Hanson, op cit, pp 101-2: "The historian Xenophon noted, when news arrived at Athens that Lysander was on his way into Piraeus, that panic broke out among the citizens who though that they might now suffer some of the barbarity that they had inflicted on others, running the gamut from planning to cut off the right thumbs or entire hands of captive seamen and throwing captured crews overboard in the high seas, to butchering the Histiaeans, Scionaeans, Toronaeans, Aeginetans, 'and many other Greek peoples.' In the new Athenian world there was nothing intrinsically at odds with citizens watching a play of Euripides' one day and voting to kill the adult male citizens of Scione the next. "Indeed, in the very midst of the war the Athenians nevertheless pursued art and culture as they always had. Take, for example, a sample period between 411 and 408, when a seemingly exhausted Athens was plagued by internal revolution and the Spartan plundering from Decelea, while fighting for its life in a series of climactic sea battles at Cynossema, Abydos, and Cyzicus. Nevertheless, in the midst of such killing and calamity, Aristophanes staged his masterpiece antiwar comedy Lysistrata (411), followed by Thesmophoriazusae - fantasy plays in which women take state policy and the courts into their own hands. And while the masons were nearing completion of the Erechtheum, the last and most daring of Pericles' envisioned Acropolis temples, Euripides produced one of his darkest tragedies, Orestes, and Sophocles his majestic Philoctetes - about the unconquerable will of an unfairly tormented hero who resists the forces of accommodation. Actors, theatergoers, and artisans alike might ride, row, or riot in between plays and stonecutting." Comment: Someone I read recently (I don't think it was Hanson) wrote, in effect, that more great works of literature were written in and about war than in and about peace. I believe it was with that understanding that Fukuyama didn't end his title with The End of History, but added The Last Man. Nietzsche's "Last Man" lives during a time of perpetual peace and creates no great works of art - or anything else. It is during some form of aggressive affirmation rather than passive acceptance that the great works are created - so Nietzsche and Fukuyama would have argued, and they may have been influenced in this to some extent by their study of the Peloponnesian War. Lawrence Helm San Jacinto