we get from particularly from Aristophanes, who's a comic poet, and then it crops up in some other some later sources as well, is that a lot of the decision on whether or lot to go to war hinged on one of the
sort of superficial causes. So what the Athenians were doing to Megra, and if the Athenians of the Spartans give the Athenians an ultimatum basically stop bullying the Megarians, and the Athenians won't back down. But if they'd been willing to back down, that could have avoided the war could have been avoided. Yeah, and maybe if they if the plague had hit earlier, or if Pericles had been less persuasive, you know, they they might the ms have back down.
Whether that would have meant the war never happened, or just the war didn't happen at that point, whether you just postponed. If these citities is right, this war was inevitable. It had to happen at some point. Then maybe the war would just have broken out five years later.
Well if ucinity is and I'll disagree on that point. I'm not sure there's such a thing as historical inevitability frankly, but I mean it begs a similar question. You know, if the Archduke isn't assassinated in Sarajevo in nineteen fourteen, does World War One not happen or does it just
happen later at that point? And I think, but it's always interesting to think about these questions because then it gets you into it forces you to confront the questions about the conflicts themselves, if you start to think about
the various counterfactuals that are involved here. And one of the things that I asked you about was or do I just misunderstand the Athenian political system, because like I mean, Athens is thrown out you you just see the word democracy next to it, and I'm always interested in that because I would be remiss then if I didn't ask you about my all time my favorite character from the Peloponnesian War and who seems to have been somebody who was quite good at talking to the Athenian Assembly, and
that that gentleman has a name of Alcibiades. Alcibidies, to me seems like one of the most colorful figures of ancient and classical history. Certainly he comes through pretty clearly here. You know, he's this really unique person who at one point is in Athens, then he's at Sparta, then he's in Persia. I mean, he seems to be you know, if if Eucydides is setting this up as this massive dichotomy of ideology, he seems to fly in the face of that because he's able to apparently move between these
different cultures. Do you like Alabi? I mean, nobody likes Alsibodies, But do you find him interesting? Tell us about him about you know, because I find him endlessly fascinating and the role that he plays in the war so interesting.
I mean, he is a fascinating character. Again, he's a fascinating character because he's constructed as a fascinating character by
by Thucydides. I think Thucyddi has also found him really really interesting and and sort of someone who in some way exposes the what Thucydidy saw as problematic aspects of how the Athenian democratic system worked, because what Thucidity saw as a great weakness of the system is that if if a speaker was very persuasive, then a speaker could persuade the Athenians to do anything, even if that was really not in the athenians best best interests and our
sobiety's is the is really the poster boy for that. Pericles is very persuasive, but Thusidies sort of lets him off because Thucididies thinks Pericles is persuading the Athenians to
do sensible things. Al Sebiodes persuades the Athenians to do idiotic things, according to Thucilidies, to invade Sicily, which we could almost take as a decision to start a second war, and he sort of panders to the worst insect instincts of the Athenian so he promises them easy money, riches, glory, and the union democracy according to the Fucidities, so are sort of just persuaded by that and vote to do something which isn't ultimately in their best in their best interests.
So yeah, part of the sort of characterization of azibid Is. Is this very charismatic, persuasive, glamorous figure. Is I think part of the Ciditi's project to show why democracy is a problematic form of government because it gives power to the people, but then also power to individual politicians who might not have the best interests of the people at heart. So our sobiety is set up as a sort of
foil to a politician that decidities. I think admired a lot called Nikias, who's a much more sort of staid, sensible, slightly boring figure who's really who isn't a good orator and gives very good advice, but because he doesn't give it in a persuasive way, he doesn't he hasn't listened to by by the people. So we have these sort of these this flashy, persuasive, damaging politician Alcibieties set against this boring, good, unpersuasive, unsuccessful politicians.
And if you have a chance, I'll certainly pick up the book to read about Alcibieties. But he is a fascinating figure. He his life intersects with Socrates. He he has this tendency to bounce around. He has sort of this I suppose if you know, we we tended to all for a while. I don't know that we actually do any more, but for a while, especially in the United States, we tended to punish politicians for flip flopping.
Alcibid is made out of teflon. When it comes to this, he seems to be able to shift whatever it is that he's doing and really kind of manage to continuously avoid responsibility for his actions, including at one point having an affair with the Spartan king his wife, and so none of these things are particularly like you would look at him and say, well, he's definitely a foil for morality, right, I completely understand what you're saying, and it makes a
lot of sense. And then he has this idiotic decision and I don't think you can really characterize as anything but to invade Sicily. You don't normally open another front
right when you're starting that second war. And then, you know, if we kind of jump forward a little bit to the end of the conflict, right because we're kind of covering all parts of it, sort of like beginning, middle, and end, this really turns into US blog and ultimately, you know, Sparta is going to say emerge victorious kind of an air quote, but they do it with an unlikely ally, right, and so how is Sparta ultimately able to turn the tide?
Yeah, so they get they get Persia on their side, and it's Persian money. So Tidy is in quite early on in the work actually, as part of his obituary of Pericles. So, as you mentioned, dies of the plague, so it dies quite early in the war. Says the two things that meant that the Athenians lost this war in the Spartans. One one was bad political leadership in Athens death Pericles, so it's the Alcibiodi's problem. And the
other one was Persian money. So the Persians, well, they're probably a bit more involved in the early phases of the war than Ticinityes tells us. He very much underreports Persian activity in the first phase of the war, but they're not. They weren't directly involved, certainly. And then in the final phase, the Spartans persuade, ultimately persuade the Persians to start paying for a fleet. Again, this comes back
to something we talked about earlier. The Spartans hadn't really been able to afford a fleet in the first phase of the war, and that had meant that they couldn't properly really really damage the Athenians. When they get this Persian money, then they can start to fund the fleet, and then they can confront the Athenians on more of us level playing field. And that's in the end what
allows the Spartans to win. That they destroy come close to destroying the Athenian fleet, and then they can effectively blockade Athens and the Athenians are starved into submission, so which had sort of been the Spartan strategy from the very beginning that they thought they could try and sort of starve the Athenians out, but they couldn't do it until they had they had a fleet. So yeah, it does. It grinds to a very slow and quite miserable conclusion in the war.
I mean, it's an extremely long and costly conflict. And I put air quotes around the word victorious or one at the end for a Sparta because you do have to look at the end of the war and wonder, well, who really actually won anything out of this. It doesn't seem like either side truly emerged victorious, you know. And for those who are history fans of classical history and for those who aren't, you'll know, well, why couldn't the
Spartans blockade them? Well, Athens had these things called the long walls that protect that essentially protected its access to its main port. So until you choke off the water, you know, it's really hard to be able to starve them into submission. And ultimately, thanks to Persia and Sparta is able to do that and that ends the war. Although all it really ultimately does, at least in my opinion, in the invenient of some is it really just kind of cuts the grass for Philip of Macedon, who's going
to come down and you know, take everybody's rights. Well maybe not. I mean, it doesn't really care about Sparta that much anymore, so, you know, but I think it's it's interesting to think about it as a case study of a conflict that was a avoidable b shouldn't have gone on nearly as long as it did, and see allows you to look at it at the end and say, I'm not sure anybody actually won anything out of this,
certainly not the due principal combatants. But you know, like I said, that's that's why it is relevant today, and that's kind of what it's fun to talk about, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I think I mean you could. I think you could take a slightly shorter term view sort of the outcome of the war that sparsay they build on their victory maybe for five years or so, but it's really remarkable how quickly the Athenians bounce back or how little sort of the spartansor a man able to take advantage
of their victory. I think the other people you could say probably do okay out of this conflict is Persia, because it's the Persian objective probably is just to stop the Greeks causing trouble at the western edge of their empire. And if Sparta Anatins are just sort of squabbling a bit, then that's okay, but they don't want them sort of causing making trouble for them further east sort of into Asia minor western Anatolia. And actually Sparta and nath Is
just wearing each other out. That's quite good news for Persia because it solves that problem for
Them, and something that rings true even today as we think about the benefits of conflict