by Ober, Josiah
The Melian oligarchs’ “irrational” decision to fight demonstrated the limits of the rationality of acquiescence to Athenian rule. Ominously for the Athenians, if the rulers of enough states were similarly irrational in making their choices about resistance or submission, the Athenians would be unable to maintain their empire. They could take on only so many battles at one time, even assuming the high standard of military efficiency that they had manifested in the suppression of the Mytilenean revolt. The decision of the Melians to gamble on resistance pointed to a weakness in the sophistical “realist” analysis of power and human motivation. In the wake of Melos, Thucydides’ text would seem to imply, the Athenians would do well to remember Pericles’ cautious advice that there be no attempt to expand the empire until the war against the Peloponnesians had been concluded on terms favorable to Athens.
ATHENS VS. SYRACUSE
In the summer following the attack on Melos, the Athenians embarked on the most ambitious military operation of the war: a massive invasion of Sicily, aimed at conquest of the superpolis of Syracuse and at radically expanding the Athenian empire into the western Mediterranean. Thucydides (6.8–26) offers a detailed narrative of the assembly meeting at which the decision was made. Although a substantial Athenian force had campaigned in Sicily in the 420s in support of states friendly to Athens, Thucydides claims that the Athenian voters were largely ignorant of the physical size, demography, and political history of Sicily. He implies that they were misled by Alcibiades, the most prominent of the hawkish leaders who overemphasized divisions within and between Sicilian poleis. Others, by contrast, urged caution. The most prominent of the cautious leaders was Nicias, the general who had brokered the peace with Sparta in 421 and who, ironically, ended up as Athens’ chief commander on Sicily. Nicias pointed to Sicilian manpower and material resources that could be brought to bear against an Athenian invasion and challenged the hawks’ optimistic portrayal of Sicilian divisiveness.60
In fact, the situation in Sicily was complex. In the decades after the end of the tyrannies and the establishment of republican governments in the 460s, the Sicilian economy, still heavily based on agricultural exports, continued to grow. Carthage and the Aegean Greek world provided ready markets for Sicilian food products. Wealthy Syracuse and Akragas, and to a lesser degree other Sicilian poleis, spent lavishly on public buildings, minted large issues of silver coins, and became centers of culture and science. There were, however, deep political divisions—and not only between Greek poleis. In the 450s, Syracuse, Akragas, and the major Greek states had confronted an insurgent movement driven by ethnic nationalism among the native Sikels of east-central Sicily. That movement had been crushed and its leader coopted, leaving Syracuse free to rebuild a mini-empire in eastern and northern Sicily. Hostilities had flared anew between democratic Syracuse and oligarchic Akragas. Leontini in eastern Sicily was threatened by Syracuse’s expansion. The major Elymian city of Segesta was threatened by Greek Selinous. And there were festering social tensions within Sicilian Greek cities, dating back to the fall of the tyrannies, centered on disputes over citizenship and property and on antagonism arising from stark inequalities between wealthy elites and ordinary residents.
Athenians who attended to Sicily’s growing economic prosperity could have concluded either that it would be a tough opponent or a highly desirable prize. Those focusing on Sicilian politics might point either to endemic divisions that an invader might readily exploit or to the alliance among Sicilian poleis that had doomed the Carthagian invasion of 480. In the background was the historical tendency of the Sicilian Greek cities to exchange information and to follow regional trends in cascades of emulation—a factor that could tilt either in the invaders’ favor or against them.
The original agenda of the Athenian assembly meeting at which the fateful decision was made to invade Sicily with a massive force was quite narrowly framed: The assembly was to decide on details of the logistics for a relatively modest military expedition to Sicily, of about the same magnitude as the Athenian force that had campaigned there in the 420s. The expedition’s ostensible goals were defensive, to support Segesta and other Athenian allies against expansionism on the part of Syracuse and Selinous. But Nicias, who was an elected general in 415, feared that a modest expedition could quickly escalate, given the ambitions of the Athenian hawks.
In what proved to be a fateful speech to the assembly, Nicias unconstitutionally raised an issue that was not on the Council-approved agenda: the option of canceling the expedition altogether. He also ferociously attacked the character and motivations of Alcibiades, the prominent hawkish leader. Then, when the assembly evinced no interest in scuttling the planned expedition, Nicias tried a second ploy. He raised the stakes of the invasion, arguing that if there must be an expedition to Sicily, it must be a huge one, since only a supersized force would be able to control the risk of failure. He gambled that the Athenians would prefer the no-expedition option to the high cost of guaranteeing the outcome by voting for a hugely expensive show of military might. As it turned out, he badly misjudged his audience.
In a logical inverse of the irrational (from a cost–benefit, probable-outcome perspective) choice to risk everything on a slight chance of saving everything, made a year before by the oligarchs of Melos, the democratic Athenians proved ready to pay an irrationally high “insurance rate” to lock in the gains they now felt confident they could reap from the expedition. Once again, as Kahneman’s experimental work on prospect theory demonstrates, this is a common reaction of people facing the possibility of a large gain. They willingly spend heavily to ensure against a small chance of failure.
In this instance, as Thucydides pointedly noted, the common “prospective gain” response was so strong in the assembly that those citizens who remained opposed were unwilling to express criticism, lest they be labeled unpatriotic: Athens’ most important single decision of the long Peloponnesian War was thus made under a cloud of constitutional violation, explicable but potentially disastrous irrationality, and false consensus bought at the cost of stifled dissent. In future years, the Athenians sought to correct the institutional design flaws that had made this decision possible (ch. 9). But for now the die was cast, and the expedition launched. After some setbacks, including the loss of Alcibiades, Athens’ most hawkish—and most talented—general to a legal prosecution arising from charges of impiety, the Athenian force settled in to besiege the big and heavily fortified city of Syracuse.
Over the next two years, many things went wrong for the Athenian invaders, while things went right for Syracuse’s defenders. In the end, the Sicilian expedition resulted in the greatest military catastrophe in Athenian history. Perhaps with better luck, the expedition could have succeeded. But, contrary to the Athenians’ belief that their overinsurance had eliminated risk, the expedition was a very risky gamble from the start. Sicily was not Lesbos, and Syracuse was not Mytilene. As Thucydides points out, Syracuse was, in relevant ways, Athens’ twin: The two superpoleis were similar in population; both had big navies; both were experienced at land warfare based on building and defending fortifications. And both were democracies. Although, as we have seen, they were quite different sorts of democracy, Syracuse manifested a very “Athens-like” resilience and social cohesion under conditions of extreme pressure, and likewise a capacity for strategic insight and ruthlessness in exploiting its advantages. Syracuse’s population was as productively diverse and innovative as that of Athens. And Athens had no experience with an Athenslike opponent.61
The disunity of the Sicilians, anticipated by the Athenians based on their information regarding Sicily’s ethnic diversity and its history of interstate rivalry, failed to materialize. Instead the invasion produced a typical Sicilian emulation cascade, in Syracuse’s favor: The Athenians were regarded as outsiders, who were no more likely to pursue the interests of the Sicilian poleis if victorious than were the Carthaginians before them. Meanwhile, Athens’ primary ally, Segesta, had wildly over
represented the material support that Athens would be able to muster locally. As a result, the expedition had to be resupplied overseas from Athens—a daunting and hugely expensive prospect as the years dragged on.
The Syracusan defenders furthermore had the advantage of the advice of a Spartan military expert—and the sense to take it. After it became clear to the Spartans that the Sicilian invasion meant that the war with Athens was reengaged, they dispatched Gylippos to Sicily. Like Brasidas and a few other Spartan commanders in this war, Gylippos belied the Cornithian stereotype of the slow, conservative, risk-averse Spartan. A Spartan citizen, he had the standard intensive Spartan training and extensive field experience. But he seems also to have thought through the lessons of both Spartan and Athenian military campaigns of the mid-fifth century onward. In brief, fulfilling the boasts of fifth century sophists, he had mastered a great deal of technical knowledge and he was able to instruct others in what he knew in ways that made them much more effective at gaining their ends. The final outcome of the effective Syracusan resistance was the complete destruction of the Athenian land and sea forces in 413 BCE. Very few of the many thousands of soldiers and sailors who left Athens in 415 ever returned.62
FINAL PHASE OF THE WAR
Athens did not give up. Syracuse was slow in taking the war to the mainland: The victory over Athens was followed by resurgent social conflict, a roiling series of political reforms that ended in replacing the democracy with yet another tyranny, and a second Carthaginian attempt to conquer much of the island. Meanwhile, despite building a permanent base in Athenian territory, which denied the Athenians access to much of their land for the rest of the war, the Spartans failed to capitalize on Athens’ gigantic setback in the west. Although individual Spartans, like Gylippos, were adroit at achieving tactical and strategic ends, Sparta as a state was as yet unable to act with enough decisiveness and speed to put an end to the war. Athens was still able to draw on a big capital fund that had been kept in reserve for just this sort of emergency. A new Athenian fleet was quickly built and manned. Revolts across the empire were contained. Work recommenced on public projects.
In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe in Sicily, Athens’ democratic government was temporarily replaced by a narrow oligarchy. The regime change followed a series of temporary constitutional adjustments and a terrorist campaign by antidemocratic Athenians. The terrorists assassinated democratic leaders and sought to create fear and suspicion among the citizenry. The coup initially succeeded, but the oligarchs never consolidated their authority. They were rightly suspected by the middling hoplites, the very men they claimed to represent, of planning to allow a Spartan takeover of Athens.
Meanwhile, the main Athenian fleet, now based in Samos, constituted itself as a democratic government in exile and continued military operations in the Aegean. The narrow oligarchy was soon replaced by a broad-based “hoplite republic,” which then morphed back into full democracy. The Cleisthenic constitutional order once again proved its robustness in the face of severe shocks. The long-term result of the oligarchic interlude was the reorganization of the Athenian law code. The reform process was not completed until after the end of the war, but it eventually had major implications for the Athenian and, more generally, the Greek economy (ch. 9).63
Meanwhile, the Spartans finally realized that the war could not be won without access to capital sufficient to allow them to build and man a fleet capable of challenging the Athenian navy—thereby disrupting Athens’ capacity to bring overwhelming force quickly to bear against defecting subjects. The only available source of capital was Persia, and so the Spartans cut a deal: Persia would supply the money. Once Athens was defeated, Sparta would allow subject states of the Athenian empire to be reincorporated into the Persian Empire. Sparta duly built fleets and found competent commanders and skilled rowers, but then, so did the Athenians, who welcomed back the brilliant general Alcibiades—only to expel him again. The war dragged on for years. Naval operations were focused in the northern Aegean and especially at the Hellespont, the vital choke point for Athenian imports of grain from the Black Sea.
Finally, in 406 BCE, the decision by several Athenian generals to pursue the Spartan fleet after a difficult Athenian naval victory led to the loss of many Athenian rowers in a storm.64 The infuriated Athenian assembly violated ordinary legal procedure by convicting the generals en masse. The next year’s college of elected generals was uncharacteristically risk averse. That all-too-predictable strategic quirk allowed the Spartan general to destroy much of Athens’ main fleet on a Hellespontine beach at the battle of Aigospotamoi (map 7). This time, Athens lacked the resources to rebuild.65
The Athenians surrendered in 404 BCE. The city and its population were spared; the Spartans needed to maintain a counterweight to their sometime ally, Thebes, in central Greece. But Athens’ walls were slighted, the fleet destroyed, the empire dismantled. Political authority in the polis was turned over to a hand-picked gang of pro-Spartan antidemocrats. Their leaders styled themselves students of Socrates but quickly proved themselves lawless kleptocrats who killed and exiled at will and confiscated the property of wealthy foreign residents.66
Athens’ loss in the Peloponnesian War ended the most extensive, in duration and extent, and the most influential, in economic and cultural terms, Greek empire of the classical age. Successor mini-empires, led by Syracuse, Sparta, and Thebes were smaller and more ephemeral. With the defeat of Athens, the desire for strong citizenship and local autonomy seems to have trumped the cost–benefit logic of rational acquiescence to imperial rule. And so the Greek world continued on its path as an outlier in the world history of city-state ecologies, in terms of both extent and robustness of decentralized political authority. As it turned out, no Greek city-state would ever follow the trajectory of the imperial city-states of Babylon and Rome (for example), by successfully transforming a small-state ecology into a great and durable empire.
If the era of Greek efflorescence had coincided with the Athenian imperial age, classical Greece would not be such a notable outlier and we would not need to explain how efflorescence could be sustained in a decentralized ecology of states. The end of the golden age of Greek empire did not, however, mark either the beginning or the end of Greek economic growth and cultural accomplishment. The rise of imperial Athens stimulated growth across the Greek world, but the fall of Athens did not trigger an economic collapse. Indeed, the era that followed the Peloponnesian War, while catastrophically disordered from a Hobbesian “imperative of central authority” perspective, marked the apex of the classical Greek efflorescence.
9
DISORDER AND GROWTH, 403–340 BCE
A POSTWAR WORLD
In the century following the end of the Peloponnesian War, Hellas reached the peak of the classical-era efflorescence. That Hellas would be highly developed by the late fourth century BCE was, however, far from obvious to Greek observers of the immediate postwar generation: Xenophon, Plato, and Isocrates each characterized their Greek world as without leadership, lacking order, and plagued by chaotic wars and endemic civil strife. In the fourth century BCE, Hellas was in effect divided into three zones, each with its own political and economic trajectory. In the first half of the fourth century, each zone saw what look like signal failures when viewed from the perspective of the golden age of empire: In the west, polis republics collapsed and warlords reigned. In central Greece, grand imperial projects came to nothing. In Anatolia, the Great King reasserted Persian control over Greek states.1
Whereas the history of the Greek world for much of the fifth century was defined by the rise and fall of an empire in a power struggle among a few superpoleis, fourth century Greek history is a shifting collage, with many significant players engaged in a bewildering range of historically consequential enterprises. If the late classical peak was not the result of commands emanating from a central authority, neither can it be explained by rivalry among a handful of competitors for that role. It was produce
d by the choices and actions of millions of individuals and hundreds of collectivities, each pursuing advantage in an expanding ecology characterized by fierce competition, rational cooperation, and growing opportunities for profitable specialization.
In the west, the poleis of Sicily suffered an economic and demographic downturn. Major cities were reduced to villages; parts of the countryside were abandoned. Citizen-centered regimes that arose after the fall of the early fifth century tyrannies were overthrown. The political landscape was dominated by a volatile mix of exploitative autocratic states and predatory nonstate military organizations led by skilled and ruthless violence specialists with short time horizons. The sharp downturn in Sicily was, however, followed by a quick recovery in the decades after ca. 340 BCE. Cities were refounded and given republican constitutions. The population of Greek Sicily rebounded with immigration from Italy and central Greece, and agricultural productivity bounced back to fifth century levels. Meanwhile, the creation of new poleis and the Hellenization of native Sicilian settlements continued apace. Almost a third of the Sicilian communities listed in the Inventory as poleis (14 of 47) achieved that status between 400 and 323 BCE.