The initial failure to destroy Sparta itself in 369 meant that a short
preemptive war transmogrified into a decade-long slog, requiring far
more resources than originally envisioned. The beguiling attraction
of preemptive war is that it is seen as an economical means to solve
a problem of a dangerous and disadvantageous peace, without lead-
ing to a drawn-out, exhausting war. So it is unlikely that Epaminondas
108 Hanson
envisioned in 370 that his initial winter invasion would almost immedi-
ately be followed by a second late summer return in 369, and two more
within the next seven years, with the endpoint his own death in battle
against the Spartans eight years later at Mantineia.
Similarly, after the 2003 war, the United States and its allies appar-
ently understood that their preemptive effort to remove Saddam
Hussein would immediately require some sort of occupation. The co-
alition’s fostering of civil, democratic society was designed to preclude
the reemergence of a similarly autocratic leader like Saddam Hussein
who might likewise translate Iraqi’s enormous petroleum wealth into
military arsenals, regional aggression, and threats to a great deal of the
world’s oil reserves.
The premise at first appeared sound. But the calculation of the de-
gree of difficulty in bringing the first constitutional government to
the Arab Islamic Middle East, in the heart of the ancient caliphate,
was overly optimistic, for neither Iraq nor the Middle East in general
proved immediately receptive to foreign-imposed democratic govern-
ment following the end of Saddam Hussein. Given the nature of the
modern democratic consumer capitalist society, the American public
and its European allies were far less willing to tolerate a five-year oc-
cupation, costing more than 4,200 dead and nearly a trillion dollars in
expenditures, than a tiny Boeotia was to support the nine-year plan
of Epaminondas, which, from the victory at Leuctra to the defeat at
Mantineia, meant nearly constant fighting and an endless financial and
human drain on a poor agricultural state. The enemies of Epaminon-
das no doubt made some of the identical arguments against a foreign
preemptive war that antiwar opponents brought against the Iraq con-
flict, among them that the long-term gains were uncertain, while the
immediate costs were undeniable.
To be successful, then, preemption, like preventive wars, must change
the conditions for the original hostility, and rather promptly, either by
destroying an enemy altogether, as was the case of Carthage in Rome’s
Third Punic War, or by altering its politics to create an al y in place of an
enemy. And while a preemptive strike may weaken an enemy, it is risky
to leave a wounded target, angry and with a desire and a legal basis for
retaliation.
The Doctrine of Preemptive War 109
In the end, preemptive war is a paradox. It is attractive because it
offers a quick, sudden means of eliminating a threat and assumes that
the enemy will not have the military means to withstand attack, but to
be successful in the long run, it often involves a postwar investment at
odds with its original attraction of quick, surprise, and limited attacks.
Democratic Irony
In both the ancient Peloponnese and contemporary Iraq, preemptive
war was intended to lead to the creation of new democratic states that
in turn would enhance regional stability and evolve into like-minded
democratic parties. To a large extent this was true of the consequences
of Epaminondas’s invasion of 370–369, as Mantineia, Megalopolis, and
Messene for a time became the fetters that prevented the Spartan army
from either reconstituting the Spartan land empire or marching north-
ward toward the isthmus. That said, as democratic autonomous states,
their own foreign policies reflected local concerns that sometimes
could transcend ideological solidarity and hinge more on balance-of-
power considerations. By 362 Mantineia, for example, was back on the
side of oligarchic Sparta and fighting kindred democratic Thebes.
Again, the irony is that unleashing the democratic genie hardly
ensures perpetual allegiance to its liberator, as the United States dis-
covered through much of 2008 in acrimonious negotiations with the
Iraqi government over everything from future security guarantees to
relations with Iran. That said, it was a truism in the ancient world, as
it is in the modern world, that democratic states are less likely than oli-
garchies to fight other democracies, a fact that eventually works to the
long-term advantage of democratic liberators .
Ancient Preemption and Modern Iraq
By 2004 many observers were citing the infamous Athenian expedi-
tion to Sicily of 415–413, launched during a lull in the Peloponnesian
War—200 Athenian imperial ships lost, tens of thousands of coalition
troops lost or unaccounted for—as the proper warning about the Iraq
War. Both the United States and ancient Athens, it was argued, with
110 Hanson
plenty of enemies in an ongoing war, had foolishly “taken their eye
off the ball” and had preempted and unilaterally begun yet another
optional conflict, this time unnecessarily against an enemy that posed
no elemental threat. Many commentators pointed to the hysterical
warmongering in the Athenian assembly on the eve of the war, graphi-
cally related by the historian Thucydides, as an eerie reminder of how
rhetors, generals, and politicians can whip up public sentiment for fool-
hardy disastrous imperial schemes.26
But on closer examination, many of the apparent similarities col-
lapse. The democratic Athenians attacked the largest democracy in the
ancient world, at a time when Syracuse had a larger resident popula-
tion than Athens itself. To keep such a dubious ancient–modern anal-
ogy proper, it would be instead as if the United States, in a relative
truce with radical Islam, suddenly invaded a distant and democratic
India, a multi-religious state that was not a threat but was far distant,
and larger than the United States itself.
More problematic still is Thucydides’ analytical assessment of the
Sicilian disaster, in some ways at odds with his own prior narrative of
events. Defeat at Syracuse, he says, was not preordained. It arose not
necessarily from poor planning or flawed thinking, although his own
history in books VI and VII often suggests just that. The real culprit,
the historian argues in his summation, was the inability of the Athe-
nians at home to fully support the war they had authorized—a theme
he sounds frequently in his history, especially in the speeches of the
Athenian statesman Pericles, who chastised the fickle Athenians for be-
ing for the Peloponnesian War when they thought it would be easy and
short, and then blaming him for sole responsibility when the struggle
proved difficult and long.27
Instead, for rough paral els in the ancient world that better serve as
reminders about the complexities of the preemptive war and its after-<
br />
math—with special reference to Iraq in particular—none is more tel ing
than Epaminondas’s invasion of 370–369. The Boeotians’ preemptive war
was aimed at eliminating a longstanding hostile regime in hopes of en-
suring stability and al iance by fostering democracy in the region. Prior
to the preemptive attack, Boeotia had been in an on-and-off war with
Sparta even longer than the twelve-year hostility between the United
The Doctrine of Preemptive War 111
States and Iraq that began in 1990 with the Iraqi attack on Kuwait and
continued with the subsequent American enforcement of no-fly zones
within Iraqi airspace. Epaminondas and his advisers, both at home and
abroad, were seen to have been democratic zealots, eager to enact far-
reaching goals that were both beyond the resources of Boeotia and
without reliable long-term public support. Indeed, Pythagorean utopian
zealots supposedly surrounded Epaminondas in the same manner that
neoconservative idealists purportedly influenced George W. Bush.28
To judge whether either the American or Boeotian efforts were
wise, or achieved results that justified the ensuing expense, in some
sense depends on how one adjudicates the ensuing strategic calculus,
the relative human and material costs of the respective invasions, and
the number of lives that were helped or hurt by the enterprise. Before
Epaminondas, the Peloponnese was largely oligarchic and at the mercy
of Spartan influence, a hundred thousand or more Messenian helots
were enslaved, and Sparta had a long record of invading democratic
states in northern Greece. After nine years of a long and expensive war
(we have no records of the aggregate numbers of Boeotian dead and
wounded), the Peloponnese emerged largely democratic, the helots of
Messenia enjoyed an autonomous and democratic state, Sparta was
permanently emasculated, and the Greek city-states to the north stayed
free from Spartan attack.29
By the end of 2008, the long ordeal in Iraq had tragically cost more
than 4,200 American dead, along with hundreds of allied casualties,
nearly a trillion dollars, and thousands more wounded—and seemingly
had led to a relatively quiet and democratic Iraq whose beleaguered
people were free, and elected a government as friendly to the United
States as it was hostile to radical Islamic terrorists. Long after contem-
porary political furor over Iraq has quieted, history alone will judge in
the modern instance, as it has in the ancient, whether such an expen-
sive preemptive gamble ever justified the cost.30
Further Reading
What little we know about the career of Epaminondas and his preemptive attack in
370–369 on the Peloponnese is found in Xenophon’s Hel enica and Agesilaus, the history of
112 Hanson
Diodorus, and Plutarch’s Pelopidas and Agesilaus, supplemented by information in Pausa-
nias and Nepos (see the notes for the specific references). John Buckler in various works
has serial y discussed the rise of Boeotia under Epaminondas; see J. Buckler and H. Beck ,
Central Greece and the Politics of Power in the Fourth Century bc (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008); J. Buckler, Aegean Greece in the Fourth Century (Leiden: Bril , 2003),
and idem, The Theban Hegemony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
For the career of Epaminondas as a democratic liberator, see Victor Hanson, The
Soul of Battle (New York: Anchor Paperbacks, 2001). There is a good description of
Leuctra that has references to the major secondary and primary sources in J. K. An-
derson, Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1993). Epaminondas is discussed at length from a Spartan
perspective in P. Cartledge, Agesilaos and the Crisis of Sparta (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987), and C. Hamilton, Agesilaus and the Failure of Spartan Hegemony
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). For a larger narrative of events surround-
ing the decade of Theban hegemony, see also D. M. Lewis, J. Boardman, S. Horn-
blower, and M. Ostwald, The Cambridge Ancient History: The Fourth Century b.c., vol. 6
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 187–208 (J. Roy).
For specialists, almost all the ancient evidence concerning Epaminondas is collated
(in Italian) by M. Fortina, Epaminonda (Turin: Società Editrice Internazional, 1958), and
(in German) by H. Swoboda, s.v. “Epameinondas,” in A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, W. Kroll,
K. Witte, K. Mittel haus, and K. Ziegler, eds. Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Al-
tertumswissenschaft: Neue Bearbeitung (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1894–1980), 10:2674–707.
Notes
1 See Alfredo Bonadeo, “Montaigne on War,” Journal of the History of Ideas 46, no. 3
(July–September 1985): 421–22. Cicero Tusculanae Disputationes 1.2.4; Ephorus (in Dio-
dorus 15.88.2–4). It should be noted that young student Gen. George Patton admired
Epaminondas as a model of military and ethical excellence: “Epaminondas was with-
out doubt the best and one of the greatest Greeks who ever lived, without ambition,
with great genius, great goodness, and great patriotism; he was for the age in which
he lived almost a perfect man.” See Victor Davis Hanson, The Soul of Battle (New York:
Anchor Paperbacks, 2001), 283.
2 There are still no biographies of Epaminondas in English, an understandable situa-
tion in light of the loss of the Plutarch’s Epaminondas, the relative neglect of Boeotia in
our sources, and our reliance for fourth-century Greek history on Xenophon’s Hellenica
and Agesilaus, which so often short Epaminondas. But two well-documented accounts
that collate almost all the scattered ancient literary citations surrounding his life can
be found in M. Fortina, Epaminonda (Turin: Società Editrice Internazional, 1958); and
H. Swoboda, s.v. “Epameinondas,” in Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertum-
swissenschaft: Neue Bearbeitung, ed. A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, W. Kroll, K. Witte, K. Mittel-
haus, and K. Ziegler, vol. 10 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1894–1980), 2674–707.
3 On the nature of agrarian egalitarianism in rural classical Boeotia that predated
the fourth-century establishment of the more radical democracy of Epaminondas and
The Doctrine of Preemptive War 113
Pelopidas, see Victor Hanson , The Other Greeks (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1998), 207–10.
4 There are several accounts of the rise of the Theban hegemony after the Boeotians’
break with Sparta following their successful alliance against Athens in the Pelopon-
nesian War. A narrative of events is found in J. Buckler, The Theban Hegemony, (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), especially his summation at 220–27. See
also D. M. Lewis, J. Boardman, S. Hornblower, and M. Ostwald, The Cambridge Ancient
History: The Fourth Century b.c. , vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
187–208 (J. Roy). We should remember that Thebes “medized” during the Persian War,
fighting against the Greeks at the battle of Plataea. On the Athenian stage, a macabre
mythology typically was associated with Thebes, as the incest, self-mut
ilation, fratri-
cide, suicide, and sacrilege accorded the dead of the Oedipus cycle attest.
5 On some of the events of the period, see J. T. Hooker, The Ancient Spartans (Lon-
don: Dent, 1980), 22–211. Thebes had demanded of Sparta autonomy for its Pelopon-
nesian subservient allies, but it resisted reciprocal Spartan calls to allow the cities of
Boeotia to be independent of Thebes, on the somewhat strained logic that they were
already democratic and thus free, and as fellow Boeotians apparently needed group
solidarity to resist oligarchic and foreign challenges.
6 For the Spartan invasions of Boeotia and the various responses to these serial Spar-
tan attacks, see M. Munn, The Defense of Attica (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1993), 129–83, and especially Paul Cartledge, Agesilaos and the Crisis
of Sparta (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 228–32.
7 For a good account of the battle of Leuctra and its strategic ramifications, see J. K.
Anderson, Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1993), 193–202; C. Hamilton, Agesilaus and the Failure of
Spartan Hegemony (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 211–14.
J. Buckler, Aegean Greece in the Fourth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 293, n. 56, has
a contentious note about my own criticisms of his earlier, and I still think mistaken,
reconstructions of Leuctra (Victor Hanson, “Epameinondas, the Battle of Leuktra
[371 BC], and the ‘Revolution’ in Greek Battle Tactics,” Classical Antiquity 7 [1988]: 190–
207). Buckler fails to grasp that demonstrating that none of Epaminondas’s tactics at
Leuctra per se (the combined use of cavalry and infantry, a supposed reserve force
of hoplites, an oblique advance, putting the better contingents on the left, or the use
of a deep phalanx) were in themselves novel is not the same as denying military in-
sight and genius to Epaminondas in combining at Leuctra previously known military
innovations.
8 For details of the invasion, see Buckler, Theban Hegemony, 71–90; Hanson, Soul
of Battle, 72–94; and D. R. Shipley, Plutarch’s Life of Agesilaos: Response to Sources in the Presentation of Character (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 336–49. The main ancient accounts of the invasion of 370–369 are found at Xenophon Hellenica 6.5.25–32; Agesilaos
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