PING
Wow, VDH says alot in a little article!
it was only 75 years or so from the year that the united Greeks turned back Darius, to the end of the disastrous Peloponnesian wars...and the first 30 or 40 years of that period was the golden age of Athens.
So, really, the decline came very, very rapidly, just a generation or a generation and a half.
Sure, Greece limped on for a while. But who would have thought the the decline from the Age of Pericles could be so total, and so swift?