A Comparison Of The Cold War And The Peloponnesian War

“The conflict of Athens and Sparta is supposed to serve as a lesson for what can happen to any people in any war in any age” (Hanson, 7). How Thucydides was right when he made this statement, when you compare the Peloponnesian War and the Cold War, the similarities are striking. Even though these wars occurred thousands of years apart the are very similar. They both lasted for many decades and even though the Cold War had not involved any fighting it has themes that echo all the way back to the Peloponnesian War where its occupants fought with crud weapons compared to today’s modern technology. The Peloponnesian War and the Cold War can be compared to the events leading up to the war, because of their common ambition in that the nations involved

Both time periods had seen golden ages for some of the countries involved and both also came after a previous conflict. Athens had their golden age before the Peloponnesian war: which in they were growing territorially as a city state, powerfully as a democracy, and intellectually as a people. Growth can occur in a city state even during war if the fighting is abroad like when the Greeks battled the Persians. The Peloponnesian War came shortly after Greece’s struggle Persia and its king Xerxes. Even though the battle had brought the Greeks together to fight a common enemy, the end of that war divided them back to their old ways. The Cold War started off as the same when the Americans and the Soviets were involved in World War Two. America like Athens had a golden period during World War Two and also during the Cold War as the country continued to grow. Even though they had fought on the same side and after the fighting was over they still had enough resentment toward each other in that they were constantly trying to battle to see who was best for the next fifty years. Even though no actual physical combat occurred during the Cold War, greatness over the other was a common theme that shared its roots in the Peloponnesian War as

The Peloponnesian War and the Cold War are no exceptions in that they were trying to see which nation and which types of government were the best way to rule. In the Peloponnesian war, Athens and Sparta were battling over whether Athens’s democracy or Sparta’s oligarchy was the best way to rule literally. Sparta had specifically started the war over the fact Athens was expanding rapidly and Sparta wanted the Greek city states to not expand and stay in the size that they were over a century ago. In essence be the small communities that they had started out as. Sparta’s worry over the fact that Athens was growing and the fact that greatness was the measure for who was on top was a common theme during the Cold war. The Cold War was not only the space race and the arms race, but also America was trying to contain the Soviet Union’s influence over its neighbors because they feared the spread of communism. The space race and the arms race were battles of greatness during the Cold war. Not only did these races try to prove grandeur in their governments but also in many of the other aspects of their countries like industrial power, advances in science, and the importance of education. Also during the Cold War, America wanted to stop the spread of communism that was one of the main goals of the Soviets for either allies or their mission to make all the governments of the world