The Athenians’ power, and economy, depended on her fleet, after all: food could be supplied from various trading partners abroad, and meanwhile Athenian and allied ships could harry the coastal towns of the Peloponnese, seeking to exhaust the enemy (as Kagan notes), “psychologically, not physically or materially.” Pericles well knew that the Spartans ruled their own alliance with an iron hand; behind the Athenian leader’s ostensibly passive strategy lay the assumption that after a few years of this harrying, this psychological attrition, the alliance would crumple and the Spartans would be eager for peace. Kagan relates all this with briskness and authority. He’s a particularly shrewd reader of the realities behind certain kinds of political rhetoric—not least, the material and economic considerations that affect policy and strategy. Where others might see in Pericles’ famous exhortation to restraint an admirably and very Apollonian impulse to moderation, Kagan sees the calculations of a politican who knew he had only enough drachmas in the bank “to maintain his strategy for three years…but not for a fourth.” Let alone a twenty-seventh.
Pericles’ strategy, however, died fairly swiftly after the man himself did, in 429, a victim of the plague that ravaged Athens from 430 to 426—the first blow of many that resulted in the disintegration of the city, both physically and morally. (In a rare reference to his personal life, Thucydides writes in the History that he had the illness but survived.) He was succeeded at first by the hawkish demagogues Cleon and the aptly named Hyperbolus, two men who never met a peace offer they couldn’t walk away from. Thucydides, himself related to a royal family (of the northern region called Thrace, from whose silver mines he earned an income substantial enough to allow him to devote himself to writing), evinces disdain for these nouveaux riches, examples of the so-called new politicians of the second half of the fifth century B.C. in Athens—politicans who didn’t come, as did Pericles and his protégé Alcibiades, from the rarefied ether of Athenian society, but who were pragmatic self-made men with mercantile fortunes at their disposal, and who cared little for the genteel pieties of the upper crust. (Cleon’s father made a fortune in leather, the subject of no little amusement for the comic playwright Aristophanes.) It was Cleon, more than anyone else, who broke with the Periclean strategy and urged Athens on to the more aggressive stance that, for many historians—Kagan isn’t one of them—cost Athens her empire.
It was under the ambitious, risk-taking, and aggressive Cleon that the war began to oscillate between unforeseeable victories (such as the Athenians’ capture of one tenth of all of Sparta’s citizen-soldiers on the island of Sphacteria in 425, which would provide tremendous strategic and diplomatic leverage for years to come) and unnecessary defeats (such as the dreadful Athenian defeat at Delium in 424, the outcome of a rash effort to force a decisive encounter). Under Cleon, Athenian policy also began to reflect the notion, then fashionable in certain intellectual circles which rejected old-fashioned pieties, that “might makes right,” a principle of which Cleon himself was the greatest exponent. When the city of Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, revolted from the Athenian alliance in 427, it was Cleon who proposed to the Athenian assembly that all of the rebellious city’s adult men should be put to death and all its women and children sold into slavery as a punishment—a motion that passed, only to be revoked the following day by the guilt-ridden Athenians. Luckily for the Mytilineans, the ship bearing the reluctant executioners was overtaken by that bearing news of the reprieve. (Not for nothing does the action of Euripides’ final bitter wartime drama, Iphigenia at Aulis, turn on a comparable volte-face involving two dispatches, one bearing death and the second bearing a reprieve; in the play, however, the second fails to catch up with the first.)
After Cleon’s death in battle in 421, a brief peace—negotiated by his longtime rival for leadership, a wealthy, deeply pious man called Nicias—soon gave way to a cycle of more and more arrogant strategies that led to ever greater disasters. By the time the tiny island of Melos, a Spartan colony, refused to become part of Athens’s alliance in 416, the Athenians no longer felt any compunctions about punishing civilians: in Book 5 of the History, Thucydides crisply relates how all of the men were put to death, and all of the women sold into slavery.
For many historians, Melos marks the watershed in Athens’s moral decline. The next year, greedy for more empire, the Athenians decided to invade another island, Sicily—a decision heavily influenced by the glamorous but untrustworthy political wild-card Alcibiades, a figure whose beauty, taste, intellectual brilliance, and diplomatic smoothness (to say nothing of his unpredictability, his lack of ethical compass, and mercurial nature) make him, in the latter part of the History, a useful symbol for Athens herself. The Sicilian Expedition, which takes up the entire sixth and seventh books of the History, ended in the complete annihilation of the Athenian armada, the death of Nicias, and the beginning of the end for Athens.
Even Athens’s occasional triumphs during the dismal last decade of the war were vitiated by capricious behavior that suggested a polity no long in control of itself. After the great Athenian naval victory at Arginousae, the Assembly voted to put the victorious admirals to death on the grounds that they failed to rescue sailors who’d drowned in a tempest following the battle. It’s during a description of the aftermath of this horror that Thucydides’ narrative breaks off, in midsentence. What came next, we learn from his contemporary, Xenophon: increasingly violent internal strife, the overthrow of the democracy and its replacement with a succession of oppressive oligarchic regimes, the fatal alliance between Sparta and Persia, which put terrible pressures on an increasingly cash-poor Athens; the final, catastrophic defeat of the Athenian navy at Aesgispotami in the Hellespont—all but ten ships of the great Athenian fleet destroyed, all four thousand Athenian prisoners put to death by the Spartans. The following year, in March 404, exactly twenty-seven years after the war had begun, Athens capitulated. The visible sign of her defeat was the destruction of the Long Walls by the gleeful Spartan allies, an event that Kagan rightly does not presume to describe, instead quoting Xenophon: “With great zeal they set about tearing down the walls to the music of flute-girls, thinking that this day was the beginning of freedom for the Greeks.”
Twenty-five years ago, you knew what to make of all this. Indeed, it used to be easy to teach the Peloponnesian War: all you had to do was think of the Cold War. For most of the half century from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Soviet Union—and certainly during the late 1970s, when I was an undergraduate classics major wrestling for the first time with Thucydides’ prose—the parallels between the Peloponnesian War and the Cold War seemed self-evident. It wasn’t that the course of the contemporary conflict was following that of the ancient one—or at least you hoped not, given Athens’s fate. It was more a matter of personality. You knew, as you read about Athens, about her boisterous democratic politics and fast-talking politicians, her adventurous intellectual and artistic spirit, that these were the good guys—our own cultural forbears. And you knew, just as surely, as you read about Sparta, about her humorless militarism and geriatric regime, her deep antipathy to democracy and her drab cultural life, that these were the bad guys. They, too, looked awfully familiar.
You knew, too, what it was like to live in a world divided between “two sides [that] were at the very height of power and preparedness,” as Thucydides remarks at the beginning of his History; and you knew how that polarization created a global political climate in which “the rest of the…world was committed to one side or another,” and how the blind adherence to ideology or established policy which resulted from such polarization could result in a fearful illogic. (Kagan dryly points out, of the Greek conflict, that “the Spartans were therefore willing to expose themselves to the great danger of a war to preserve an alliance they had created precisely to save them from danger.”) The Peloponnesian War—or, to be more precise, Thucydides’ account of it—was, in short, every Classics professor’s dream: an ancient text whose relev
ance to contemporary society could not be questioned.
In the bipartite world of the Cold War, there were two ways to read Thucydides as a political text. If you leaned to the left, you saw, in the carefully structured presentation of Athens’s gradual descent from cautious self-restraint first into brutality and then into anarchy, a cautionary tale: about the abuses of imperial power, say, and the moral decay that accompanies unscrupulous exercises of such power. If you leaned the other way, you took Thucydides’ famous detachment, his failure to pass explicit moral judgments on the Athenians and their wartime behavior, as an implicit if cautious endorsement of Machtpolitik as a grim requirement for being a superpower. (“Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can,” the Athenians blandly opine during the debate about the fate of the Melians.) But whichever way you read Thucydides, the bipolar structure of the real world, the world in which you actually lived as you read the History, implied that you needed to heed the implied message of its numerous polarities—between the Athenians and Spartans, between the Corinthians and their frisky former colonists the Corcyreans, between the Athenians and Melians—which was that one side or the other must be right. Or, more to the point, must win.
Almost as soon as the Cold War had begun, in fact, people who knew their history were using the Peloponnesian War as a lens through which to examine the modern-day global geopolitical scene. On February 22, 1947, Truman’s secretary of state, George Marshall, came to Princeton University to talk about world affairs. In his speech, he declared that he “doubt[ed] seriously whether a man can think with full wisdom and deep conviction regarding certain of the basic international issues today who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the Fall of Athens.” These words were no more than a fulfillment of a prophecy that Thucydides confidently, if rather cynically, makes in the Introduction to his History:
It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged to be useful by those who want to understand the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or another and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.
That the American general-diplomat could so emphatically invoke the Athenian historian’s narrative twenty-three hundred years after the death of its author would seem to bear out not only the latter’s dim assessment of human nature, but also his declaration that his book would be “a possession for all time.”
But what kind of possession, and whose? Time, or rather times, have changed—far more radically, you could argue, between Marshall and the present than between Thucydides and Marshall. What do you make of Thucydides—or, for that matter, the Peloponnesian War itself—at the “end of history,” when there is only one superpower?
One answer to this question is to be found in the new book by Kagan, who is alert to the opportunities presented by the new world order for rereading—or, some might say, rewriting—the Peloponnesian War. At the beginning of his new history, he writes that although the Greek conflict’s “greatest influence as an analytical tool may have come during the Cold War,” he wants his work to “meet the needs of readers in the 21st century.” Self-consciously echoing the famous Thucydidean objectivity, he declares that he will refrain from drawing parallels between the ancient event and any modern counterpart, in the hopes that “an uninterrupted account will better allow readers to draw their own conclusion.” Uninterrupted, yes, but not disinterested. Kagan is famous on campus and off for his conservatism (he numbers Ronald Reagan and Otto von Bismarck among his “heroes”); what strikes you the most after reading his history of the Peloponnesian War is that you can come away from it with an entirely different view of the war than the one you take away from Thucydides. Unsurprisingly, it’s a view that could be taken to support a very twenty-first-century project indeed: a unilateralist policy of preventive or preemptive war, with no tolerance for rivals.
The only way to do this, of course, is make the Peloponnesian War unilateral, too—to strip all the Thucydides out of the History, omitting the many voices and famously dialogic structure that the Athenian historian worked so hard to include. Kagan is, indeed, far less shy about intruding his own voice into the proceedings than Thucydides is. This is nowhere more apparent than in his revisionist championing of Cleon and the war party in Athens, whose hawkish policies Kagan consistently presents as the only reasonable choice for the Athenians: in the debate over the punishment of Mytilene, in the crude rejection of Spartan peace offers in 424 (after Athens gained the upper hand at Sphacteria) when the Athenians refused to allow the peace-seeking Spartans to save face, in the city’s harsh punishment of generals who’d concluded a peace with the Sicilian states in 424, even in the “un-Periclean aggressiveness” that backfired at Delium. “It is tempting to blame Cleon for breaking off the negotiations,” goes a typically tendentious sentence. “But what, realistically, could have been achieved?” Anyone who hasn’t read Thucydides (whose comment on the Athenians’ rejection of peace is that “they were greedy for more”) will be inclined to agree.
The desire to rehabilitate Cleon results, inevitably, in a corresponding denigration of the peace party (with their “apparently limitless forbearance,” as Kagan dismissively remarks) and of the cautious policies recommended first by Pericles and then by Nicias, a figure for whom Kagan has great disdain. (“Misguided.”) It’s here that Kagan’s revisionism borders on the misleading. At one point, for instance, Kagan bizarrely refers to the Sicilian expedition as “the failed stratagem of Nicias.” This is absurd. The pious Nicias had no taste for the Sicilian expedition: what happened was that Nicias had tried to bluff the Athenian Assembly into abandoning the invasion of Sicily, declaring that it would require far greater expense than people realized; but they simply approved the additional ships and troops. It’s a grotesque stretch to use his failed political ploy to blame the disaster on Nicias, who indeed paid for it with his life. As for the Athenians’ massacre of the Melians, Kagan dismisses it as “the outlet they needed for their energy and frustration.”
Kagan’s reading of the war, with its pervasive pro-Athenian triumphalism, its willing, Cleonic disdain for anything that doesn’t serve the aggrandizement of Athenian power, may indeed be the right reading for the twenty-first century, when the United States, unlike the ancient city-state to which it used to be confidently compared, has no traditional military opponents, and no global ideological system to oppose its own ideological aims, of the kind it had thirty years ago. But while his approach owes something to an admirable, and perhaps Thucydidean, desire to look at the war with fresh and unsentimental eyes, you often can’t help feeling that it also owes something to a hawkishness on the author’s part, a distaste for compromise and negotiation when armed conflict is possible. His book represents what you could call the Ollie North take on the Peloponnesian War: “If we’d only gone in there with more triremes, we would have won that sucker.”
This way of reading Thucydides in light of the new world order is reflected in other recent books about the Greeks at war, none more so than those by Victor Davis Hanson. Hanson, who is extremely prolific on the subject of war—his most recent book, Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think (Doubleday; $27.50), is his fourteenth in twenty years—writes absorbingly and well about ancient infantry battles. Increasingly, he’s devoted himself to other topics. Among other things, he’s a tireless opponent of what he sees as corrupt practices in the current academic study of the Classics. For instance, in his 1998 polemic Who Killed Homer?, he suggests that we discard what he clearly sees as a decadent preoccupation with femininity and sexuality, and instead pay more attention to the average guy in ancient Athens—ordinary men who (like Hanson himself, as it happens) farm the land.
But Hanson’s own handling of the texts that he wants to reclaim for authentic Greek manliness is itself more than
a little suspect. In an article for the National Review Online entitled “Voice From the Past: General Thucydides Speaks About The War,” since collected in a volume of essays entitled An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 And the War on Terrorism, he poses questions about the Gulf War and has Thucydides “answer” them, by means of citations from the History. For example, to the question “Why do you think bin Laden and his terrorists…believed they could repeatedly get away with killing Americans, win prestige, and gain concessions—without eventually incurring the destructive wrath of the United States?” he gives the following “answer” from Book 3 of the History:
Their own prosperity could not dissuade them from affronting danger; but blindly confident in the future, and full of hopes beyond their power though not beyond their ambition, they declared war and made their decision to prefer might to right. Their attacks were determined not by provocation but by the moment which seemed propitious.
Any classicist will immediately recognize in this an appalling misrepresentation. Hanson neglects to mention, in citing this implicit Thucydidean endorsement of a “right” American response to 9/11 (presumably one that would involve “destructive wrath” in the Middle East), is that the words he’s citing here aren’t, strictly speaking, Thucydides’, but rather Cleon’s: the speech he quotes, as it happens, is the one in which the politician urged his fellow Athenians to slaughter all of the adult males and enslave the women and children of Mytilene, a punishment from which the Athenians themselves, before they entirely lost their moral bearings, shrank in guilty horror. (Cleon’s apparent distaste for the enemy’s preference for “might to right” in this passage is, in any case, a disingenuous piece of rhetoric; as we know, he was the most outspoken advocate of Machtpolitik.) To make matters even worse, nearly all classicists agree that Thucydides had a special loathing for Cleon. To cite Cleon’s speeches as if they represented Thucydides’ views on the subject of retributive violence is grotesque—it’s like quoting Iago’s speeches and saying it’s what Shakespeare thought about love.
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