At the outset Thucydides saw that the struggle would be a cataclysmic stasis, the equivalent of an ancient Hellenic world war. “The greatest shaking up [kinesis] in history,” he soberly added in one of his many apocalyptic pronouncements of this horrendous civil war that consumed his own adult life. Americans who fought a terrible Civil War can identify with such an assessment. Even today, when talking of the carnage of the great twentieth-century wars of mass conscription and industrialization—World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam—historians still assess their horrific carnage with the qualifier “except for the Civil War.”
Twenty-five hundred years later most agree also with Thucydides’ assertions that this “disturbance” sabotaged much of what Greece could have accomplished.11 Think of it: for the cost of organizing and supplying the two successive armadas that went to Sicily, in aggregate over 40,000 troops, Athens could have built at least four additional Parthenons. For the outlay of putting 100 triremes to sea for a month, 1,000 tragedies could have been staged, three times the number of plays put on by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in their entire careers combined. Americans were traumatized by the Civil War as some 600,000 Union and Confederate troops perished in combat and from disease out of a population of 32,000,000, or about 1 in 50 lost. But the fatalities on Sicily alone in a little over two years were even worse (1 lost for every 25 people in the Athenian empire)—in an enterprise in which it was hard to see Athenian national interests at stake.12
Most wars do not end as they start. Before the battle of Shiloh (April 6–8, 1862), for example, Ulysses S. Grant thought one great battle would ruin the South. After the two-day slugfest he realized that several years, thousands of lives, and millions of dollars in capital were needed for the Union to ruin a recalcitrant Confederacy rather than merely defeat a southern army. So, too, the cocky Spartans marched into Attica in spring 431 thinking a year or two of old-style ravaging would bring them final victory by prompting a conventional big battle or unleashing starvation upon the Athenians. But after seven years of continual Spartan failure in Attica, and 80,000 Athenians lost to the plague, neither side was closer to victory. And there were another twenty far worse seasons to go.
The Peloponnesian War, if it did not utterly ruin Athens, surely wrecked the idea of imperial Athenian culture. Yet it brought no lasting security or wealth to the victor; Sparta soon failed even more miserably as a would-be imperial power. The conflict left hundreds of other nonaligned Greek city-states sometimes confused and ambivalent, but more often invaded, sacked, and impoverished. The earlier united Greek victory over the Persian king Xerxes (480–479) had marked the inauguration of the triumphant Golden Age. Yet this classical century that started with such great promise, with the alliance of Athens and Sparta against the Persians, finally crashed into the self-inflicted wreckage of their own civil war.
The butchery that King Darius and his son Xerxes once could only hope for at the battles of Marathon (490) and Salamis (480) was brought to fruition a half century later by Greek generals like Pericles, Cleon, Alcibiades, Brasidas, Gylippus, and Lysander (to the delight of contemporary Persian satraps across the Aegean). Now Greeks often killed more of their own people in a year than had the Persians in a decade. In 406, at the single sea battle off the Arginusae Islands and its bloody aftermath, more Greeks lost their lives than all those killed by the Persians at the famous battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea combined. The expedition to Sicily took more Greeks than the combined fatalities from every hoplite battle in the fifth century. In that sense, the Peloponnesian War was a Persian dream come true. At the war’s end Greek Ionia, in western Asia Minor, returned to a de facto Persian satrapy. Athenian literature of the next half century is full of references and allusions to the unhealed wounds from plague, slaughter, military defeat, and national capitulation.
The only Hellenic empire powerful enough to challenge the supremacy of the Persian king in the Aegean, Periclean Athens, was left exhausted. On the horizon were a number of thuggish Greek and Macedonian autocrats ready to end Hellenic freedom under the slogan of “uniting” together to “pay back” the Persians, offering a nationalist antidote to the self-inflicted carnage rendered by consensual governments of the past.
The Peloponnesian War was also the first great instance where Western powers turned on each other. Their common commitment to rationalism, civic militarism, and constitutional government resulted not just in high culture but also in lethal militaries that could square off in mutual destruction. So Athens versus Sparta serves as a warning—centuries before the Roman Civil Wars, Cold Harbor, the Somme, and Dresden—of what can happen when the Western way of war is unleashed upon its own. In modern terms, the Peloponnesian War was more like World War I, rather than the Second World War—the issues that divided the two sides likewise more complex, the warring parties themselves not so easily identifiable as good or evil, and the shock of thousands killed similarly grotesquely novel and marking a complete break with past experience.
Root Causes?
Thucydides felt strongly that the Spartans had invaded the Athenian countryside in the spring of 431 because “they feared the Athenians lest they might grow still more powerful, seeing most of Greece was already subject to them.” That assessment—hardly true, because in the strict sense Athens really did not control “most of Greece”—is nevertheless thematic in his history. The Spartans, in other words, started the actual fighting with a preemptive strike into Attica. They, not the Athenians, were unhappy with the fifth-century status quo. At another point Thucydides concedes that such apprehensions of being slowly overwhelmed in peace “forced the Spartans into war.”13
“Forced”? Of course, there always seemed other, more immediate pretexts for war that made the conflict perhaps unavoidable. There always are. But in the last analysis, Thucydides at least felt in hindsight that there were such great underlying differences between the two powers, albeit perhaps not always perceptible to contemporary Athenians and Spartans themselves, that the more pressing (and minor) disagreements must eventually lead to a catastrophic face-off.
Although both sides claimed that they were coerced into the conflict, in Thucydides’ way of determinist thinking, if Sparta did not go to war over the pretexts of Corinthian and Megarian grievances against Athens, then the sheer dynamism of Pericles’ imperial culture—majestic buildings, drama, intellectual fervor, an immense fleet, radical democratic government, an expanding population, and a growing overseas empire—would eventually spread throughout its area of influence in southern Greece.*
The Spartans might have lived with the existence of Athenian imperialism. They had done just that for much of the earlier fifth century. But once Athens began to combine its lust for power with a radical ideology of support for democracy abroad, Sparta rightly concluded that the threat transcended mere armed rivalry and promised to infect the very hearts and minds of Greeks everywhere. Their worries were legitimate. Athenian democracy, in fact, was not merely proselytizing and expansionary but also remarkably cohesive and stable. Even the brief revolutions during and after the war in 411 and 403 were short-lived, suggesting a level of support for popular government among a wide variety of Athenians well beyond the landless poor.
Spartans had also seen Athenian-inspired democracy spread throughout the Aegean and Asia Minor in the 450s. They bridled at Athenian influence over the supposedly Panhellenic colony of Thurii, in southern Italy. Their leaders were also furious that sympathetic oligarchs on the island of Samos had been crushed in 440. Elites at Sparta seethed that recalcitrant subject states like Potidaea were not merely besieged but faced with perpetual radical democratic government imposed and maintained by Athenian triremes. How threatening these purported demonstrations of Athenian power really were did not matter; Sparta was convinced that they represented a systematic and dangerous new aggression. Innate ethnic and linguistic differences between Ionian Athenians and Doric Spartans might have been mitigated, but democra
tic imperialism on the move was again another challenge altogether.
This new Athenian global village would offer incentives to Sparta’s friends that a parochial town of infantrymen could not hope to match. Similarly, the die-hard wealthier supporters of Sparta throughout the Aegean must have felt that they were losing influence in their own communities to an upstart underclass. The poor, who did not farm, ride horses, or frequent the gymnasia, liked the security offered by the Athenian fleet and did not mind the obligations of tribute, which fell mostly upon their own rich and landed aristocracy. Behind all the realist calculations, however, was the undeniable fact that Athens just kept growing—King Archidamus believed that at the war’s outbreak it was the largest city in the Greek world—while Sparta was shrinking.14
“Athenianism” was the Western world’s first example of globalization. There was a special word of sorts for Athenian expansionism in the Greek language, attikizô, “to Atticize,” or to become like or join the Athenians.15 Contemporaries accepted the reality that Athens sought to promote the common people abroad whenever it could. In contrast, when Athens engaged instead in realpolitik—such as attacking the similar consensual government of Syracuse—without the necessary revolutionary fervor of democracy, it often failed.16
Spartans were oligarchic fundamentalists par excellence, hating “people power” and the danger it represented. Their warrior-citizens were quite wary of the appetites for the hustle and bustle of the good life that even among their own stern elite grew faster than they could be repressed.17 Although they had been the preeminent Greeks earlier in the sixth and fifth centuries, by the time of the Peloponnesian War the Spartans could sense their own influence waning, based as it was almost exclusively on hoplite infantry rather than the ships, population growth, and money of an ever grasping hyperdemocratic rival—one that in Pericles’ own words had ruled “over more Greeks than any other Greek state.”18
To avoid war with Sparta, Athens was asked to cease its imperialist overstretch and essentially disband the empire: stop besieging cities like Potidaea and let nearby states like Aegina and Megara decide their own affairs. In short, “let the Greeks be independent.” To do all that, however, would mean that Athens could no longer be Periclean Athens; rather, it would revert back to its agrarian modesty of an earlier century, when it had no ships, no Long Walls, no tribute, no majestic temples, and no lavish dramatic festivals but was a benign commonwealth not much different from other large Greek city-states.19
The Burdens of the Past
Was war inevitable as its logic of violence and death overrode what individual Spartan and Athenian leaders might do or not do to manage crises? The very idea bothers us that Sparta’s fault in breaking the peace of 431 was not so much that it or Athens was rationally culpable in any given context. Rather, out of fear, a lot of envy, and some hatred, Sparta was mercurial in its actions, prone to all the wild urges that make men do what is not always in either their own or the general interest.20
In almost all the various debates that surrounded the outbreak of the conflict, the enemies of Athens cited fundamental grievances that acerbated political and ethnic fault lines—reckless Athenian character, the growth of an unstoppable empire, and innate Athenian arrogance—just as frequently as adducing legitimate and more specific legal transgressions that demanded immediate redress. Perhaps there was something about Athens that sparked a certain hatred by rival city-states like Corinth, Thebes, and Sparta, a loathing that was deductive, antiempirical, and hopelessly embedded with deep-seated feelings of antipathy.*21
Enemies hated Athens as much for what it was as for what it did. As early as 446 Athens had abandoned claims to almost everything sought in the First Peloponnesian War and was careful not to offer any concrete reason for war to the Spartans themselves. Perhaps that paradox is best summarized by Thucydides’ fascinating description of the Spartan debate in late 432 over proposals to invade Attica the next spring. After Athenian envoys and the Spartan king Archidamus both offered sober and reasoned explanations of why war at that particular time with Athens was a bad idea, the dense ephor Sthenelaidas stepped forward in response.† He shouted out a few slogans about Spartan pride and power. The Spartan military assembly then immediately voted for war. They seemed to be swayed (as were the Athenians who later voted to invade Sicily) by emotion rather than reason: “The long speeches of the Athenians I do not understand at all.… Vote therefore, Lacedaemonians, for war as the honor of Sparta demands and do not allow Athens to become too powerful.”22
In turn, at Athens an entire generation had grown up in Periclean splendor. It, too, seemed deathly afraid of inevitable generational decline, a common apprehension among elites in Western societies that are free, affluent, and experiencing social and cultural change.23 Many felt that if contemporary Athenians did not stand up to Spartan bullying, they would betray the legacy of those tougher “Marathon men”—men like Miltiades, Themistocles, and Aristides, who had fought at Marathon (490) and Salamis (480) and bequeathed a secure and prosperous empire. Perhaps even a handful of these larger-than-life 10,000 hoplite infantrymen were still alive and now in their eighties. They are the frequent heroes of Aristophanes’ comedies, the embodiment of the “old courage” to be contrasted with a lesser and softer generation that would not trust in its own hoplite prowess to meet the Spartans in Attica.
Yet while the Athenians could scarcely field an army of 10,000 preeminent hoplites of the caliber that had plowed through the Persians sixty years earlier on the beach at Marathon, their aggregate imperial military strength—ships, financial capital, manpower—was greater even than that of all their potential Greek enemies combined. Athens was stronger precisely because it had evolved beyond placing its national security in the sole hands of doughty hoplite farmers. These living anachronisms, after all, were a one-dimensional force, as irrelevant off a small flat battlefield as it was deadly on it.
Nevertheless, that burden of past glory loomed over Alcibiades’ age group just as the accomplishments of the “greatest generation” of World War II do our own, especially when men like his guardian Pericles constantly harangued younger Athenians about their imperial burdens. Spartans also felt similar apprehensions about becoming soft in comparison to their roughneck Lacedaemonian granddads who had died blocking the pass at Thermopylae. Thus, the Corinthians remonstrated with the Peloponnesians on the eve of the battle: “It is not a just thing that all that was won through poverty should be destroyed through prosperity.”24
Unforeseen Consequences
The war itself would prove to be a colossal absurdity. Neither a Socrates nor a Pericles could have predicted its course or final outcome. Sparta had the most feared infantry in the Greek world, yet its newly created navy finally won the last great battles of the war. Democratic Athens sent almost 40,000 allied soldiers to imprisonment and death trying to capture far-off Syracuse—against the largest democracy in the Greek world. At the same time thousands more of her old enemies in Greece were thereby emboldened to plunder her property with impunity less than thirteen miles outside her walls from the base at Decelea.* Alcibiades at times proved the savior of Athens, Sparta, and Persia—and their collective spoiler as well.
Athens started off the war with money piled high in its majestic Parthenon. There was the staggering amount of some 6,000 talents of coined silver and another 500 in other precious metals, altogether worth about $3 billion in con temporary value. It ended the conflict bankrupt with a city full of orphans, widows, and the disabled—and thousands of names on its ubiquitous stone casualty lists.
The wartime Athenian treasury was unable even to finish fluting the final columns of the Propylaea, the monumental gateway to the still uncompleted temples on the Acropolis. Much less could it find the money to finish an array of other rural temples at Rhamnous and Thorikos in the Attic hinterland. Most of the capital needed to complete Pericles’ grand dream of a marble imperial city went down with some 500 triremes lost off Sicily and later i
n the Aegean.
Sparta fielded the most terrifying army in Greece. Most of its enemies, however, fell not to its Dorian spears but to disease, sieges, or guerrilla-style killing. Its grand strategy of ravaging the crops of Attica proved a colossal failure within a week of its inception. Yet within a year the Peloponnesian sojourn in the enemy countryside inadvertently set the stage for the plague that nearly ruined Athens.
No government was as calculating or sober—or blinkered—as Sparta’s gerousia, a governing senate of old men who had seen little of civilization abroad and thus were loath to sanction rash action beyond the vale of Laconia.* No government was as reckless and dangerous as Athens’ assembly, composed of many leaders who had traveled the Aegean. Yet the latter in a minute’s fit could call for the execution of a man—or an entire captured city across the seas—on the flimsiest of charges.
The philosopher Socrates had doubts about democratic Athens’ hubris and megalomania, especially the later visions of grandeur in Sicily. But those worries were not enough to prevent him from fighting heroically in her cause in his potbellied middle age. As he reminds the whipped-up audience of accusers in the last speech of his life, he battled bravely in three of Athens’ most difficult engagements, at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis.25 Thucydides used the broad message of the war’s apparent senselessness to explore his own bleak views about human nature. Yet despite being exiled on trumped-up charges by the demagogues, no Athenian fought more unquestioningly and without cynicism than did Thucydides in service to his country.
Euripides, the maverick playwright, thought his countrymen’s brutal execution of the Mytileneans and poor Melians a criminal act and a moral commentary about the mindless savagery of conflict. But even Euripides hated the Spartans and seems to have wished the enemy to lose as much as he wanted the war simply to end. Traitorous Alcibiades at times helped Athens, Sparta, and Persia win the war, even as the jaded Athenians refused the infamous turncoat’s final sound advice at Aegospotami, which might have saved them from defeat in the last great battle of the conflict.
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 3