The Isle of Stone

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The Peloponnesian War was the war to end all wars in antiquity: a conflict of unprecedented scope, length, and destructiveness, after which nothing was the same. Fought over a period of twenty-seven years, it pitted Athens and her sometimes-reluctant imperial subjects against a league of Peloponnesian states led by Sparta. This novel dramatizes one of the war’s key campaigns-the entrapment and siege of hitherto undefeated Spartan soldiers on a narrow island in the west of Greece. The incident turned out to be a high point of the struggle for the Athenians, who still lost the war.

Readers unfamiliar with this subject may be confused by the varying ways the ancients referred to the Spartans and their allies (“Lacedaemonians,” “Laconians,” “Peloponnesians,” “Spartiates,” “Equals,” et al). By way of clarification, “Lacedaemon” and “Laconia” are alternative names for the fertile valley region in the southern Peloponnese that encompassed the city of Sparta. Although all Lacedaemonians were Peloponnesians, the region of the Peloponnese included a number of other important city-states that were part of the Spartan bloc. Describing a force as “Peloponnesian” therefore emphasizes a preponderance of Spartan allies within (though at least some Spartans were usually part of such armies or fleets).

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