A quarrel between Corinth and its colony Corcyra over the city of Epidamnus escalated into a naval war. Corcyra, which had one of the largest fleets in Greece, sought an alliance with Athens. In 433 BC Athens agreed to a defensive alliance and sent ships, which fought at the Battle of Sybota.

Potidaea was an awkward hybrid: a colony of Corinth that was also a tribute-paying member of the Athenian empire in the Chalcidice. Fearing revolt, Athens ordered Potidaea to pull down part of its walls and expel its Corinthian magistrates. Potidaea revolted instead, with Corinthian and wider encouragement, and Athens laid siege to it.

What is the Megarian Decree?

The sharpest and most contested grievance was Pericles' own initiative. The Megarian Decree excluded Megara, a small state on Athens' border and a Spartan ally, from every harbour of the Athenian empire and from the Athenian agora. It was an economic weapon rather than a military one, but for a small trading state it was strangling, and Megara's allies treated it as an act of aggression.

What is not answering the question asked?

"Assess whether Pericles caused the war" needs an explicit verdict; "evaluate the strategy" needs a judgement on both its logic and its outcome.

§-Syllabus dot point

NSWAncient HistorySyllabus dot point

How did Pericles' foreign policy and grand strategy shape the outbreak and early conduct of the Peloponnesian War, and how do ancient and modern historians judge his responsibility for it?

The foreign policy of Pericles and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War: the First Peloponnesian War and the Thirty Years' Peace of 446/5 BC; the grievances over Corcyra (433 BC), Potidaea (432 BC) and above all the Megarian Decree; Pericles' refusal to compromise and his defensive grand strategy of abandoning Attica and relying on the Long Walls and the fleet; and ancient and modern assessments of whether his policy caused the war

A focused answer to the HSC Ancient History Pericles dot point on foreign policy and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War - the Thirty Years' Peace of 446/5 BC, the grievances over Corcyra, Potidaea and the Megarian Decree, Pericles' no-concession stance and defensive Long Walls strategy, and whether his policy caused the war.

Generated by Claude Opus 4.813 min answerUpdated 2026-07-01

Reviewed by: AI editorial process; not yet individually human-reviewed

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Quick answer

After the Thirty Years' Peace of 446/5 BC froze the Athens-Sparta rivalry, a run of grievances (Corcyra 433 BC, Potidaea 432 BC and, above all, Pericles' Megarian Decree) brought war by 431 BC. Pericles refused to repeal the decree (Thucydides 1.140 to 144), arguing that Sparta was breaking the peace by refusing arbitration and that no concession should be made under compulsion. His grand strategy abandoned Attica, sheltered the population behind the Long Walls, relied on the fleet and imported grain, and waged attrition rather than seeking a land battle, at heavy social cost (the evacuation, then the plague of 430 BC). Thucydides distinguishes the immediate grievances from the truest cause, the growth of Athenian power and Spartan fear (1.23); modern historians divide, with de Ste Croix defending Pericles' policy as defensive and Kagan judging his inflexibility a costly miscalculation.

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What this dot point is asking
The answer
How to read a source on this topic
Historians and the debate

What this dot point is asking

NESA's foreign-policy strand for Pericles asks you to explain how Athens moved from the uneasy truce of the Thirty Years' Peace (446/5 BC) to open war with Sparta in 431 BC, what part Pericles personally played in that slide, and how he proposed to fight the war once it came. You need three connected things: the sequence of grievances (Corcyra, Potidaea and, above all, the Megarian Decree), Pericles' hardline refusal to compromise as reported in his speech at Thucydides 1.140 to 144, and his defensive grand strategy of abandoning Attica and relying on the Long Walls and the fleet. Underneath all of it sits the central assessment question the exam loves: did Pericles' policy cause the war, or was he prudently defending Athens against a rivalry he did not create?

In plain English

Think of two rival companies that have signed a truce carving up the market between them. A string of small disputes flares up, and the smaller rival demands that the bigger company drop one minor pricing rule as the price of keeping the peace. The big company's boss (Pericles) refuses: not because the rule matters much, but because he knows that caving to one demand made under threat invites ten more. War breaks out. His plan for it is unusual: instead of meeting the rival head-on where the rival is strongest, he pulls all his staff inside head office, locks the doors, lives off deliveries that arrive by a route the rival cannot block, and simply waits for the rival to run out of patience. It is a clever plan that avoids his weakness and plays to his strength, but it asks everyone to sit tight while their old neighbourhood gets trashed outside, and it has no backup if something goes badly wrong inside the locked building. That is Pericles' foreign policy and war strategy in a nutshell, and the argument ever since has been whether the refusal to compromise was brave prudence or a costly mistake.

The answer

The First Peloponnesian War and the Thirty Years' Peace (446/5 BC)

Athens and Sparta had already fought once. The First Peloponnesian War (c. 460 to 446 BC) was an intermittent, inconclusive conflict in which Athens, at the height of its confidence, over-extended itself on land and lost ground. It ended with the Thirty Years' Peace, sworn in the winter of 446/5 BC. The treaty did not resolve the rivalry; it froze it. Greece was recognised as divided into two blocs, an Athenian sea empire and Sparta's land-based Peloponnesian League, and each side agreed not to interfere with the other's allies. Crucially for what followed, the treaty also provided that any dispute should be submitted to arbitration rather than settled by force. That arbitration clause is the legal hinge of the whole crisis of 432 BC: Pericles would later argue that by refusing arbitration and issuing ultimatums, it was Sparta, not Athens, that broke the peace.

The road to war: Corcyra, Potidaea and the Megarian Decree

Between 435 and 432 BC a cluster of disputes drew the two blocs back toward war. Thucydides, our fullest source, calls these the immediate grievances (aitiai), and is careful to distinguish them from the deeper cause.

Corcyra (435 to 433 BC): A quarrel between Corinth and its colony Corcyra over the city of Epidamnus escalated into a naval war. Corcyra, which had one of the largest fleets in Greece, sought an alliance with Athens. In 433 BC Athens agreed to a defensive alliance and sent ships, which fought at the Battle of Sybota. Athens had now taken sides against Corinth, one of Sparta's most important and most aggrieved allies, in a quarrel that was not originally its own.
Potidaea (432 BC): Potidaea was an awkward hybrid: a colony of Corinth that was also a tribute-paying member of the Athenian empire in the Chalcidice. Fearing revolt, Athens ordered Potidaea to pull down part of its walls and expel its Corinthian magistrates. Potidaea revolted instead, with Corinthian and wider encouragement, and Athens laid siege to it. Corinth's anger at Athens now hardened into a campaign to bring Sparta into the war.
The Megarian Decree (c. 432 BC): The sharpest and most contested grievance was Pericles' own initiative. The Megarian Decree excluded Megara, a small state on Athens' border and a Spartan ally, from every harbour of the Athenian empire and from the Athenian agora. It was an economic weapon rather than a military one, but for a small trading state it was strangling, and Megara's allies treated it as an act of aggression. Sparta made repeal of this single decree the explicit price of peace, which tells you how far the crisis had become a test of Athenian dominance rather than a dispute about Megara.

Pericles' refusal to compromise: the "no concession" speech (Thuc. 1.140 to 144)

When Sparta's final embassy reduced its terms to a single condition, repeal the Megarian Decree and there need be no war, Pericles rose in the assembly and argued against any concession. Thucydides reports the speech at 1.140 to 144, and it is the central source for Pericles' foreign policy. Three strands run through it. First, the legal case: the Thirty Years' Peace provided for arbitration, and Sparta was refusing it, so Sparta was the one breaking the treaty. Second, the argument from precedent: the decree itself was a small thing, but to repeal it under an ultimatum would be to take orders, and a concession made under compulsion only invites a larger demand next time. Pericles insisted the Athenians should not imagine they were going to war over a trifle: the trifle was really a test of whether Athens would obey. Third, the argument from resources: he backed his firmness with a sober audit of Athenian strength, the fleet, the imperial tribute and the reserve on the Acropolis, and concluded that Athens could win a long war if it kept its nerve and did not blunder.

Pericles' defensive grand strategy

Pericles matched his diplomatic firmness with a clear-eyed military plan that flowed from one hard fact: the two powers were strong in different elements. Sparta led the finest hoplite army in Greece and could not be beaten in a pitched land battle; Athens commanded the sea and could not be beaten there. Pericles' strategy was to refuse to fight on Sparta's terms and to make Athens fight only on its own.

The plan had four parts. First, abandon the Attic countryside: when Sparta invaded, the rural population would evacuate inside the city rather than march out to defend their fields. Second, rely on the Long Walls, the fortifications joining Athens to its port at Piraeus, which turned the city and its harbour into a single fortified island that a land army could not storm or starve. Third, use naval supremacy to keep the sea lanes open and import food, above all grain from the Black Sea region, so the walled city could be fed indefinitely while Attica was ravaged. Fourth, wage a war of attrition rather than conquest: mount naval raids on the Peloponnesian coast to wear Sparta down, draw on the reserve Pericles put at 6000 talents of coined silver (Thucydides 2.13), and, critically, make no attempt to expand the empire while the war lasted. The aim was not to defeat Sparta in the field but to convince her that she could never win, and so to secure peace on the pre-war terms.

The social strain: the evacuation of the countryside

The strategy asked an extraordinary thing of Athenian citizens. Thucydides (2.14 to 17) describes the wrenching evacuation of 431 BC: families who had lived on the land of Attica for generations had to abandon their ancestral homes, farms and local shrines and crowd into whatever shelter they could find inside the walls and in the corridor of the Long Walls down to Piraeus. Many were bitterly reluctant, and Pericles had to use all his authority to stop the assembly from marching out to defend the fields as the Spartans burned them in full view of the city. This was not only a military policy but a severe political and psychological test, and it grew far worse in 430 BC when plague broke out in the overcrowded city, killing perhaps a quarter to a third of the population and, in 429 BC, Pericles himself. The plague was bad luck rather than a flaw in the plan's logic, but it exposed how little margin for disaster the strategy contained.

Assessing Pericles' policy: cause of the war, or prudent defence?

The exam assessment turns on two linked judgements. On causation, the hostile ancient tradition, comic (Aristophanes' Acharnians) and biographical (Plutarch's gossip that Pericles wanted war to bury his associates' scandals), pins the war on him personally, and it is true that the Megarian Decree was his initiative and that his refusal to repeal it closed off the last chance of compromise in 432 BC. But Thucydides' own distinction between the grievances and the truest cause, the growth of Athenian power and Spartan fear, suggests the decree was a trigger, not a root. On the strategy, Pericles' plan was a logical answer to a genuine asymmetry, but it was politically demanding and brittle: it offered endurance rather than victory and left no reserve for catastrophe. A strong answer holds these together: Pericles' foreign policy shaped the timing and the pretext of a war that deeper forces had already made likely, and his war strategy was rational in conception but fragile in execution.

How to read a source on this topic

Section III sources for this dot point are usually described (never reproduced verbatim): a passage in the manner of Thucydides reporting a speech or an embassy, a comic fragment in the style of Aristophanes, a moralising anecdote in the style of Plutarch, or a modern historian's judgement. Three reading habits.

First, fix the genre and date of the source, because genre decides reliability here more than anything else. Thucydides is near-contemporary and analytical, but he reconstructs speeches and writes partly to vindicate Pericles' foresight (2.65). Aristophanes is comedy staged during the war, brilliant on Athenian public mood but useless as neutral causation. Plutarch is a Roman-era biographer (second century AD) writing centuries later, invaluable for preserving lost traditions but prone to moralising and gossip.

Second, always separate an immediate grievance from an underlying cause. A source that blames the Megarian Decree is describing an aitia; a source (or your own argument) that points to Athenian power and Spartan fear is reaching for the alethestate prophasis. Naming that distinction is often what lifts a source answer from description to analysis.

Third, move from content to reliability to usefulness to perspective, and reach a judgement, rather than simply retelling what the source says.

Historians and the debate

Thucydides is both our chief source and our first interpreter. At 1.23 he distinguishes the immediate grievances from the truest cause, the growth of Athenian power and the fear it produced in Sparta, and at 2.65 he judges Pericles' defensive strategy sound and blames his successors for abandoning its restraint. His analysis frames every modern debate, but his closeness to Pericles means he must be read critically as well as followed.

G.E.M. de Ste Croix (The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, 1972) argues that Sparta, under Corinthian pressure, was the real aggressor, that Pericles' policy was essentially defensive, and that the Megarian Decree was neither economically ruinous nor the true cause of the war. His reading broadly vindicates Pericles and follows Thucydides' structural emphasis.

Donald Kagan (The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, 1969) is more critical. He argues the war was not inevitable and that Pericles' inflexibility, especially his refusal to make even a face-saving concession over Megara, was a miscalculation of deterrence that removed the last chance of peace. On strategy, Kagan questions whether a purely defensive posture offered Athens any theory of victory at all.

Ernst Badian ("From Plataea to Potidaea," 1993) presses a revisionist line, reading Thucydides as partly shielding an expansionist Athens and treating Athenian conduct in the 430s BC as more provocative than the traditional account allows.

Model exam responses

1. Source-analysis response (using a passage in the style of Thucydides on the Spartan ultimatum). "A source in which the Spartan embassy offers peace in exchange only for repeal of the Megarian Decree is valuable evidence for how the crisis had crystallised by 432 BC, because it shows both sides treating one minor trade measure as the symbolic test of the whole rivalry. Its usefulness is limited by the fact that a reconstructed speech tells us how Thucydides understood the diplomacy, not necessarily the exact words used; speeches in Thucydides are composed to bring out the underlying logic of events. Read carefully, though, the demand corroborates his own thesis at 1.23: that the aitiai like Megara were the occasion, while the real issue, made explicit in the accompanying call to 'leave the Greeks their independence', was Athenian power itself."

Marker's note: markers reward using the source for what it reveals about the crisis, an explicit reliability caveat about Thucydidean speeches, and linkage to the grievance-versus-cause distinction rather than retelling.

2. Essay paragraph (policy shaped timing, not the underlying war). "Pericles' refusal to compromise is best understood as decisive for the timing of the war rather than for its fundamental cause. His decree was a genuine provocation and, as Kagan argues, his rigidity in 432 BC closed the last diplomatic exit, so it is fair to hold him responsible for the war coming when and how it did. But de Ste Croix, following Thucydides' distinction at 1.23, is more persuasive on the deeper question: Sparta's willingness to make so trivial a measure a reason for war betrays that the true anxiety was the scale of Athenian power, not the fate of Megara. Pericles therefore lit a fire in a room already filled with fuel he had not, by himself, put there."

Marker's note: this paragraph scores because it separates responsibility for timing from responsibility for underlying cause, and uses two named historians to do genuine argumentative work.

Command words and how to use a source

Outline/describe wants a small number of clearly separated points; explain wants a point, evidence and why it matters; assess/evaluate/to what extent wants a sustained argument reaching a supported judgement. For "assess whether Pericles caused the war," do not narrate the road to war: argue it, and answer the yes/no directly at the end.

Using a source properly means four things every time: (1) content, what it actually says or shows; (2) reliability, who produced it, when, and why; (3) usefulness, what specific question it can help answer and how far; (4) perspective, whose viewpoint it represents and what it leaves out. For this dot point, always fix the genre first (analytical Thucydides, comic Aristophanes, late moralising Plutarch), because genre decides reliability here.

Weaving in historiography means using a named position to build your case, for example "as de Ste Croix argues, the decree was not economically ruinous, which weakens the claim that Megara was the real cause," rather than dropping a historian's name in as decoration.

Common exam traps

Retelling the road to war instead of arguing about it: Narrating Corcyra, then Potidaea, then Megara wins few marks. The question almost always asks you to weigh causes or judge policy, so lead with a thesis and use the events as evidence.
Collapsing grievance into cause: Blaming the war simply on the Megarian Decree ignores Thucydides' own distinction (1.23) between the aitiai and the truest cause. The decree is the trigger; the growth of Athenian power and Spartan fear is the underlying cause.
Taking Aristophanes or Plutarch at face value: The comic "three women" story and Plutarch's gossip about Pericles' motives are hostile and unreliable on causation; use them as evidence of mood and tradition, not of fact.
Judging the strategy only by the plague: The plague of 430 BC was contingent bad luck. Assess the strategy's design (playing to sea power, avoiding Sparta's strength) separately from the disaster that struck it, then weigh both.
Not answering the question asked: "Assess whether Pericles caused the war" needs an explicit verdict; "evaluate the strategy" needs a judgement on both its logic and its outcome.

Practice questions

Original practice questions graded from foundation to exam level, each with a full worked solution. Try them before revealing the solution.

foundation3 marksOutline the terms and significance of the Thirty Years' Peace of 446/5 BC.

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A 3-mark "outline" rewards several correctly named points, briefly developed.

What it was: The Thirty Years' Peace, sworn in the winter of 446/5 BC, ended the First Peloponnesian War (c. 460 to 446 BC) between Athens and Sparta and her allies (1 mark).
Its terms: It recognised two spheres of influence, an Athenian sea empire and a Spartan-led Peloponnesian bloc, each side agreeing not to poach the other's allies, and it provided that disputes would be settled by arbitration rather than force (1 mark).
Its significance: It was an uneasy truce, not a resolved rivalry; the arbitration clause later became central to Pericles' argument that Sparta, by refusing arbitration in 432 BC, was the party breaking the peace (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward the date, the two-spheres division, and the arbitration clause rather than a narrative of the earlier war.

foundation4 marksOutline the main elements of Pericles' defensive grand strategy at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War.

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A 4-mark "outline" wants several developed elements of the strategy.

Abandon the countryside: Pericles advised the Athenians to evacuate the rural population of Attica inside the city and refuse a pitched land battle with Sparta's superior hoplite army (1 mark).
Rely on the Long Walls: The fortifications joining Athens to its port at Piraeus turned the city into a fortified island that could not be starved out by a land siege (1 mark).
Use the fleet and imports: Athenian naval supremacy kept the sea lanes open so grain could be imported by sea, largely from the Black Sea region, funding and feeding the city while Attica was ravaged (1 mark).
Attrition, not expansion: Athens would wage a war of endurance, mounting naval raids on the Peloponnesian coast, drawing on a reserve Pericles cited as 6000 talents of coined silver (Thucydides 2.13), and would not try to extend the empire while the war lasted (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward the abandonment of Attica, the Long Walls, the fleet/imports, and the logic of attrition, not just "he defended Athens."

core5 marksSource A (an ExamExplained reconstruction, in the style of Thucydides reporting the final Spartan embassy to Athens in 432 BC): "The Spartans came a last time and declared plainly: if the Athenians would repeal the decree against Megara, there need be no war. And they added, above all, that the Athenians should leave the Greeks their independence." Using Source A and your own knowledge, explain what the Spartan demands reveal about the road to war.

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A 5-mark "explain" needs the source used plus supporting own knowledge.

Use the source: Source A shows Sparta reducing its case to a single concrete condition, repeal of the Megarian Decree, wrapped in the broad slogan that the Greeks should be "independent," which framed Athens as the oppressor and the war as a war of liberation (2 marks).
Own knowledge: the concrete grievances: By 432 BC three flashpoints had accumulated: Athens' alliance with Corcyra against Corinth (Battle of Sybota, 433 BC), the siege of Potidaea, a Corinthian colony inside the Athenian empire (432 BC), and the Megarian Decree barring Megara, a Spartan ally, from the empire's harbours and the Athenian agora (2 marks).
Own knowledge: what the demand reveals: By making repeal of the decree the price of peace, Sparta turned a minor economic measure into a test of whether Athens would take orders; the "independence" slogan reveals that the underlying issue was Athenian power itself, not Megara (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward decoding the source's two demands (repeal plus "independence") and connecting them to the named 433 to 432 BC grievances.

core6 marksSource B (an ExamExplained reconstruction, in the style of Aristophanes' comedy Acharnians, staged at Athens in 425 BC): "Some drunken young Athenians stole a girl from Megara; the Megarians in a rage stole two of Aspasia's girls in return; and so, over three loose women, Pericles thundered out his decree and set all Greece ablaze." Using Source B and your own knowledge, assess the value and limitations of this type of source for a historian investigating the causes of the war.

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A 6-mark "assess" requires balanced value and limitations plus wider knowledge.

Origin and perspective: The real passage is from Aristophanes' Acharnians (425 BC), an Athenian comedy staged during the war; Source B reconstructs its mocking, deliberately absurd tone. It is satire written for laughs and for the poet's own anti-war argument, not a considered analysis (1 mark).
Value: It is genuinely useful in two ways: it is near-contemporary, and it confirms that ordinary Athenians in the 420s BC saw the Megarian Decree and Pericles personally as central to the war's origins, which corroborates that the decree was a real and prominent grievance (2 marks).
Limitation: As comedy it distorts for effect: the "three women" story is a joke, not a cause, it names no dates, and its whole point is to blame Pericles, so it cannot be taken as neutral evidence of why the war actually broke out (2 marks).
Wider knowledge: Corroborate against Thucydides, who lists the decree among the immediate grievances (aitiai) but insists the "truest cause" (1.23) was the growth of Athenian power and Spartan fear, a structural cause a comedy could not dramatise (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward identifying the comic, hostile perspective, a real value AND a real limitation, and corroboration with Thucydides.

core6 marksExplain Pericles' policy of refusing to compromise with Sparta in 432 BC, as reported in his speech at Thucydides 1.140 to 144.

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A 6-mark "explain" needs the policy, the reasoning behind it, and named evidence.

The policy: In his speech to the assembly (Thucydides 1.140 to 144) Pericles urged the Athenians to make no concession to Sparta and to reject the demand that the Megarian Decree be repealed (2 marks).
Reason one: the legal case: Pericles argued that the Thirty Years' Peace provided for arbitration, which Sparta was refusing; by preferring an ultimatum to arbitration, Sparta, not Athens, was breaking the treaty (2 marks).
Reason two: the precedent: He argued that yielding to a dictated demand, however trivial the Megarian Decree itself was, would invite larger demands; a concession made under compulsion would be read as weakness, so "let no one think we go to war for a trifle" (1 mark).
Reason three: confidence in resources: Pericles backed his firmness with a sober account of Athenian resources, the fleet, the tribute of the empire and the reserve on the Acropolis, arguing Athens could outlast Sparta in a long war (1 mark).

Marker's note: markers reward the three strands, refuse arbitration equals treaty-breaking, no concession under compulsion, and confidence in resources, not just "he said no."

exam20 marksAssess whether Pericles' foreign policy caused the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. In your answer, refer to relevant sources and to at least one modern historian.

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A Band-6 response sustains a judgement across the whole essay, using dated evidence and named historiography rather than narrating the road to war.

Thesis: Pericles' inflexible handling of the 432 BC grievances, above all his refusal to repeal the Megarian Decree, made the immediate outbreak harder to avoid, but the deeper cause lay in a structural rivalry, the growth of Athenian power and Spartan fear, that his policy inflamed rather than created.
Argument line 1: the case that Pericles precipitated the war: The Megarian Decree was an Athenian initiative and a deliberate provocation; Sparta made its repeal the single price of peace (reconstructed in the style of Thucydides' final embassy). Pericles' speech (Thucydides 1.140 to 144) then closed off compromise by treating any concession as surrender. Plutarch (Life of Pericles 29 to 32) preserves a hostile tradition that he wanted war to escape scandals around Pheidias, Aspasia and Anaxagoras, and Aristophanes' Acharnians (425 BC) pins the war on him.
Argument line 2: the case that deeper causes drove the war: Thucydides himself, our fullest source, distinguishes the immediate grievances (aitiai) over Corcyra (433 BC), Potidaea (432 BC) and Megara from the "truest cause" (alethestate prophasis, 1.23): the growth of Athenian power and the fear it produced in Sparta. On this reading the decree was a trigger, not a root; had it never existed, Corinthian pressure and Spartan insecurity supplied ample other grievances.
Argument line 3: weighing the sources: Plutarch is late (second century AD) and moralising, and Aristophanes is comedy, both hostile to Pericles and both unreliable on causation; Thucydides is near-contemporary and analytical but writes partly to defend Pericles' foresight (2.65), so even he must be read critically.
Historiography: G.E.M. de Ste Croix (The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, 1972) argues Sparta was the aggressor and Pericles' policy essentially defensive, the Megarian Decree neither economically ruinous nor the true cause. Donald Kagan (The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, 1969) counters that the war was avoidable and that Pericles' rigidity over Megara was a miscalculation that removed the last off-ramp. Ernst Badian reads Thucydides as partly shielding an expansionist Athens.
Model paragraph: The decree matters most as a symptom. Pericles could have repealed a minor trade measure at little material cost, and Kagan is right that his refusal narrowed the room for peace in 432 BC. But de Ste Croix's structural reading, following Thucydides' own distinction between grievance and cause, is more persuasive over the long run: Sparta's willingness to make so small a measure a casus belli shows the real anxiety was Athenian power itself. Pericles' policy therefore shaped the timing and the pretext of the war far more than its underlying necessity.
Judgement: To a limited extent: Pericles' uncompromising foreign policy precipitated the immediate outbreak in 431 BC, but the Peloponnesian War arose chiefly from a structural rivalry his firmness sharpened rather than manufactured.

Marker's note: markers reward a sustained judgement answering "assess," the aitiai-versus-truest-cause distinction, the critical weighing of Plutarch, Aristophanes and Thucydides, and named modern historians used to build the argument.

exam25 marksEvaluate the effectiveness of Pericles' defensive grand strategy as a response to Athens' strategic position at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. In your response, refer to relevant sources and historians' interpretations.

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A Band-6 response needs a clear thesis, argument lines tied to dated evidence, engagement with historiography, a model paragraph, and a judgement answering "evaluate."

Thesis: Pericles' strategy was a logical, resource-based answer to an asymmetry Athens could not escape, strong on land Sparta could not win, dominant at sea Athens could not lose, but it was politically and psychologically fragile, and events beyond his control (the plague) exposed limits the plan could not absorb.
Argument line 1: the strategy fitted the strategic reality: Sparta's hoplite army was unbeatable in a pitched land battle, so Pericles refused one; Athens' fleet was unbeatable at sea, so he leaned on it. Abandoning Attica, sheltering behind the Long Walls to Piraeus, importing grain by sea and raiding the Peloponnesian coast turned Athens into a fortified island funded by empire tribute and a reserve of 6000 talents (Thucydides 2.13). It was attrition designed to make Sparta despair of victory.
Argument line 2: the strategy carried a heavy social cost: Thucydides (2.14 to 17) describes the wrenching evacuation of the countryside, families abandoning ancestral homes and rural shrines and crowding into makeshift shelter inside the walls. This bred resentment and required Pericles to hold the assembly to a passive plan against every instinct to march out and defend the land, a political strain as much as a military one.
Argument line 3: the strategy had no clear path to victory: Kagan objects that pure defence could exhaust Athens without ever forcing a decision; endurance is not the same as winning, and the plan gambled that Sparta would tire first. It also depended on unbroken discipline and on nothing catastrophic happening to a population packed behind the walls.
Argument line 4: contingency broke it: The plague of 430 BC, worsened precisely by the overcrowding the strategy required, killed perhaps a quarter to a third of the population and Pericles himself in 429 BC. This was bad luck rather than a flaw of conception, but it revealed how little margin the plan had.
Historiography: Thucydides (2.65) judged the strategy sound and blamed later leaders for abandoning Pericles' restraint and overreaching (the Sicilian Expedition). De Ste Croix broadly endorses the defensive design as rational. Kagan is more critical, arguing a purely defensive posture ceded initiative and offered no theory of victory. Modern strategic historians note the plan asked a democratic citizenry to watch its farms burn, an unusually demanding political ask.
Model paragraph: Judged against Athens' actual options in 431 BC, the strategy was the best available: to fight Sparta on land was to lose, so Pericles fought the war Athens could not lose and dared Sparta to outlast a sea power funded by empire. Its weakness was not its logic but its brittleness. It demanded years of civic patience, offered only exhaustion rather than conquest as a route to peace, and left no reserve for disaster, so when the plague struck the crowded city the whole design buckled. Thucydides' retrospective verdict (2.65) that the plan was sound and that Pericles' successors ruined it is persuasive on the concept, but it understates how much the strategy depended on a discipline and a run of luck that democratic Athens could not guarantee.
Judgement: Effective in conception and appropriate to Athens' position, but only conditionally so: it was rational rather than robust, and its dependence on civic endurance and freedom from catastrophe was a real, ultimately fatal, limitation.

Marker's note: markers reward evaluating both design and outcome, dated evidence (2.13, 2.14 to 17, the 430 BC plague), the Thucydides 2.65 verdict weighed against Kagan, and a judgement that answers "evaluate" rather than describing the strategy.