The deaths of Cleon and Brasidas, together with the imminent expiration of the Argive peace, as well as the Athenian occupation of Cythera, which provides a base for deserting helots, …

…lead in 421 BCE to the misguided Peace of Nicias and an alliance with the Spartans, ending the war (called, in this stage, Archidamian, from Archidamus, the Spartan king), in stalemate.

The essence of the Peace of Nicias is a return to the prewar situation: most wartime gains are to be returned.

Sparta has resoundingly failed to destroy the Athenian empire, and in this sense Athens, whatever its financial and human losses, has won the war.

Aristophanes in The Wasps, produced in 422 BCE, had ridiculed the mania for litigation and paid jury service displayed by the senior citizens of Athens.

Euripides in the same year had written another patriotic play, The Suppliant Women.

Aristophanes celebrates the recent armistice with Sparta in The Peace, produced in 421 BCE.

Construction begins in this year on the Erechtheum, where the Ionic order, near its apogee, is displayed to great advantage.

Athens is to retain the Messenian harbor of Pylos; …

…Sparta is to retain Amphipolis.

Corinth and …

…Boeotia, however, reject the peace from the outset.

The Tholos at Delphi constructed around 420 BCE marks the first emergence of a round temple form.

The newly designed Corinthian capitals make their initial appearance on temple exteriors around the same time.

The Nike of Paeonius is erected outside the Temple of Zeus at Olympia in about 420 BCE.

According to the inscription on the base, it was dedicated by the people of Messenia and Naupactus after a victory in an unnamed conflict, possibly the battle of Sphacteria.

Paeonius also won the commission to decorate the acroteria of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia (about 430 - 420 BCE), Pausanias was probably wrong in claiming that he worked on the sculptures for the pediments of the temple.

The Nike of Paeonius will be featured as part of the design of the medals of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens and is today exhibited at the Archaeological Museum of Olympia.

The armistice between Athens and Sparta proves ultimately unstable, because, although there have been no significant hostilities, neither side has fully complied with the terms of the inconclusive Peace of Nicias.

When in 422 the death of Cleon made peace with Sparta possible, Laches had served on the commission that negotiated terms.

He has supported Nicias' attempts to preserve the peace, but cannot prevent the dangerous alliance of Athens with Argos and Mantineia.

Sophocles between 430 and 420 produces The Trachinian Women, a play that deals with the violence of sexual passion.

Like Aeschylus in his earlier Oresteia, Sophocles retells a part of the tragedy of the House of Atreus in his explicit version of Electra, produced between 420 and 410.

Like Aeschylus, Sophocles recounts justice and vengeance in Agamemnon’s family but focuses on the sensitively drawn character of Electra.

The city of Elis, again allied with Sparta during this phase of the Peloponnesian War, in 420 defects to the side of Athens, as does …