Abstract

Thucydides and Xenophon, the two historians of the Peloponnesian War, record that in the years between 431--403 B.C. Athens suffered through a plague, summer raids on its crops and groves, a political panic, two oligarchic regimes, a final siege, a civil war, and a deep economic depression. These events do not appear in the dialogues of Plato even though Socrates, who does, lived through them all. This study asks how and why Plato has hidden the Peloponnesian War. It proceeds first, by developing a concise history of the Peloponnesian War from which is derived a short list of the ways the war directly affected daily life in Athens. This list is then brought to sequential readings of Aristophanes' comedies and Xenophon's Socratic writings with the aim of obtaining independent confirmation for these home-front experiences. With these confirmations in hand, the dialogues of Plato are carefully reviewed for direct references and indirect allusions to the Peloponnesian War. Finally, the pattern established by this review, what-is-shown of the war and what-is-not, is compared with a timeline of the dramatic dates for Plato's dialogue. The study concludes that Plato 'conceals' the Peloponnesian War, even as he reminds us of it, by staging his dialogues in the periods of peace that punctuate the active fighting, often just before some fateful event like the Sicilian Expedition. It is theorized that Plato follows this strategy in order to shame the arrogant ambitions of Periclean Athens, the public memory of which was supporting fourth century aspirations for a second empire