The purpose of this research is to examine the influence of religion on politics from 478 to 399 B.C., the period of the Peloponnesian War in Greece between Athens and Sparta. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which reli gion intersected with Athenian public policy during that period and then to discuss specific features of such policy that re flect or that seem predicated of religious praxis or belief.
The principal historical point to be derived from the course of the Peloponnesian War is that by the time it ended, the political hegemony and leading cultural status of Athens were by and large in the past, absorbed by the ethos and governmental form of Sparta. But the war depleted both Athens and Sparta and ended the Golden Age of Greece. It cannot be said that religious belief and worship somehow "caused" the decline of Greece. But uses to which religion was put in regard to the general population and the religious affinities that informed behavior of individual military leaders appear to have had a role in the course of the war. The weight of evidence is that religion was not least an instrument of policy and, as required, of populace mobilization. With regard to the influence of religion on individuals, the evidence is that it proved decisive but not always beneficial to both the pious and impious.
The instrumental use of religion is presented, on the whole without comment or evaluation, throughout Thucydides's history of the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, in Thucydides's formulation, the principal voices in various debates or exhortations of the war seem no more than conventionally pious. This did not prevent anyone in the case from invoking divine sanction when it might benefit the invokers. At the time of the Congress of the Spartan confederation, when the Athenians were just on the point of seeking to manipulate a variety of city-states into alliances with Athens on the strength of Athens's reputati...