Peace was performed at the City Dionysia in 421 BCE, just days before the signing of the fifty-year treaty known as the Peace of Nikias, which brought an end to the first ten years of the Peloponnesian War. The negotiations that led up to this definitive moment for Athens and Sparta had been initiated the previous summer by the simultaneous deaths of Cleon and Brasidas at Amphipolis, who had been, according to Thucydides, ‘the two principal opponents of peace on either side’ (5.16.1). These unexpected deaths created a power vacuum which was filled by more moderate politicians on both sides of the conflict—Nikias and Pleistoanax, respectively—each of whom had his own personal reasons for desiring peace, apart from alleviating the battle fatigue felt keenly throughout the Greek world by this point. At Athens, the break in military action occasioned by this transference of power put the focus back on the political situation at home, and it was during this break that Aristophanes produced his cautiously optimistic play Peace, which, in its celebration of this fortuitous turn of events, also displayed a renewed interest in the well-being of the Athenian home front at this time.