It was a bunch of Greeks fighting over an asparagus patch................. you know asparagus needs a lot of water, and a lot of weeding.

Actually I'd have to look that one up. Is that the one where the guy dropped in his tracks after running the first Marathon to report victory??? Was is Sparta and Athens? (Standard answer for all Greco Roman questions.... "It was Sparta and Athens") War is often driven by overpopulation. Civil War was supported by pop overflow from Ireland, after the high attrition rates on both sides.

Where history drives me nuts when it's taught is they DON'T look at motivations. They look at dates and bare essentials. Civil war was boring boring boring in elementary school. History should be storytelling. We learn from stories.

One thing I recently put together on the Civil War was after reading the O'Reilly books on the subject (good stories!!!) IMHO Lincoln did what LBJ did during Viet Nam. He tried to run it (politically) from the Oval Office, and didn't let his generals run it. When the generals finally took over (Grant was really stubborn, did what he thought was best to end it) the war finally resolved. It went on MUCH longer than it should have.

IMHO the war should never have been fought, but the intellectuals of the south (people like Ashley and Rhett in the movie) hung back and didn't take an open stance, while hot heads (many of whom couldn't read, illiteracy was rampant in the South among planter's kids, they were spoiled ignorant brats) in the South were allowed to push the narrative. No one won but the speculators (like Rhett Butler, who was running cotton to England, and keeping his money in Boston) Add to that people starving in Ireland, and funneling into Boston and New York, overloading the labor market. If the slaves had been freed, that would throw ALL the labor markets off (and finally did, what we miss in the flurry of war was the resulting race riots between the Irish and the Blacks... those were really really ugly and went on into the Depression era off and on, over labor markets.) The North would have run out of armies too if they didn't have all those Irish immigrants who took up guns.

Sorry, I'm not sure how I got so interested in that era. It's not about evil overlords with whips, and about guns and killing. It's about greater social issues which weren't resolved and were unrecognized as social motivations. The emotions of today are BS IMHO. We need to apply lessons learned and move onward.

There is also a theory in biology that when too many individuals are stuffed into a small space, they will turn on each other (it was done with rats, if allowed to overbreed and fed unlimited food, they finally turn on each other and kill/eat one another, too many in the same cage.) Back east you guys have higher population than we out west do. I think that's why we don't have the race issues out here than still exist in the South and East. Just a thought.

"Glory" is also an awesome movie about the Civil War, excellent acting, good storytelling, Morgan Freeman sticks out for me. It's about the 54th out of Boston, all Black regiment. They were wiped out heroically at some point. I recommend it.

I just remember what the Peloponnesian plain is. When I did Greece back in the 80s we drove to "King Agammenon's Palace" which turned out to be ruins up on an "acropolis" IE a high knoll in the middle of this huge huge plain. The ruins were mostly just stones lying in lines in the grass, not much left (the lion gate was still there, Mycene era) but what impressed me was the incredible view they had. From the palace, you could look out across the Peloponnesian plains and see anyone coming with their army. It was a bit like in Lord of the Rings, these huge plains around cities and palaces built on hills.

After looking at the map, that's right. The Peloponnesis is a peninsula, a huge one. Very flat.

Here you go

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peloponnesian_War

War motivations are always interesting.... sorry I guess I absorbed that sort of thing being in the military, we talk about that sort of thing when bored in the shop. Lots of opinions! WWII I need to write down all the stories I heard about it from my father and uncles. One of my uncles "looked" Native American (he was only 1/8) he was in the First Division that invaded at Kasserine. Going up through Italy to Rome, he was shot so badly he was unrecognizable, and I think he got hauled off to a hospital and classified as a Turkish solidier, there was a whole collection of different nationalities and ethnicities in that particular battle. Anyway he was listed as MIA and presumed dead for a long time. Once he recovered enough to tell them who he was, they attached him to the Thunderbirds (a Native American unit) and shipped him home. Just a minor note in motivators in war. He was a funny guy too, was hospitalized with "shell shock" and learned to crochet while in recovery. Drank like a fish!