The fifth century BC was not only the first Classic age of European civilisation. It was the first and last period before the Romans in which great political and military power was located in the same place as cultural importance. This volume therefore is more narrowly focused geographically than its predecessors and successors, and hardly strays beyond Greece.

Two series of narrative chapters, one on the growth of the Athenian Empire and the development of the Athenian Empire and the development of Athenian democracy, the other on the Peloponnesian War which brought them down, are divided by a series of studies in which the artistic and literary achievements of the fifth century are described.