The reaction of the Athenians to the Sicilian defeat was to look for scapegoats. Spartan forces now occupied Attica and over the next few years more than twenty thousand slaves defected to the enemy ...

Thucydides says that fear sparked the Peloponnesian War. Fear was behind Sparta’s attack on Athens. In the 50 years or so after the Persian wars, 479-431 BCE, Sparta watched the rise of Athenian power ...

A rebel tyrant arrives in Sparta with a map of the world, asking for help against an empire that already spans continents. This chapter follows the Ionian Revolt, the fall of Miletus, and the shock of ...

The history of classical Greece is largely defined by divisions, both within and between city-states. Revolutions and coups, shifts in alliances and alignments, and nearly continuous balance-of-power ...

What strikes one first about 300, a Zack Snyder 2006 American film, is that it is a big display of machismo. All of the characters in the entourage of Leonidas, the Spartan king, are chiselled, ...