The Peace of Nicias

It is much easier to start a war than to end one. The former, a single, willful party can ordinarily accomplish with ease; to achieve the latter, it usually takes two. Often, it takes more parties than that. Such was the experience of those who found themselves engaged in what is conventionally called the Archidamian War – the first stage in what Thucydides termed “the great war” that took place “between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians” (Thuc. 1.1). The Archidamian War began in the spring of 431 B.C. It ended, if that is the proper word, ten years thereafter in the spring of 421 B.C., when ambassadors from Athens and Sparta met to swear an oath on behalf of their rival cities that for fifty years they would honor the terms of what came to be called the Peace of Nicias (5.17-20). The fact that the Athenians and the Spartans set a term to the agreement, that they regarded it as a long-term truce and never even imagined that it would be a lasting peace, should occasion on our part a brief digression. Peace making in antiquity was not the pious process that it pretends to be today. With regard to war and peace, the ancient Greeks entertained few of the illusions that govern twenty-first–century rhetoric and shape policy making as well.

Political science · Classical Antiquity Studies · Geology

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