From 479 to 431 B
From 479 to 431 B.C. was the Golden Age of Greece, and during this short
period Athens gave birth to more great men–poets, artists, statesmen, and
philosophers–than all the world beside had produced [1] in any period of
equal length. Then, largely as a result of the growing jealousy of
military Sparta came that cruel and vindictive civil strife, known as the
Peloponnesian War, which desolated Greece, left Athens a wreck of her
former self, permanently lowered the moral tone of the Greek people, and
impaired beyond recovery the intellectual and artistic life of Hellas. For
many centuries Athens continued to be a center of intellectual
achievement, and to spread her culture throughout a new and a different
world, but her power as a State had been impaired forever by a revengeful
war between those who should have been friends and allies in the cause of
civilization.