Thucydides wrote this history of the war between Athens and Sparta, from 431 to 404 BCE, in what we now call Greece. This is Book 3 of his History of the Peloponnesian War. Book 2 was the first year of fighting, 431: plague in Athens, Pericles dead, the city still at war without the man who designed the fight.

Here the war becomes neighbors killing neighbors. Mytilene, chief city of Lesbos, revolts from Athens's empire and is crushed. Cleon, loudest in the assembly that ran Athens, wants every adult male dead. Diodotus talks them down by a near-failing vote. A second trireme, a war galley, beats the first to Lesbos by hours, so only the ringleaders die. Starved Plataea surrenders to Sparta and is erased. At Corcyra, now Corfu, civil war eats fathers, temples, and words: reckless daring becomes courage, prudence cowardice. Demosthenes blunders among javelins in Aetolia, then takes Ambracia's camp in the dark. Sparta's fleet never comes. Lesbos stays in the empire, thinner and watched.