The best book about conflict ever written, Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War , accounts for this 30-year cataclysm, where Athens and Sparta slugged it out all over the eastern Mediterranean, by one overwhelming factor: the rise in the power of Athens.

There had, hitherto, been no civilisation so brilliant, and for that matter there has been none since. We still look at the statuary as the finest ever, we read the plays with delight and use them as metaphors (the Oedipal complex, for example), and arguably, philosophy has been a series of footnotes to those 5 ^th century BC savants ever since.