Notes · Ancient HistoryUK · A-Levels

Greek Period Study: Relations between Greek and non-Greek states, 492-404 BC

The compulsory Greek Period Study covers the ninety years in which the Greek city-states faced the Persian Empire, won an improbable victory, and then turned the alliance built for defence into an Athenian empire that provoked the greatest war the Greek world had yet fought. This chapter follows the sequence from the Ionian Revolt and Marathon, through Xerxes' invasion and the foundation of the Delian League, to the growth of Athenian power, Thucydides' analysis of why war came in 431, and the long conflict that ended with the fall of Athens in 404 - always with attention to what Herodotus and Thucydides can and cannot establish.

6 sections~34 min reading time3 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 2

T·0222 / 9

Exam profile

AO1 · Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of Greek and non-Greek relations, 492-404 BCAO2 · Analyse and evaluate the causes, course and consequences of the Persian and Peloponnesian WarsAO3 · Use and evaluate Herodotus, Thucydides and material evidence within their historical context

Operators:assesshow farto what extentexplainanalyseevaluateaccount for

basic level

AS-Level expects secure narrative knowledge of the Persian Wars and the growth of Athenian power, with straightforward comment on Herodotus and Thucydides.

higher level

The full A-Level expects sustained analysis of causation across the period - why Persia failed, how a defensive league became an empire, and how far Thucydides' explanation of the Peloponnesian War stands - supported by evaluated source material.

Depth

Text

Contents · 6 sections

Greek Period Study: Relations between Greek and non-Greek states, 492-404 BC

Persia, the Greeks and the Ionian Revolt#

FoundationOCR H407 Component 1 Period Study - the origins of Greek and Persian conflictDfE GCE Ancient History subject content

From the Ionian Revolt to invasion

Fig. 1The chain of decision and consequence that turned a local revolt in Ionia into a Persian campaign against mainland Greece.

By the late sixth century BC the Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great and extended by Cambyses and Darius I, was the largest state the Near East had known, running from the Aegean coast to the Indus. It absorbed the Greek cities of Ionia on the western coast of Asia Minor after the fall of the Lydian kingdom of Croesus, and governed them as it governed everywhere: through satraps, tribute and, in the Greek cities, local rulers - tyrants - who owed their position to Persian support. Persian rule was not uniformly oppressive by ancient standards, but it removed the political independence that Greek cities regarded as the mark of a free community, and it made Greek affairs a Persian concern.

It is worth pausing on how we know any of this, because the whole period study depends on it. Herodotus is our narrative, and he is a Greek writing in the middle of the fifth century about events beginning two generations earlier, drawing on oral tradition, on informants in many cities, and on his own travels. He is genuinely interested in Persia and preserves a great deal about Persian institutions and outlook that no Greek partisan would have bothered to record. But his framework is Greek: he explains the conflict through a pattern of expansion, retribution and the fall of the over-mighty, and the traditions he received from Greek families were rarely disinterested. Reading him well means using his detail while remaining aware of his shape.

The Ionian Revolt of 499-494 BC set the two worlds against each other. According to Herodotus, it was launched by Aristagoras, the ruler of Miletus, after a failed expedition against Naxos left him exposed - a personal and political calculation rather than a national uprising. Aristagoras sought help in mainland Greece: Sparta refused, unwilling to campaign so far inland, while Athens sent twenty ships and Eretria five. The allied force marched inland and burnt Sardis, the seat of the Persian satrap, in 498. The revolt then unravelled: Athens withdrew, the Persians reconquered the coast city by city, the Ionian fleet was defeated at Lade in 494, and Miletus was sacked.

The consequences were out of proportion to the revolt's military scale. Persia now had a specific grievance against Athens and Eretria and a strategic interest in controlling the Aegean approaches to its Ionian possessions. Herodotus makes the burning of Sardis the moment that turned Persian attention westwards, and though he dramatises it - his story of Darius ordering a servant to repeat 'remember the Athenians' at every meal is exactly the kind of moralising anecdote that should be handled as tradition rather than fact - the strategic logic is real enough. A first expedition under Mardonius in 492 secured Thrace and Macedon before its fleet was wrecked off Mount Athos; a second, in 490, was aimed directly at Eretria and Athens.

Two analytical points should shape how you write about the origins. First, the conflict was not inevitable: Persia had absorbed Greek cities without difficulty for decades, and mainland Greece was of limited value in itself. What made confrontation likely was the combination of Persian expansion along its own logic of frontier security, the political fragmentation of the Greek world that offered both allies and pretexts, and specific decisions - Aristagoras' revolt, the Athenian expedition, the burning of Sardis. Second, the Greek sources present the wars as a contest between freedom and slavery, and that framing was itself a product of the wars; it should be analysed as an interpretation rather than adopted as a description.

Worked example

Assessing Herodotus on the causes of the revolt

How far can Herodotus establish why the Ionian Revolt broke out?

State what he claims
Herodotus attributes the outbreak to Aristagoras' personal difficulties after the failure at Naxos, and to his need to escape the consequences - an explanation rooted in individual calculation rather than in Ionian grievance at large.
Assess his access
He was writing perhaps two generations later, in a Greek world that had every reason to remember the revolt as a struggle for freedom. His information came from local traditions in Ionia and mainland Greece, where families and cities had reputations to protect - including Athens, whose brief involvement ended in withdrawal.
Test the explanation
The personal explanation is plausible and unflattering to a Greek leader, which makes it unlikely to be Greek self-glorification; but a revolt that spread across many cities and lasted five years cannot be explained by one man's difficulties alone, and Herodotus himself supplies material on tribute and on resentment of Persian-backed tyrants that points to wider causes.
Judge the value
Conclude that Herodotus is of high value for the trigger and the course of the revolt, and needs supplementing by his own scattered evidence of structural grievance for the deeper causes - the classic case of using a source against the grain of its own emphasis.

Result: A judgement that accepts Herodotus' trigger, uses his incidental material for structural causes, and separates what he establishes from what he asserts.

Typical mistakes

Presenting the Ionian Revolt as a united national rising rather than a revolt begun for local and personal reasons.
Repeating Herodotus' moralising anecdotes, such as Darius and 'remember the Athenians', as established fact rather than tradition.

Active revision

Write a paragraph explaining why the burning of Sardis mattered more to Persian policy than the military scale of the revolt would suggest.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

The Persian Wars, 490-479 BC#

StandardOCR H407 Component 1 Period Study - Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and PlataeaDfE GCE Ancient History subject content

Chronology, 492-404 BC

Fig. 2The spine of the period study: two wars against Persia, the growth of Athenian power in between, and the war that destroyed it.

In 490 BC a Persian force under Datis and Artaphernes crossed the Aegean, took Eretria, and landed at Marathon in Attica. The Athenians, joined by a contingent from Plataea and commanded by generals including Miltiades, engaged and defeated them; Herodotus reports 192 Athenian dead against a far larger Persian loss, a disparity that should be treated as his figure rather than as a verified count. The Spartans, according to Herodotus, arrived after the battle, delayed by a religious festival. Marathon mattered less for the numbers involved than for its political consequences: it proved that hoplites could beat a Persian army, and it gave Athens a founding victory that shaped its self-image for a century.

The invasion of 480-479 was on an altogether different scale. Xerxes assembled a combined land and sea force, bridged the Hellespont and cut a canal through the Athos peninsula - engineering that Herodotus describes at length and that expressed the empire's capacity as much as its ambition. Herodotus' figures for the size of the army run into millions and are certainly impossible; the important analytical point is that the invasion was large enough to require a fleet to supply it, which tied the army's fate to control of the sea. In response, thirty-one or so Greek states swore an alliance in 481, the Hellenic League, and accepted Spartan command on land and at sea.

The campaign of 480 turned on three encounters. At Thermopylae the Greek force under the Spartan king Leonidas held the narrow pass for several days until a local guide - Herodotus names Ephialtes - showed the Persians a mountain path; Leonidas dismissed most of the allies and died with the Spartans and Thespians in a defence that became the defining Greek story of the war. Simultaneously the fleet fought at Artemisium without decisive result. With the pass lost, Attica was abandoned and Athens burnt; the Athenians had already evacuated to Salamis, Aegina and Troezen. At Salamis, in the narrow straits, the Greek fleet - Athenian ships making up the largest contingent, in a strategy Herodotus credits to Themistocles - destroyed the Persian advantage in numbers and won a decisive victory.

Xerxes withdrew with part of the army, leaving Mardonius to campaign in 479. The land war was settled at Plataea, where the allied army under the Spartan regent Pausanias defeated the Persian force and Mardonius was killed; a Greek naval victory at Mycale on the Asian coast followed. The pattern of Greek success is instructive. Terrain neutralised Persian numbers at Thermopylae and Salamis; the hoplite phalanx in close order proved superior at Plataea; the length of Persian supply lines made a long campaign costly; and, for once, a substantial number of Greek states cooperated. Nothing about the outcome was preordained, and several states - Thebes most notably - fought on the Persian side.

For the period study, the wars matter above all for what they left behind. They created an alliance habit and a shared story of Greeks against barbarians that could be invoked long afterwards, they made Athens a naval power with a fleet built under Themistocles from the silver of Laurium, and they left the Aegean islands and Ionian cities looking for protection. The prestige of victory attached to Sparta on land and to Athens at sea, and the two claims were not easily reconciled. The next generation's politics grew directly out of the question of who would lead the continuing war against Persia - and on what terms.

Why the Greeks won

Fig. 3Greek victory rested on several factors together - none of them individually decisive, and none of them making the outcome inevitable.

Worked example

Planning a causation essay on Greek victory

Plan an answer to: 'How far was Greek victory in the Persian Wars due to Athenian sea power?'

Set the criterion
Decide what would make sea power the decisive factor: that without the fleet the invasion would have succeeded, and that no other factor was equally necessary. This turns the question into a testable comparison rather than a list.
Argue the case for sea power
Salamis broke the Persian fleet in narrow water where numbers could not tell; the loss of naval superiority made supplying and reinforcing a large army in Greece far harder, and Xerxes withdrew with part of his force. The Athenian fleet, financed from the Laurium silver, supplied the largest contingent.
Weigh the alternatives
Set against this: Plataea in 479 was a land battle won by the hoplite phalanx under Spartan command, and the war was not over until it was fought; terrain shaped both Thermopylae and Salamis; and the alliance of 481 made concerted resistance possible at all.
Evaluate the evidence
Note that our account is Herodotus', that it gives Themistocles a decisive and dramatic role at Salamis, and that Athenian tradition had a strong interest in that emphasis - a reason to argue the case for sea power on the strategic logic rather than on the anecdotes.
Reach the judgement
Conclude with a graded answer: sea power was necessary but not sufficient - it prevented Persian success in 480 and made the position untenable, while the land victory of 479 was required to end the invasion.

Result: A plan that sets a criterion, argues one factor against the others, evaluates the source basis, and delivers a graded judgement rather than a list.

Typical mistakes

Repeating Herodotus' multi-million Persian army as fact instead of noting that such figures are impossible and rhetorical.
Writing about 'the Greeks' as a united nation when many states medised or stayed neutral.

Active revision

Assess how far the Greek victories of 480-479 BC can be explained by terrain rather than by leadership.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)) · GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient history (Department for Education)

The Delian League and the rise of Athens#

StandardOCR H407 Component 1 Period Study - the Delian League and Athenian powerDfE GCE Ancient History subject content

From alliance to empire

Fig. 4The mechanisms by which a voluntary alliance became an empire: Athenian command, cash contributions instead of ships, and the forcible prevention of secession.

The Delian League was founded in 478 BC to continue the war against Persia, to liberate the Greeks still under Persian rule and, in Thucydides' account, to take revenge by ravaging Persian territory. Its formation followed the failure of Spartan leadership at sea: the conduct of the Spartan commander Pausanias alienated the Ionian and island allies, who turned to Athens. Sparta, with a land-based system and helots to control at home, was content to withdraw from the Aegean. Members either supplied ships or paid a money contribution, the phoros, assessed - according to the tradition - by the Athenian Aristides; the treasury was placed on the sacred island of Delos, and league meetings were held there.

From the outset the structure favoured Athens. Athens supplied the commanders, the largest fleet and the administrative machinery; allies who paid rather than served lost the naval experience that would have made independence possible. Success in the war confirmed the pattern: campaigns under Cimon cleared the Aegean, took Eion, and won a substantial victory over Persian forces at the Eurymedon in the 460s. Each success made membership more valuable and secession more dangerous, and Athens had both the fleet and the motive to prevent departures.

The transformation from alliance to empire can be traced through the treatment of members who tried to leave. Naxos revolted and was besieged and subjected; Thasos, in dispute with Athens over mainland resources, was reduced after a long siege and lost its walls, fleet and mainland possessions. Thucydides comments on this pattern directly, observing that the allies had themselves to blame, since most preferred paying money to serving in person and so found themselves without the means to resist. By the middle of the century, contributions were assessed and collected by Athens, disputes involving allies were increasingly heard in Athenian courts, and Athenian officials, garrisons and settlements of Athenian citizens - cleruchies - appeared in allied territory.

The move of the league treasury from Delos to Athens, dated to 454 BC, is the symbolic turning point; from that year Athenian records list a portion of the tribute set aside for the goddess Athena, and those inscribed lists are among our best documentary evidence for the empire's scale and membership. Whether a formal peace with Persia was concluded around 449 - the so-called Peace of Callias - is disputed in modern scholarship, since the evidence is late and contested; what is not disputed is that the league continued and the tribute went on being collected after major fighting against Persia ceased. That is the essential point: the alliance outlived its stated purpose.

Assessing the empire requires holding two things together. Athenian rule brought suppression of piracy, a common currency and weights in some periods, protection, and in some cities the support of democratic factions against local oligarchs - which is why Athenian power had genuine friends. It also brought tribute, the loss of independence in foreign policy and justice, the risk of savage punishment for revolt, and settlements of Athenian citizens on confiscated land. Our sources reflect the tension: Thucydides has Athenians themselves describe their rule as a tyranny that it had become dangerous to let go, while the inscribed decrees show an administration of assessment, oath and audit. Both are evidence, and a strong answer uses both.

Worked example

Weighing literary and documentary evidence on the empire

How valuable are the Athenian tribute records for an enquiry into the nature of Athenian rule, compared with Thucydides?

Establish what each is
The tribute records are inscribed on stone at Athens and list the portion of allied contributions dedicated to Athena; Thucydides is a narrative by an Athenian participant written within a generation of the events described.
State what the inscriptions establish
They are contemporary, official and administrative: they show which communities paid, roughly how much, and how the system was managed and revised over time. Because they were cut for accounting and religious purposes rather than to persuade, they are unusually free of rhetorical shaping.
State their limits
They are silent on how the tribute was regarded, on how it was enforced, and on what members thought of Athenian rule; they survive incompletely, and restoring damaged text is itself interpretation. They document a system without explaining it.
Set Thucydides against them
Thucydides supplies exactly what the stones cannot - motive, argument and the language in which Athenians and their subjects discussed power - but he is selective, shapes speeches to expose the logic of the situation, and writes with a strong interpretative purpose.
Judge together
Conclude that the two are complementary rather than rival: the inscriptions establish the machinery and scale of the empire, Thucydides the politics and perception of it, and an argument that uses both is stronger than one resting on either.

Result: A judgement that assigns each type of evidence to the part of the enquiry it can answer, and integrates rather than ranks them.

Typical mistakes

Dating the empire to a single act rather than tracing a cumulative process across three decades.
Asserting the Peace of Callias as established fact when its existence is disputed on late and contested evidence.

Active revision

How far was the transformation of the Delian League into an Athenian empire the result of decisions taken by the allies themselves? Plan the two sides of the argument.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

Athenian power, Sparta and the road to war#

StandardOCR H407 Component 1 Period Study - Athenian expansion and the Thirty Years' PeaceDfE GCE Ancient History subject content

Two alliances compared

Fig. 5The two leagues differed in almost every structural respect - which is why the war between them became a contest between incompatible kinds of power.

The two leading powers of the Greek world were organised on opposite principles, and the contrast shaped everything that followed. Athens was a naval and democratic power whose strength lay in ships, silver, trade and an empire of tribute-paying maritime states; it could project force anywhere in the Aegean but was vulnerable to a land invasion of Attica. Sparta was a land power at the head of the Peloponnesian League, an alliance of autonomous states - Corinth, Thebes at times, and others - that supplied troops and met in congress; it could not easily campaign far or long, both because its allies had their own interests and because the helot population at home required constant watching.

Relations deteriorated in stages after the Persian Wars. Athens rebuilt its walls despite Spartan objections; an Athenian force sent to help Sparta suppress a helot revolt after a severe earthquake in the 460s was dismissed, an insult that pushed Athens towards Sparta's enemies. There followed the conflicts historians call the First Peloponnesian War, roughly 460-446/5, in which Athens fought Corinth and Aegina, gained and then lost control of Boeotia, and committed a large force to a disastrous campaign in Egypt. The fighting was ended by the Thirty Years' Peace of 446/5, which recognised two spheres and required each side to leave the other's allies alone.

The peace held for less than half its term, and the crises that broke it are well documented by Thucydides. Corcyra, a substantial naval power, quarrelled with its mother-city Corinth over Epidamnus and sought Athenian alliance; Athens agreed to a defensive alliance and its ships became involved in fighting against Corinth. Potidaea, a tributary of Athens but a Corinthian foundation, was ordered to pull down walls and dismiss Corinthian magistrates, and revolted. Athens excluded Megara, a Spartan ally, from the harbours of the empire and the market of Attica - the Megarian Decree, whose economic effect is debated but whose provocation was clear. Sparta's allies, Corinth above all, pressed for war.

Thucydides records the debates at Sparta in which the Corinthians accused the Spartans of slowness, the Athenians present warned of their own strength, and the Spartan king Archidamus counselled delay while the ephor Sthenelaidas carried the assembly for war. The Spartans voted that the treaty had been broken. These speeches are Thucydides' compositions - his own statement of method makes clear that he wrote what the situation required to be said - and they should be used as analysis of the positions rather than as transcripts. Even so, they reveal the structure of the crisis: allies dragging a hegemon into war, a naval power confident in its resources, and a land power fearful of a rival it could not check.

Two evaluative points are worth carrying into the essay. First, both alliances were coalitions, and the interests of Corinth and Corcyra were as important as those of Athens and Sparta; explanations that focus only on the two great powers miss how the crises actually arose. Second, the distinction between the immediate disputes and the underlying condition is the heart of the analysis, and it is Thucydides who supplies it. His formulation - that the truest cause, least openly stated, was the growth of Athenian power and the fear it caused in Sparta - is the framework in which the question is still discussed, but it is an interpretation, and a strong answer will test it against the evidence of the particular quarrels rather than simply repeating it.

Worked example

Testing Thucydides' 'truest cause'

How far should Thucydides' explanation - the growth of Athenian power and the fear it caused in Sparta - be accepted as the cause of the Peloponnesian War?

State the claim precisely
Thucydides distinguishes the openly stated grievances from what he calls the truest cause, least openly avowed: Athenian growth and Spartan fear. This is a structural explanation that subordinates the particular disputes to a long-term shift in the balance of power.
Argue for it
The explanation accounts for why the disputes could not be settled: each concession would have confirmed Athenian dominance. It fits the pattern of Athenian expansion since 478, the failure of the Thirty Years' Peace to hold, and the Spartan vote that the treaty had been broken despite Archidamus' warnings about Athenian resources.
Test it against the immediate crises
The evidence of the crises complicates it: Corcyra and Potidaea arose from Corinthian interests, and Sparta was pushed hard by allies who had their own reasons for war. Thucydides' own narrative supplies this material, which suggests that alliance politics, not only bipolar rivalry, drove the outbreak.
Evaluate the source position
Note that Thucydides was writing to explain the war's whole course and had an interest in a unifying explanation; the distinction between stated grievances and true cause is a powerful analytical device, but it is his device, and the evidence he supplies can be read to support a more contingent account.
Judge
Conclude that the structural explanation is necessary but not sufficient: Athenian growth made a settlement unstable, while the specific crises and the pressure of Sparta's allies determined that war came in 431 rather than at some other time.

Result: A judgement that accepts the framework as a condition of conflict while using Thucydides' own narrative to restore the contingency his formulation understates.

Typical mistakes

Explaining the road to war purely as Athenian aggression or purely as Spartan fear, ignoring the role of Corinth and Corcyra.
Treating the Thirty Years' Peace as a failure of intention rather than a settlement that could not accommodate continued Athenian growth.

Active revision

Explain how the Corcyra and Potidaea affairs each brought Athens into conflict with a Spartan ally, and why that mattered for the outbreak of war.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)) · GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient history (Department for Education)

The causes of the Peloponnesian War#

AdvancedOCR H407 Component 1 Period Study - the causes of the Peloponnesian WarDfE GCE Ancient History subject content

Causes of the Peloponnesian War

Fig. 6Separating structural conditions, medium-term developments and immediate triggers keeps a causation answer analytical rather than narrative.

A rigorous account of causation separates three levels. Long-term conditions are the structural features that made conflict possible: two incompatible power systems, an empire that could not stop growing without weakening, an alliance system that transmitted local quarrels upwards, and the memory of earlier fighting ended by a treaty rather than a settlement. Medium-term developments are the changes that made war likely: continued Athenian expansion after 446/5, the hardening of Corinthian hostility, and the demonstration that the Thirty Years' Peace could not cover disputes involving neutrals. Immediate triggers are the specific crises of 435-432 that turned likelihood into decision.

The Corcyra affair shows the mechanism working. A quarrel between Corcyra and Corinth over the colony of Epidamnus escalated into a naval war; Corcyra, unallied and possessing a substantial fleet, appealed to Athens, arguing that its ships would otherwise fall to Corinth. Athens made a defensive alliance - a legally defensible move under the treaty, since Corcyra was neutral - and its squadron became engaged against Corinthian ships. The decision was rational in terms of naval power but it converted an argument between two other states into a direct Athenian-Corinthian confrontation. Causation here is not aggression but the logic of a system in which any refusal also carried a cost.

Potidaea and Megara followed the same pattern. Potidaea was a member of the Athenian empire that retained ties to Corinth, its mother-city; Athenian demands intended to secure the empire produced revolt and a Corinthian intervention. The Megarian Decree barred Megara from the ports of the empire and the Attic market; whether it was economically crippling is debated, but it was a public exercise of imperial power against a Spartan ally, and Thucydides reports that Sparta made its repeal a condition for peace. Each episode was defensible from Athens' point of view and intolerable from Corinth's - which is exactly why the crisis could not be defused.

The decision for war was Sparta's, and its politics matter. Thucydides shows Corinth pressing hard, threatening in effect to look elsewhere for support; he gives Archidamus a speech warning that Athens could not be beaten quickly because its power rested on ships and money rather than on land; and he shows the assembly voting for war on a simpler argument. Two Spartan considerations lie underneath: the fear that further delay would make Athens unassailable, and the need to keep an alliance together whose members could not be ignored. Sparta went to war less as an aggressor than as a hegemon unable to hold its coalition without acting.

In writing about causes, three disciplines will raise the answer. First, attribute the interpretative framework - the distinction between grievances and truest cause is Thucydides', and saying so shows control of the evidence. Second, resist the temptation to make one factor do all the work: Athenian growth without the Corinthian quarrels would not have produced war in 431, and the quarrels without the structural rivalry would have been settled. Third, be explicit about what the sources cannot tell us. We have no Spartan or Corinthian account, no record of the debates beyond Thucydides' reconstruction, and no way of testing what Spartan opinion actually was - and an answer that acknowledges this argues from a stronger position than one that does not.

How the crises produced a Spartan decision

Fig. 7Three separate crises converged on one decision: Sparta's vote that the treaty had been broken.

Worked example

Ranking causes with a criterion

Assess the relative importance of the Megarian Decree among the causes of the Peloponnesian War.

Define importance
Set a criterion: a cause is more important if removing it would have prevented or substantially delayed the war. This makes ranking an argument rather than an impression.
Argue for the decree
Thucydides reports that Sparta made its repeal a condition of peace, which suggests contemporaries treated it as central; it was a visible, deliberate use of imperial power against a Spartan ally, and it gave Sparta's war party a concrete grievance.
Argue against
The decree came after Corcyra and Potidaea had already brought Athens and Corinth into armed conflict; its economic impact is disputed; and repealing it would not have addressed the underlying dispute over Athenian expansion. On the criterion set, its removal would probably have delayed rather than prevented war.
Relate it to the structure
Place it accurately: the decree was a trigger and a diplomatic instrument rather than a root cause, and its prominence in the negotiations reflects its usefulness as a demand that could be publicly made and refused.
Judge
Conclude that the decree was significant as the sharpest immediate grievance and as a test of Athenian willingness to concede, but subordinate in importance to the Corcyra and Potidaea crises and to the structural rivalry they exposed.

Result: A ranked judgement grounded in an explicit criterion, distinguishing a trigger's diplomatic prominence from its causal weight.

Typical mistakes

Reducing the outbreak to a single cause, whether Athenian imperialism or Spartan fear.
Forgetting that we have no Spartan or Corinthian narrative, and writing as though Thucydides' account of their debates were documentary.

Active revision

Write an introduction and a conclusion for the question 'To what extent was Corinth responsible for the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War?', making sure the conclusion answers rather than summarises.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA))

The Peloponnesian War and the fall of Athens#

AdvancedOCR H407 Component 1 Period Study - the course of the Peloponnesian War to 404 BCDfE GCE Ancient History subject content

The three phases of the war

Fig. 8Three phases, each ended by a decisive event - the Peace of Nicias, the Sicilian disaster, and Aegospotami.

The war divides into three phases, and holding the shape in mind makes the detail manageable. The Archidamian War, 431-421, saw annual Spartan invasions of Attica met by Pericles' strategy of refusing battle on land, sheltering the population behind the walls and using the fleet to raid the Peloponnese. The strategy was coherent but exposed Athens to a catastrophe nobody had planned for: a plague that struck the crowded city from 430 and killed a large part of the population, Pericles among them in 429. The war then swung: Athens took Spartan hoplites prisoner at Pylos and Sphacteria in 425, a shock that made Sparta seek terms, while the Spartan commander Brasidas campaigned in the north and took Amphipolis. Both Brasidas and the Athenian Cleon died at Amphipolis in 422, and the Peace of Nicias followed in 421.

The peace was never secure and the second phase, from 421, was a period of manoeuvre in which neither side fully disengaged. Athens grew confident enough to attack Melos in 416, killing the men and enslaving the rest - an episode Thucydides presents through a dialogue in which Athenian envoys argue that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. In 415 Athens launched the Sicilian Expedition against Syracuse, on a scale that committed enormous resources far from home. Alcibiades, one of its commanders, was recalled on a charge of religious sacrilege and defected to Sparta; the expedition, left under the cautious Nicias and reinforced rather than withdrawn, ended in 413 with the destruction of the fleet and army.

The final phase, the Ionian or Decelean War, was fought largely in the Aegean and turned on two things Athens could not control. Sparta, on Alcibiades' advice, fortified Decelea in Attica permanently, denying Athens its countryside year-round; and Persia re-entered Greek politics, funding a Spartan fleet through the satraps and later through Cyrus the Younger. Money now decided a naval war. Athens lost and rebuilt fleets, suffered an oligarchic coup at home in 411 when the regime of the Four Hundred briefly replaced the democracy, and won a striking victory at Arginusae in 406 that was followed by the trial and execution of its own generals for failing to rescue the shipwrecked. In 405 the Spartan commander Lysander destroyed the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami; blockaded and starving, Athens surrendered in 404, gave up its walls, its fleet and its empire, and received the narrow oligarchy known as the Thirty.

Explaining the defeat requires weighing several factors. Athenian strategic errors matter - above all the scale and persistence of the Sicilian commitment - as does the instability of Athenian politics after Pericles, though the picture of demagogic decline comes largely from writers hostile to the radical democracy. Spartan adaptation matters more than is often allowed: Sparta learned to fight at sea, produced commanders like Brasidas and Lysander who could operate independently, and above all secured Persian money. And the structural point stands: an empire funded by tribute could not survive the loss of naval control, so every fleet destroyed was harder to replace than the last.

The consequences reach beyond Athens. Persia recovered influence over the Ionian cities that the Delian League had been founded to liberate - an outcome that should be stated plainly, since it shows how far the war undid the achievement of 479. Sparta emerged as the leading power but proved unable to manage a hegemony, and the Greek world entered decades of shifting conflict. For the period study as a whole, the ninety years form a single arc: the states that combined against Persia in 481 built from that cooperation an empire, fought each other over it for a generation, and ended by drawing Persian power back into the Aegean.

Why Athens lost

Fig. 9Athenian defeat was over-determined: strategic error, Spartan adaptation and Persian money each removed a support that the empire could not do without.

Worked example

Evaluating Thucydides on the Melian Dialogue

What is the value of the Melian Dialogue as evidence for Athenian imperial attitudes in 416 BC?

Establish what it is
The dialogue is Thucydides' extended dramatisation of negotiations between Athenian envoys and the Melian leadership before the island was attacked. It is not a record of words spoken in a private negotiation, and Thucydides could not have had one.
Ask what it was for
It sits at a deliberate place in his narrative, immediately before the Sicilian Expedition, and states in its starkest form the argument that justice applies only between equals. It functions as analysis of imperial reasoning at the point of maximum Athenian confidence.
State what it cannot establish
It cannot establish what any individual Athenian said or believed, and it should never be cited as proof that Athenian envoys used those words. Nor is it evidence of official policy, since it is a composition.
State what it can establish
It is powerful evidence that a contemporary Athenian of Thucydides' standing understood the logic of his city's empire in these terms, and that such reasoning was intelligible to his readers - which tells us a great deal about the political culture. The fate of Melos itself, reported as fact, corroborates the harshness the dialogue expresses.
Judge
Conclude that the dialogue is of high value as evidence for how imperial power was conceptualised and justified, and of no value as a transcript - a distinction that turns the passage from a quotation into an argument.

Result: An evaluation that separates the composed form from the historical substance, and locates the passage's value precisely.

Typical mistakes

Adopting uncritically the hostile picture of post-Periclean 'demagogues' drawn from writers unsympathetic to the radical democracy.
Omitting Persia from the second half of the war, when Persian subsidy was decisive for the Spartan fleet.

Active revision

How far was the Sicilian Expedition the turning point of the Peloponnesian War? Draft the paragraph that argues the case against, using the Ionian War and Persian funding.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification (OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)) · GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient history (Department for Education)

References & sources

Sources

OCR (Oxford Cambridge and RSA)

OCR AS and A Level Ancient History (H007, H407) specification

Department for Education

GCE AS and A level subject content for ancient history

Greek Period Study: Relations between Greek and non-Greek states, 492-404 BC

6 sections~34 min reading time3 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 3 · Advanced 2

Greek Period Study: Relations between Greek and non-Greek states, 492-404 BC

Key points

Assessing Herodotus on the causes of the revolt

Key points

Planning a causation essay on Greek victory

Key points

Weighing literary and documentary evidence on the empire

Key points

Testing Thucydides' 'truest cause'

Key points

Ranking causes with a criterion

Key points

Evaluating Thucydides on the Melian Dialogue

Sources

Greek Period Study: Relations between Greek and non-Greek states, 492-404 BC

Key points

Assessing Herodotus on the causes of the revolt

Key points

Planning a causation essay on Greek victory

Key points

Weighing literary and documentary evidence on the empire

Key points

Testing Thucydides' 'truest cause'

Key points

Ranking causes with a criterion

Key points

Evaluating Thucydides on the Melian Dialogue

Sources