APPENDIX I: GLOSSARY OF TERMS AND PLACES
ACROPOLIS · the fortified hill and center of a city-state; most often used in reference to Athens and the great temples built by Pericles.
ARGOS · the renowned large city-state in the northeastern Peloponnese that for most of the war was democratic, independent of Sparta, and often allied with Athens. The surrounding peninsula that extends from the northeastern coast of the Peloponnese into the Aegean is known as the Argolid.
ATTICA · the geographical area surrounding and controlled by Athens, a hinterland encompassing one thousand square miles.
BOEOTIA · a large agricultural region north of Attica in central Greece. Most of the cities of its nearly one-thousand-square-mile countryside were united politically into an oligarchic confederation headed by its largest city, Thebes. Throughout the fifth century Athens sought to weaken its neighboring rival by periodic occupation, fomenting democratic revolution, and encouraging Boeotian states like Plataea and Thespiae to remain autonomous.
CORINTH · a traditional maritime rival of Athens and stalwart ally of Sparta that drew its wealth and prestige from its control of the Isthmus, which governed Greek maritime traffic east and west and land travel north and south.
DECELEA · a small hillock in the Athenian plain about thirteen miles from the walls of Athens, fortified by the Spartans in 414–413 to serve as a permanent garrison of occupation in Attica and a clearinghouse for continuous plundering.
DEMOCRACY · “people power,” or government characterized by inclusion of the landless poor into the voting citizenry and rule by majority vote of the assembly. From 507 to 338, ancient democracy was often synonymous with Athens, the most powerful and influential of the democratic city-states.
DRACHMA · the most common unit of Greek money, often equivalent to the top daily wage of a well-paid worker. Six obols equaled one drachma. One hundred drachmas made a mina. A talent was equal to 6,000 drachmas or 60 minas. If current semiskilled adult labor is often compensated at about $10 (U.S.) per hour, we can envision a drachma having the approximate contemporary worth of about $80. Direct comparisons are impossible, but a talent in present-day American money might consequently be equivalent to something like $480,000—or about the cost of a large urban house in both Athens and America.
HELLESPONT · the modern Dardanelles, or the very narrow strait of water that connects the Aegean via the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea, and thus divides Europe from Asia. It was the scene of horrific Athenian-Spartan sea battles in the last four years of the war.
HELOTS · hereditary indentured and publicly owned rural serfs of Laconia and Messenia, who worked in forced servitude to supply food and provisions for their Spartan overseers.
HOPLITE · a heavily armed Greek infantryman deployed in the phalanx. Originally a voting, property-owning citizen of the polis who supplied his own armor, the hoplite was eventually defined as a soldier of any class who fought in close rank with body armor, shield, and spear. The name derives either from his large circular shield (hoplon) or his panoply in general (hopla).
IONIA · the Greek-speaking western seaboard of Asia Minor (modern western Turkey), whose northern inhabitants claimed common ancestry with Athens. Not to be confused with the Ionian Sea, which is an ancient name for the southern Adriatic, between Italy and western Greece.
ISTHMUS · the thin strip of land connecting the northern Greek mainland to the Peloponnese, and settled and governed by the Corinthians, who profited enormously by their control of north-south land traffic and east-west maritime trade between the Aegean and the Gulf of Corinth.
METICS · privileged resident aliens who might serve in the military even without full rights of citizenship. The term is used most frequently in reference to foreigners at Athens, where by the mid-fifth century some 20,000 metics resided.
OLIGARCHY · consensual government restricted to those who owned property or had ample capital, hence “rule of the few.” Oligarchs were championed by Sparta in its ideological war against democrats, the poorer and often landless supported by imperial Athens.
PELOPONNESE · the southern part of Greece, consisting of the large peninsula south of the Gulf of Corinth. The majority of states in this area of some eighty-five hundred square miles were ethnically Doric and either allied to or subjugated by Sparta. The area gave its name to the war because of the Athenocentric nature of our sources: to Athenians their war was against Sparta and its allies—loosely defined as the Peloponnesians.
PELTASTS · light-armed troops, later often mercenary and foreign, equipped with a javelin and light crescent-shaped shield (peltê) and trained to fight as skirmishers on rough terrain.
PHALANX · a columnar formation of Greek heavily armed spearmen (hoplites). The mass was used to batter away at its like counterpart in open land battles.
PIRAEUS · the port and harbor of Athens, some five miles from the Acropolis and connected most prominently by the two parallel Long Walls, which established a safe corridor for the importation of maritime goods into the city.
POLIS (PL. POLEIS) · any self-governing city-state of ancient Greece; the term serves to describe both a political entity and the geographical area surrounding the municipal center.
SATRAPY · a Persian provincial state. The term refers most often to those districts in northern (Hellespontine) and central (Sardis) Asia Minor that for the latter part of the war were run by Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes, respectively.
SPARTA · an oligarchic city-state that led the Peloponnesian alliance. A variety of terms are used to loosely describe Sparta and its empire. Lacedaemon is both a political and a regional connotation denoting those surrounding city-states and towns in the southeastern Peloponnese that were directly governed by the Spartans. Spartans refer to residents of the city and its environs of various statuses. Some men were further distinguished as Spartiates; these full citizens constituted a small elite. Laconian is more an ethnic and geographic rubric employed to describe the land around and the people residing in and surrounding Sparta, while the far broader adjective Peloponnesian roughly includes all those city-states situated on the mainland south of Corinth, most of which were allied with Sparta. Doric is a broad ethnic and linguistic category of southern Greeks, mostly referring to the Peloponnese, Sicily, the southern Aegean, and southern Asia Minor.
THETES · the lowest census class at Athens, composed of the poorer citizens, who owned little or no land and usually either rowed in the fleet or fought as skirmishers outside the phalanx. By the outbreak of the war thetic adult males at Athens may have numbered over 20,000.
TRIREME · a swift war galley powered by three banks of oarsmen and armed with a bronze ram. Triremes usually carried about 170 rowers and another 30 assorted officers and could employ an auxiliary sail during transit and patrol.