**Intact Gift Giving Condition book**

“Packed with intrigue and the politics of empire, revolution, and war, this accessible history of a tangled relationship between nations might strike some readers, the author warns, as ‘uncomfortably relevant.’” —New York Times No period has more profoundly influenced the Western world than classical Greece, and at its center stood two cities: Athens and Sparta. From an award-winning historian, the definitive history of classical Greece and the rivalry between its two greatest cities. Side by side, they beat the Persians, the only superpower of that age. Yet later, they spread conflict and destruction throughout the eastern Mediterranean, culminating in the horrors of the Peloponnesian War.