Chapter 1
1. On criticism of the neoconservatives and their purported use of Thucydides to bolster efforts to take America to war in the manner of Periclean imperialism, see Gary North, “It Usually Begins with Thucydides” (http:www.lewrockwell.com/north/197.html) and the critiques from different perspectives by D. Mendelsohn, “Theatres of War: Why the Battles over Ancient Athens Still Rage” (New Yorker, January 12, 2004). Cf. L. Miller, “My Favorite War” (New York Times Book Review, March 21, 2004). For allusions to Clemenceau and Venizélos, see Lebow and Strauss, Hegemonic Rivalry, 2–19.
2. Isocrates, On the Peace, 4, 88, mourned the loss of prominent Athenians over the three-decade course of the war, aristocrats who would have done far better to use their talents against the common Hellenic enemy, imperial Persia. Isocrates’ argument is similar to that of those who now regret the First World War, which is seen as a tragic European suicide that wrecked the imperial mission of a civilizing Britain. See, in general, N. Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York, 2000), 457–62.
3. 1.22.4. This bold assertion is perhaps the most famous phrase in Thucydides’ entire history—one of striking confidence that the historian’s views will live beyond the importance of his own subject matter. Meanwhile, some twenty-five hundred years after he wrote The Peloponnesian War, English translations of Thucydides’ history sell about fifty thousand copies in America each year.
4. See his comments on Pericles: 2.65; Brasidas: 4.81.2; the oligarch revolution of 411: 8.97.2; and Antiphon: 8.68.1–2. Those whom Thucydides appears most impressed with—Pericles, Nicias, and Antiphon—were aristocratic in nature and harbored a distrust of the collective wisdom of the common people as it was manifested on any given day in the assembly.
5. 4.65.3–4. For references to Athens as America, see Sabin, “Athens,” 237–38.
6. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.23. The discussion of Athenian popularity abroad is complex, involving the contrasting views of the poor and the more prosperous inside every city-state and the physical proximity of a particular state to either Athens or Sparta. It would not be too cynical to assume that had Athens won the war, the same Greeks who were gleeful when the Long Walls were torn down would have been equally pleased with a Spartan defeat—as, in fact, they were when Epaminondas’ massive Panhellenic army swept into the Peloponnese three decades later to destroy the Spartan empire. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Origins, 42–44, most famously discusses the popular perceptions of Athens.
7. 2.8.4–5. The goodwill of the Greeks toward the Spartans arose only after the latter gradually withdrew from the alliance with Athens following the Greek victory in the Persian War. The less the Greeks saw of the Spartans, the more they liked them. Indeed, at one time the Ionians and other Greeks “begged” the Athenians to become hegemons to curtail a Spartan presence abroad; cf. 1.95.1–2.
8. See the complaints from the Athenian envoys at Sparta (1.76.4) who remind their opponents that “even our sense of equality has very unfairly subjected us to criticism rather than approval.” The Athenian demagogue Cleon reiterated the same theme in the debate over the hostages at Mytilene (3.37) when he made the eerily modern argument that the liberal Athenians were ill-equipped for the harsh exigencies of empire. In their own domestic comfort and security they apparently wrongly assumed that the world worked according to the same principles out in the Aegean.
9. The famous phrase—a war “like no other” (hoia ouch hetera en isô chronô), from which the title of this book is taken—is found at 1.23.1; cf. 1.1.1. The Greek refers literally to the “sufferings” (pathêmata) from the war, which were unique in Greek history.
10. Whereas the Greeks had always been aware of these differences between strife and war, it was precisely the nightmare of the Peloponnesian War that led philosophers like Plato and Isocrates to draw a distinction between the two phenomena: foreign wars against people like the Persians being sometimes good, internal strife among Greek city-states always being bad. See Plato, Republic, 470B; and the long discussion by Price, Thucydides and the Internal War, 68–73. By the fourth century, the long-distant Persian conflict was the “good war,” the recent Peloponnesian “the bad”—not unlike our present construction of World War II and Vietnam into respective noble and controversial efforts.
11. 1.1.2. The notion of a “shaking up” is an interesting one, implying social unrest, terror, revolution, plague, and a host of other catastrophes that transcend the normal military casualties associated with battles of a conventional war. Thucydides was not a religious man, but his inclusion of earthquake, pestilence, and tidal wave as part of the upheaval lent dramatic effect to his tale of a self-induced Armageddon. At least he was aware that in times of terrible war people would loosely associate a host of natural misfortunes in some way with the human struggle at hand.
12. Attica, her land allies, and the subject states across the Aegean perhaps numbered a million people. For figures on some modern wars, see Keegan, Warfare, 359–61.
13. 1.23.6, 1.86.5, 1.88, and 1.118.2. Note the emphasis on perceptions of power rather than carefully delineated real grievances, and the role honor and status play in the Spartans’ sense of inevitable decline. This feeling of perceived grievance is perhaps greatest in an insular, parochial, and traditional society, in which the views of its elder ruling elite are rarely questioned or exposed to fresh ideas from abroad.
14. Fear of both sides: 1.44, 1.118; Athens’ size: 1.80.3. For the benefits of empire, see [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 2.12. There is a perceptive discussion of the Spartan angst in Cawkwell, Thucydides, 26–39. Popularity was not the only issue that determined the stability of the Athenian empire: in most Greek states for much of the fifth century the poor counted on seeing Athenian triremes in their harbor far more often than the rich could expect a phalanx of Peloponnesian hoplites marching up to the city gate. For the idea that the Spartans were both capriciously cruel and harsh abroad, see, for example, 4.80.4–5 and 4.81.3 (Brasidas as a different sort of Spartan). Dorians fighting for Ionian Athens: 7.57.
15. 3.61.2. Just as globalization is characterized by the spread of the English language, American popular culture, and the U.S. dollar, so too “Atticization” was marked by intrusion into the Aegean of Athenian coinage and the Attic dialect, as well as imperial triremes and knowledge abroad of Athenian tragedy and comedy.
16. [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 3.10–13. The anonymous author of this contemporary treatise on Athenian society displayed a certain ironic approval of the logic of Athenian democracy quite apart from his own oligarchic prejudices, perhaps in the same fashion that an aristocrat might be appalled at Wal-Mart and rap music but at least would concede that such popular institutions and tastes appeal to the material and entertainment needs of the masses far better than do small family shops, museums, and opera.
17. For the innate political differences between Sparta and Athens that led to the war, see 3.39.6, 3.47, and 3.82.I. The Corinthians reprimanded the Spartans for their inability to counter the restless culture of Athens, ending in the famous appraisal of the Athenians as a people who “were born for the purpose of themselves neither having any peace nor allowing other men to enjoy.” Cf. I.70.9, I.76–77, and 4.55.2. For a review of the ancient evidence attesting to Sparta’s fear and Athens’ desire to preempt, see de Ste. Croix, Origins, 64–67.
18. 2.64.3. There is a modern echo of post–Persian Wars Athenian control in the current use of what the former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine called l’hyperpuissance américaine—the overweening influence of the United States that has arisen in the post–Cold War world after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By 431 the Persian Wars were too far distant in Greek memory for much vestigial amity predicated on a former alliance against the common threat—Athens was too powerful and the old enemy was seemingly long gone.
19. The Spartan demands are listed at 1.139.1–4. For the radical transformation of Athens from an agrarian polis to a rich, urban, and imperial
powerhouse, see Hanson, Other Greeks, 351–96. The reactionaries longed for a return of the Solonian state, when a century earlier Athens had had no empire and had been run on the basis of a constitution favoring property owners.
20. 7.18.2; cf. 1.33.3, 1.76.2, 1.102.2–3, and 5.20. Regardless of the grievances of each side, in the end it was the Spartans, not the Athenians, who first crossed a rival’s borders.
21. See Kagan, Origins of War, 8–9 and 567–73; he best discusses these primordial emotions and their role in Thucydides’ interpretation of the war’s outbreak.
22. 1.86–87. Note that for all the previous grievances against Athens listed by her enemies, the official Spartan vote hinged on Spartan “honor” and fear of Athens’ “power.”
23. Herman, Idea of Decline, 14–19. For Roman imperial authors such as Petronius, Suetonius, Tacitus, and Juvenal, social “decline” or the natural “aging” of a state is seen as arising from luxury, leisure, and general affluence rather than a result of shaggy barbarians, plague, famine, or invasion.
24. 1.123. There is irony in the Corinthians’ assertion inasmuch as the most luxurious of the Greeks at the outbreak of the war were the Corinthians themselves, the most rugged still the Spartans.
25. For Socrates’ military record at these battles, see Plato, Symposium, 220E, 221A—B; Laches, 181 B; Apology, 28E. His opposition to the Sicilian campaign is found at Plutarch, Nicias, 13.7. Socrates may have fought at three battles and sieges while in his mid-forties. But after 421 we hear of no further service, and should imagine that he spent the last two decades of the war, while in his fifties and sixties, on guard duty with the older hoplites and resident aliens.
26. Plato, Protagoras, 359E. There is little of pacifism in any of Plato’s dialogues, which instead assume that war is a tragic but nonetheless natural event. His criticism of wars per se is pragmatic rather than what we would recognize as moral, and instead arises over particular modes of fighting that involved Greeks being killed by Greeks, or good hoplites brought down by their social inferiors in less than heroic skirmishes and at sea.
27. Cf. 1.44.2 and 1.144.3. Pericles is often and accurately compared to Churchill in that by the end of their long careers, both old aristocratic imperialists had seen too much to have any illusions that the appeasement of a garrison state and its antidemocratic coalition would bring peace.
28. 1.122.1. After the Corinthians berate the Spartans for their backward-looking foreign policy, they advocate an immediate invasion of Attica—advice incumbent on the most reactionary of all strategies, that of agricultural devastation in hopes of prompting hoplite battle. The Spartans had turned back in 446 on their own accord from invading Attica. They were sure that in 431 there was nothing stopping them from entering Athenian soil, as if that fact in and of itself would either precipitate battle or harm Athens to any great degree. Here they wrongly equated the successful tactic of overrunning Attica with the nearly impossible strategy of turning such force dominance in Attica into long-term advantage.
29. An entire subfield of Greek history exists to ascertain why the Peloponnesian War erupted when it did, and which side was at fault for finally breaking the peace. The arguments damning Athens are found in E. Badian, Plataea, 125–62. For the Athenian position, see the famous apology of G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, summarized briefly in Origins, 290–92. Kagan, Outbreak, 345–74, is fair and comprehensive in reviewing a century of scholarly controversy. Nevertheless, he has doubts about Thucydides’ rather deterministic views that the war was inevitable, given Spartan fear of an ever more powerful Athens.
30. 1.68.4. It is hard to discover any Peloponnesian recognition that the rapid growth of the Athenian fleet in the decades before the war demanded a countereffort to match trireme for trireme. The Athenian decision to build 300 warships certainly prompted no arms race like the notorious Anglo-German dreadnought rivalry of the early 1900s, which nearly bankrupted the two empires. In our sources, it is almost as if the Peloponnesians discovered belatedly at the outbreak of the conflict that in this new war ships will be critical—and that they have very few of them.
31. 2.8.1. Thucydides’ assessment of inexperience was true enough for Sparta. But Athens, in fact, had fought almost continuously by land and sea throughout the early and mid-fifth century. For example, in the two decades before the outbreak of the war, Athens had campaigned in Boeotia (447), put down revolts in Euboea and Megara (446), and besieged Samos and Byzantium (440). The idea that the young rashly rush into war without past experience of its horrors is thematic in Thucydides’ history, and explains in part why in 416 an inexperienced generation of youths paired off against its elders in demanding to go to Sicily.
32. 2.65.7; cf. 2.13.2 and 1.144.1. For a critique of Pericles’ strategy, see Kagan, Archidamian War, 352–55. Nowhere in our sources is there any Athenian war plan remotely akin to the daring of the later Epaminondas, who assumed that the only way to beat Sparta was to march into its homeland, dismantle its system of apartheid, and ring its territory with a circle of friendly democratic citadels.
33. 1.10.2. Again, it is notable that in the prewar deliberations, Sparta contemplated organizing a fleet to defeat Athens by ruining its armada and sailing into the Piraeus, while Athens never planned to create a massive army to storm into Laconia.
34. 1.71 and 1.141.3; cf. 1.142.3. At least Pericles’ prewar prognosis of Spartan impotence was mostly correct, and in sharp contrast to the last decade of the war, when Persian money changed the entire complexion of the conflict. On these and other passages, see Hanson, “Hoplite Battle,” 215–16. At the war’s outbreak Sparta had no missile troops, few horsemen, no light-armed contingents, and almost no ships—the very type of contingents that would be necessary for victory.
35. 1.102. The Athenians had come to Sparta’s help thirty years before the outbreak of the war, to put down the helot uprising of 462 on the slopes of Mount Ithome, in Messenia. Both their skill and their revolutionary character frightened the Spartans, who abruptly sent the Athenians home lest they become more of a problem than part of the solution.
36. 1.36.3. It was odd in this war how often the actual fighting belied prewar assumptions, especially how much attention both Sparta and Athens gave to ensuring the goodwill of Corinth and Corcyra, respectively, and how little each side later actually contributed to the eventual outcome of the conflict. Both states were not unlike Mussolini’s prewar Italy, which was thought to be a valuable potential ally by both Churchill and Hitler, but one that proved to offer little military advantage once the war actually started.
37. See 8.2–7 for the efforts of Sparta to create a fleet, and cf. Kagan, Fall, 14–16.
38. Later remarks about mercurial helots: Aristotle, Politics, 1269A; Xenophon, Hellenica, 3.3.6; cf. Thucydides, 1.101–02 and 4.80.3 Most Greeks owned slaves of varying statuses and nationalities. But at Sparta the helots were exclusively a rural people, without exception Greeks, and in the case of the Messenians endowed with a proud national heritage. Thus, while Athenian slaves rowed and carried the baggage of their infantrymen masters, there was far less chance that they would enjoy common affinities with one another that might transcend their servile status and thus lead to rebellion en masse.
39. King Archidamus warns about the demographical advantages that Athens enjoyed: 1.80.3. For the myriad ramifications of helots and demography on Sparta’s ability to wage war against Athens, see Cartledge, Agesilaos, 37–43.
40. Cf. 1.80.3, 1.81.1, 1.114.1, and 1.101.1. Most classical armies took along only three days’ worth of rations, so speed and timing were essential: an army that was waylaid or arrived after the harvests had been evacuated had very little tactical latitude. In some sense, Greek armies before the age of Alexander shared the same vulnerabilities as early escort fighters in World War II, whose dog-fighting over the target was curtailed by limited fuel reserves and thus often lasted for only a fraction of the total time of the mission.
41. Cf. 4.85.2, 5.14.3, and 7.28.3. Aristophanes
’ plays (e.g., Acharnians, 182–83, 512) emphasize the shame of Attic farmers impotently watching the enemy ravage their property, and especially their inability to alter the official Periclean policy of restraint.
42. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.1.35. By 411, Sparta had a fleet, capital, and new allies and thus could be assured that it could stay in Attica permanently without much worry that the Athenians, as in the past, could seriously frighten the Peloponnese. A real debate rages over the degree of Athenian self-sufficiency in food. Garnsey (Famine and Food Supply, 105–06) may well be right in his contention that classical Attica could supply almost half the grain needed by the late-fifth-century Athenian state.
43. 1.144.4. The evacuation of the Attic countryside before Xerxes’ onslaught was often evoked as proof of Athenian courage and sacrifice—even as the Athenians made arrangements never to suffer such an indignity again.
44. 1.80.3 and 1.82.2. We owe to the genius of Thucydides this paradoxical portrait of Archidamus, the one astute Spartan who warned against the very strategy he subsequently followed, and who was forever associated with the first decade of the war that he sought to avoid.
45. Long Walls at Argos and Patras: 5.52 and 5.82; cf. 1.93.1. Irony abounds: Nicias (7.77.6) argued that walls did not matter, but rather the men behind them. Yet they did at Syracuse: just a few more thousand feet of fortifications on Epipolae and his now disheartened mob would have cut off the city and been in control. Corinth seems to have used long walls to connect its ports to the city without falling to the democratic virus, but it had a long prior tradition of aristocrats engaging in trans-Isthmus trade and, given its strategic geography, never associated fortification with the deliberate abandonment of farmland.
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 44