The Athenian patrician Thucydides began writing the history of his city’s conflict with Sparta even as the war was beginning.

The Peloponnesian War shows how fear, ambition, and mistrust can escalate into full-scale conflict. Thucydides’ trap helps us ...

Pericles himself shortly succumbed to the plague. Within thirty years, Athens was defeated by her arch-rival, the quintessentially undemocratic Sparta–a nation-state marked by a cult of militarism and ...

Athens and Sparta represented for classical thinkers distinct and opposing regimes. Democratic Athens took pride in its freedom, openness, and accomplishments in the arts and philosophy. Oligarchic ...

Fierce? Yes. Tough? You bet. But the true history of the Greek civilization had a lot more nuance Myke Cole Co-author, The Killing Ground: A Biography of Thermopylae Ancient Sparta has been held up ...

On Sparta’s Second Attic War, by Paul A. Rahe. Sparta’s check of imperial Athens in the inconclusive so-called First Peloponnesian War (460–445 B.C.) foreshadowed a remarkable subsequent ...

Inside China’s Rare Earth Empire: The Hidden Costs in Myanmar Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) holds crucial lessons about the nature of great power war, beyond the ...

For nearly 2,500 years, the Athenian general and historian Thucydides has been a popular source of strategic wisdom in the West. Lately, his name has popped up in Asia, too, especially in reference to ...

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Saul Bellow, in his “To Jerusalem and Back,” wrote approvingly of how Israel was so special a place because it sought simultaneously to be both Sparta and Athens — and largely succeeded at both. That ...