SPECIAL POLITICAL BETRAYAL IN THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR
The social fabric of Greek antiquity was predominantly rural and agrarian, and the maintenance of their fragile socio-political order depended on at least some measure of internal peace and stability. In the absence of centralized political institutions, obedience to time-honoured customs could provide some measure of security in an otherwise uncertain and unpredictable world. The various poleis that evolved from the communities of Homer and Hesiod may have developed more elaborate political institutions for the maintenance of civic order and the formation of alliances, yet their continued stability was attributed to their adherence to divinely-sanctioned customs and their civic laws; lawless deviation could produce only civic ruin, particularly when it was the product of both internal political strife and external military forces. When faced with overwhelming external threats, internal factional dissent, or some combination of the two, these rudimentary political bodies proved incredibly vulnerable to political factionalization, social fragmentation, and self-destructive internal power struggles.
These patterns of behaviour were well recognized by Greek historians, as isolated incidents attracted the interest of Herodotus in his history of the Greco-Persian War. The frequent internecine bloodshed of the Peloponnesian War, however, produced recurring patterns of civic political strife and conflict that frequently metastasized into wholesale massacres offactions. Such phenomena became a point of fascination for Thucydides and Xenophon in their histories of the Peloponnesian War, which provided a literary framework for later Greek historians (such as Polybius and Diodorus Siculus) for investigating this disturbing trend within Greek civic politics from the late fifth through early second century BC.
