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The Peloponnesian War was fought in the Eastern Mediterranean between the Athenian-led Delian League and the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League from 431 to 404 BC for hegemony over Ancient Greece. Initially inconclusive, the intervention of the Persian Empire in support of Sparta in 413 BC allowed the Spartan coalition to decisively defeat Athens, beginning a period of Spartan hegemony over Greece.
The war consists of four related conflicts which have traditionally been combined into one. The opening phase, called the Ten Years' War or the Archidamian War, began in 431 BC when the Spartan king Archidamus II invaded Attica with his army. After successive Spartan invasions of Attica and Athenian raiding of the Peloponnese, Athens gained the upper hand at Sphacteria in 425 BC, but suffered a major defeat by Thebes at Delium in 424 BC. Both sides also faced rebellions within their respective alliances. With both city-states exhausted from years of fighting, the Peace of Nicias was signed in 421 BC. The second phase, the Argive War (419–416 BC), was a proxy war between Sparta and its Peloponnesian rivals, led by Argos and supported by Athens. The Argive alliance was defeated at Mantinea in 418 BC, restoring Spartan control over the Peloponnese. The third phase, the Sicilian Expedition, saw Athens attempt to conquer the Spartan-allied Syracuse. Fought between 415 and 413 BC, the expedition ended in defeat for Athens and the destruction of most of its navy.
After the expedition's failure, Sparta, now allied to the Persian Empire, broke the peace in 413 BC and began the final phase of the war, called the Decelean War or Ionian War. While Persia captured the Athenian cities in Asia Minor; Sparta, led by Lysander, built a Persian-financed fleet to break Athens's naval superiority. Sparta won the decisive battle of Aegospotami in 405 BC, which broke the power of the Delian League. Athens fell the following year and the Delian League was dissolved, ending the war. The Delian League's democracies were replaced with Spartan-style oligarchies, most notably the Thirty Tyrants in Athens. Spartan hegemony was short-lived after the victory. A decade later Athens regained its independence in the Corinthian War, and Sparta's power continued to fall in the years to come.
The war changed the ancient Greek world. Athens lost its Aegean empire and its maritime dominance, while Sparta became established as the leading power of Greece. The destruction of whole cities and large swathes of countryside made poverty widespread in the Peloponnese, while Athens was economically devastated and never regained its pre-war prosperity. The war also wrought subtler changes to Greek society. While Ancient Greek warfare had once been limited and formalised, with religious and cultural taboos preventing large-scale fighting, the conflict between the democratic Athenian alliance and the oligarchical Spartan alliance transformed it into total war between competing political ideologies. The divisions and destruction caused by the war helped lead to foreign domination of the region and the end of the golden age of Greece.
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