The Peloponnesian War: Conflict, Society, and Cultural Transformation in Classical Greece

Value

$37,434

Partners and collaborators

None

Description

This project will produce a major new monograph on the Peloponnesian War, examining how prolonged conflict reshaped the political, social, cultural, and emotional life of the ancient Greek world. The book reinterprets the war not simply as a sequence of battles and diplomatic events, but as a transformative condition that affected every level of Greek society.

The Peloponnesian War altered relationships between Athens, Sparta, Persia, and allied communities; intensified imperial extraction and enslavement; disrupted civic and domestic life; and reshaped how people understood danger, identity, religion, and collective belonging. Warfare penetrated cities, households, sanctuaries, and everyday routines. Populations were displaced, urban spaces fortified or abandoned, and cultural forms such as tragedy, comedy, public oratory, and commemorative ritual became ways of negotiating crisis and collective trauma.

Although the conflict has long occupied a central place in the study of classical Greece, scholarship has often remained dominated either by strategic military narrative or by close study of the historian Thucydides. This project brings together recent developments in social, cultural, spatial, and emotional history to offer a broader interpretation of the war as lived experience. It integrates literary texts, inscriptions, archaeology, and material culture to reconstruct how conflict transformed communities across the Greek world.

The book examines themes including democracy under pressure, empire and coercion, displacement and enslavement, religious response, performance culture, public emotion, and changing experiences of space and movement. Designed for scholars, students, and wider audiences alike, it aims to provide a new interpretive framework for understanding one of the most consequential conflicts of the ancient world.

This project builds on the edited collection Reassessing the Peloponnesian War (Cambridge University Press, 2025), co-edited with Professor Robin Osborne (Cambridge), which brought together international scholars to explore new social, cultural, and interdisciplinary approaches to the conflict. The volume examined themes including emotion, ritual, labour, space, memory, and political culture, and helped establish the broader interpretive framework developed further in the present monograph.

The project has also included public-facing engagement through a short accompanying blog essay for the Cambridge University Press blog, introducing the volume’s aims and significance to a wider readership.

Related publication: Reassessing the Peloponnesian War