Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome

by Victor Davis Hanson

allies, Thebes and Sparta, quickly turned on each other in squabbles

  over booty, the treatment of defeated Athens, and respective spheres of

  influence. Indeed, for most of the ensuing half-century (403–362), the

  two rivals were in a near-constant state of conflict marked by pitched

  battles, frequent Spartan invasions of Boeotia, and brief armistices.

  Contemporaries largely viewed their early struggle as a sometimes lop-

  sided contest between a traditionally superior Spartan phalanx and an

  upstart Theban infantry hitherto considered formidable, but hardly an

  instrument capable of projecting Theban power beyond the confines

  of a cultural Boeotian backwater with a questionable history.4

  The on-again, off-again decades-long struggles, however, took a radi-

  cally different turn in 379 BC. In that year a remarkable group of Theban

  democrats overthrew the ruling oligarchs under Leontiades, who was

  propped up by Spartan overseers. In place of oligarchy, the reformers

  instituted a Boeotian confederate democracy freed from outside influ-

  ence and bent on ensuring a permanent end to Spartan meddling in the

  affairs of the Greek city-states. Not only did the ongoing war between

  the two rivals now assume a new ideological dimension, democracy

  versus oligarchy, but the conflict was energized by this new group of

  Theban firebrands, who were not quite doctrinaire in accepting tradi-

  tional notions of a balance of power between the city-states. Instead,

  led most notably by Pelopidas and, later, Epaminondas, Theban demo-

  crats came to the fore determined to eliminate permanently the source

  of the Spartan threat.

  In reaction, for much of the next eight years the Spartans were

  bent on revenge for their own expulsion from Boeotia. King Agesilaus

  rightly feared that the new Boeotian democracy under Epaminon-

  das was no longer just a rival polis but rather a unique revolutionary

  agent of change that could eventually threaten Sparta’s own interests

  in the Peloponnese, as well as refashion altogether the traditional

  The Doctrine of Preemptive War 95

  autonomous network of small individual city-states into larger and far

  more hostile democratic blocs and confederations. As a result of these

  apprehensions, between 379 and 375, on at least four occasions Spartan

  kings invaded, or attempted to invade, Boeotia to dismantle its new

  democratic Boeotian confederation.5

  Aside from occasional military alliances with Athens, the Boeotians

  turned to a variety of both passive and active strategies to blunt these

  serial Spartan offensives. At various times they resorted to erecting an

  extensive wooden stockade around their most fertile farmland. Some-

  times they harassed the invaders with both light-armed and mounted

  patrols. On rarer occasions they managed to draw them into skirmishes

  and small pitched battles, such as the surprisingly successful engage-

  ment at Tegyra in 375.

  This Theban democratic and Spartan oligarchic rivalry initially

  played out in limited fashion, according to traditional Greek protocols

  of annual invasions in which the invader tried to harm the agricultural

  infrastructure of the invaded state. While King Agesilaus, the archi-

  tect of the Theban invasions, almost succeeded for a season or two in

  bringing near famine to Thebes, and had established forts in a number

  of Boeotian cities—Plataea, Orchomenos, Tanagra, and Thespiae—the

  Spartans in their nearly decade-long efforts failed to end Theban demo-

  cratic control of Boeotia. These years of serial and inconclusive fight-

  ing in Boeotia explain not only Epaminondas’s later radical decision to

  meet the Spartans in pitched battle at Leuctra but also his subsequent,

  even larger gamble to attack Sparta itself. At some point in this decade,

  Epaminondas apparently saw there would be no end to the normal

  pattern of serial invasion and battle other than an end to Sparta as the

  Greeks had known it for the prior 300 years.6

  The Invasion of Winter and Spring 370–369

  The pulse of this long war of attrition changed radically a second time

  sometime in midsummer 371, when the Spartans broke the general ar-

  mistice of 375 and once again invaded Boeotia. But this time, under

  the leadership of the Theban general Epaminondas, the outnumbered

  Boeotian army at last chose to engage decisively the Spartan invaders

  96 Hanson

  in a dramatic pitched battle amid the rolling hills of Leuctra, not far

  from Thebes itself. There, in brilliant fashion, the Boeotian army nearly

  wrecked the invading force, killed the Spartan king Kleombrotos and

  about 400 of his elite 700 Spartan hoplites, as well as hundreds more of

  allied Peloponnesians, and sent the scattered survivors back home in

  shame and defeat, at once redefining the strategic balance of the Greek

  city-states and presaging a permanent end to what had been nearly an-

  nual Spartan invasions in the north.7

  Most prior decisive victories in Greek hoplite battle—First Coronea

  (447), Delion (424), or First Mantineia (418)—had led to a regional ces-

  sation of major fighting for a few years. But the win at Leuctra, despite

  its decisive nature, soon led to a resurgence of, not an end to, The-

  ban–Spartan hostilities, and proved to be a precursor of a vast reorder-

  ing of the Peloponnese. If the Sicilian expedition of 415–413, in which

  some 40,000 imperial Athenian soldiers and allies were lost, captured,

  or killed, ended the dream of an expanding Athenian empire, the loss

  of about 1,000 Peloponnesians and the humiliation of the legendary

  Spartan military prowess at Leuctra had a similar effect of ending the

  idea of Spartan expansionary policy and questioning the stability of its

  very rule beyond the vale of Laconia.

  About eighteen months after the battle (which occurred in July 371

  BC), during December 370–369 BC, the general Epaminondas convinced

  the Boeotian leadership to embark on a preemptory strike to the south.

  The ostensible reason for intervention was a call for help to the Thebans

  from the newly consolidated Arcadian city of Mantineia to ward off the

  threat of constant Spartan invasion by King Agesilaus. Epaminondas

  seems to have concluded that even after Leuctra, the Spartan army still

  threatened large democratic states, and that it would only be a matter

  of time until the Spartans regrouped and attempted yet another annual

  incursion into Boeotia. The timely invitation from the Arcadians and

  other Peloponnesians to intervene on their behalf seems to have galva-

  nized Epaminondas into envisioning an even larger—and final—plan to

  end the Spartan hegemony of the Peloponnese altogether.8

  Epaminondas’s huge al ied army included thousands of Pelopon-

  nesians who joined the invasion at various places south of the Corinthian

  Isthmus, among them perhaps some of those Peloponnesians spared

  The Doctrine of Preemptive War 97

  over a year earlier at Leuctra. The march fol owed a nearly 200-mile

  route into the heart of the Spartan state, a legendarily inviolate land-

  scape said to have been untouched by
enemies for some 350 years. After

  ravaging the Spartan homeland and bottling the Spartan army up inside

  the city across the icy Eurotas, the Boeotians failed to storm the acrop-

  olis. Instead, after burning the Spartan port at Gytheion twenty-seven

  miles to the south, Epaminondas’s Boeotians, along with some contin-

  gents of their victorious Peloponnesian al ies, decided to head west in

  midwinter across the range of Mt. Taygetos into Messenia, the historical

  breadbasket of the Spartan state, where indentured serfs, known as hel-

  ots, supplied foodstuffs and manpower for the Spartan state.9

  The Boeotians probably descended from the uplands of Taygetos

  sometime after the first of the year 369 BC, routed the Spartans from

  their rich protectorate in Messenia, freed most of the helots there, and

  helped to found the vast citadel of Messene. Before they departed the

  following spring, Epaminondas had ensured a new autonomous and

  democratic state of Messenia, its fortified capital at Messene now es-

  sentially immune from Spartan reprisals. And by the time Epaminondas

  had marched home, he had humiliated the Spartan state and ended its

  parasitical reliance on Messenian food, a relationship essential to free-

  ing up the Spartan warrior-citizen caste to focus on warfare. His dream

  of an anti-Spartan axis anchored by Messene, the new fortified Man-

  tineia, and the rising Megalopolis seemed to be approaching reality.10

  The remarkable invasion itself was an anomaly in a variety of ways.

  Early fourth-century Greek armies, even after the innovative tactics

  that emerged during the Peloponnesian War (431–404), still usually

  marched in late spring, preferably around the time of the grain harvest,

  to ensure good weather and secure adequate rations in the field, as well

  as to have a better chance at burning the ripening and drying wheat

  and barley crops of the invaded. Such seasonal armies usually were

  not absent for more than a few days or weeks because of their own

  harvesttime obligations. As nonprofessionals, they had little ability to

  provision themselves for extended stays abroad, whether judged by dis-

  tance or by time away from home. Usually the target was a nearby en-

  emy army or the agricultural resources of a neighboring hostile power

  rather than the utter defeat of a more distant adversity and the end of

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  its existence as an autonomous state. Total war intended to destroy a

  relatively large state was rare.11

  Epaminondas in remarkable fashion ignored most of such past pro-

  tocol of internecine Greek warfare. He chose to leave Thebes in De-

  cember, when there were no standing crops in the field, the roads were

  muddy, and his one-year tenure as Boeotarch was set to expire within

  days of his departure at the first of the Boeotian year. He may have

  remained gone for as long as five to six months, until near late spring

  harvesttime, 369. And Epaminondas faced certain trial on his return for

  violating the terms of his one-year tenure of command. His aims were

  not just the defeat of the Spartan military or even occupation of the

  Spartan acropolis but apparently, either before or after he arrived in the

  Peloponnese, a sustained effort to end the Spartan state itself.12

  Clearly, there was a sense of urgency in his decision to wage such an

  unprecedented preemptive war in midwinter, and that anomaly raises

  a number of critical questions. Was such a preemptive strike unusual

  in Greek history? What were the larger aims of Epaminondas, and did

  he achieve his long-term objectives? Or did his Boeotians simply widen

  an already long and costly struggle between two former allies? Was

  such a preemptive war sustainable, given domestic political opposition

  at home and the finite resources available for such costly and lengthy

  commitments abroad? And does the Theban experience with preemp-

  tive war and spreading democracy have any lessons for the present?

  Before answering those questions, it should be noted again that

  while the classical world considered Epaminondas among its most

  preeminent heroes, we have very little information about his career,

  and we know even less about the details of his great first invasion of

  the Peloponnese and the founding of Messene. There are no surviv-

  ing in-depth ancient speeches that reflect his plans, or much editorial-

  izing on the part of historians about his intentions. Xenophon, the only

  extant contemporary historian of the era who chronicled the Theban

  invasions, either did not appreciate the magnitude of Epaminondas’s

  achievement (Epaminondas is not mentioned by name in the Hellenica

  until his final campaign and death at Mantineia; see 7.5.4–25) or har-

  bored a generic prejudice against all things Theban. Plutarch’s life of

  Epaminondas is lost. As a result, we rely on bits and pieces in Diodorus,

  The Doctrine of Preemptive War 99

  Plutarch’s Pelopidas and Agesilaus, Pausanias, and later compilers such

  as Nepos. To a large degree, the motivations and aims of Epaminondas

  are difficult to recover and remain seemingly iconoclastic and not easy

  to fathom.13

  Preemptive and Preventive Wars

  Both preemptive and preventive wars in varying degrees are justified as

  defensive acts, and thus supposedly differ from wars of outright aggres-

  sion or blatantly punitive strikes. No one, for example, suggests that

  the Persian king Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 to prevent an impending

  major Hellenic attack on the Persian Empire. Nor did Alexander the

  Great cross the Hellespont to stop Darius III from striking Greece first.

  For all the talk of “the brotherhood of man,” he was bent on aggres-

  sion, plunder, and conquest, under the banner of paying the Persians

  back for more than a century of meddling in Greek affairs.

  Despite the Athenian rhetoric of 415, on the eve of the disastrous Si-

  cilian Expedition, about past grievances and future dangers emanating

  from the West, such as Alcibiades’s warning that “Men do not rest con-

  tent with parrying the attacks of a superior, but often strike the first blow

  to prevent the attack being made,” few Athenians probably believed the

  pretense that the expedition against Syracuse anticipated, either in the

  short or the long term, a Sicilian attack on the Athenian Empire. In-

  stead, this too was a clear case of imperial aggression, aimed at finding

  strategic advantage during a hiatus in the Peloponnesian War. The list

  of such unambiguously aggressive wars could easily be expanded in the

  Greek world and would include such episodes as the Persian invasions

  of Greek territory in 492 and 490, Agesilaus’s attack on Asia Minor in

  396 to liberate the Greek city-states of Ionia, and Philip’s descent into

  Greece in 338, which culminated in the Greek defeat at Chaeronea.14

  In contrast, among the so-called defensive wars, preemption is usu-

  ally distinguished from preventive war by the apparent perception—or

  at least claim—of a credibly imminent threat. The reality of that as-

  sertion determines whether an attack is generally accepted as genu-

  ine
ly defensive. When a state—often one considered the traditionally

  weaker side—preempts and strikes first, it is supposedly convinced that

  100 Hanson

  otherwise an existentially hostile target itself will surely soon attack,

  and will do so with much greater advantage. Again, this initial aggres-

  sion of preemptive wars is usually framed as defensive in nature, if the

  presence of a looming danger is generally recognized. And the argu-

  ment is strengthened further if there is a past history of conflict be-

  tween the two belligerents.15

  Truly preventive wars, on the other hand, such as the Iraq War

  of 2003 or the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, are

  much more controversial. The attacker—now usually assumed to be

  the stronger power—claims that time will increasingly favor the geo-

  political status of an innately aggressive and strengthening adversary

  that sooner or later might strike and change the status quo. Thus the

  instigator believes that its own inevitably declining position vis-à-vis a

  belligerent rival can be aborted by weakening or eliminating a potential

  threat before such an action proves less promising or impossible in the

  future. But because the imminence of danger is usually far less likely to

  be universally recognized than is true in cases of preemption, and since

  the initiator is usually the currently more militarily powerful, preven-

  tive wars are far more often easily criticized as wars of aggression.

  The Japanese, for example, convinced no one that their “preventive”

  Pearl Harbor strike of December 7, 1941, was aimed at weakening an

  enemy that otherwise would only have one day become stronger in an

  inevitable American-Japanese war to come. Most felt it was the first step

  in a westward expansion across the Pacific to augment the preexisting

  Japanese-led Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. In turn, the United States did

  not seek to strike Japan first, out of fear that such an attack might not

  be seen as an understandable preemptive war to ward off an imminent

  Japanese aggression but rather at best as a more controversial preven-

  tive war that would be denounced by many isolationist Americans as

  optional, bellicose, and imperial rather than defensive and necessary.

  A beleaguered Israel, to general world approval, preempted by mere

  hours its Arab enemies during the Six-Day War of June 1967 by striking