A catastrophic twenty-seven year long conflict, the Peloponnesian War can rightly be said to have ended the Greek Golden Age. It decimated the population of the Greek world, and ultimately solved nothing. “Never before had so many cities been captured and then devastated; never had there been so many exiles; never such loss of life” (Thuc.1.23). All of our sources agree that Alcibiades was one of the main protagonists in this awful war.