"In B. C. 431 the war broke out between Athens and the Peloponnesian League, which, after twenty-seven years, ended in the ruin of the Athenian empire. It began through a quarrel between Corinth and Kerkyra [or Korkyra, or Corcyru], in which Athens assisted Kerkyra. A congress was held at Sparta; Corinth and other States complained of the conduct of Athens, and war was decided on. The real cause of the war was that Sparta and its allies were jealous of the great power that Athens had gained. A far greater number of Greek States were engaged in this war than had ever been engaged in a single undertaking before. States that had taken no part in the Persian war were now fighting on one side or the other. Sparta was an oligarchy, and the friend of the nobles everywhere; Athens was a democracy, and the friend of the common people; so that the war was to some extent a struggle between these classes all over Greece." _C. A. Fyffe, History of Greece (History Primer), chapter 5._ "The Peloponnesian War was a protracted struggle, and attended by calamities such as Hellas had never known within a like period of time. Never were so many cities captured and depopulated—some by Barbarians, others by Hellenes themselves fighting against one another; and several of them after their capture were re-peopled by strangers. Never were exile and slaughter more frequent, whether in the war or brought about by civil strife. … There were earthquakes unparalleled in their extent and fury, and eclipses of the sun more numerous than are recorded to have happened in any former age; there were also in some places great droughts causing famines, and lastly the plague which did immense harm and destroyed numbers of the people. All these calamities fell upon Hellas simultaneously with the war, which began when the Athenians and Peloponnesians violated the thirty years' truce concluded by them after the recapture of Euboea. Why they broke it and what were the grounds of quarrel I will first set forth, that in time to come no man may be at a loss to know what was the origin of this great war. The real though unavowed cause I believe to have been the growth of the Athenian power, which terrified the Lacedaemonians and forced them into war." _Thucydides, History (translated by Jowett), book 1, section 23._