CHAPTER 1
FEAR
WHY SPARTA FOUGHT ATHENS (480–431)

Our Peloponnesian War

The beginning of the Peloponnesian War is now 2,436 years in the past. Yet Athens and Sparta are still on our minds and will not go away. Their permanence seems odd. After all, ancient Greek warring parties were mere city-states, most of them smaller in population and size than Dayton, Ohio, or Trenton, New Jersey. Mainland Greece itself is no larger than Alabama, and in antiquity was bordered by empires like the Persian, which encompassed nearly one million square miles with perhaps 70 million subjects. Napoleon’s army alone had more men under arms by 1800 than the entire male population of all the Greek city-states combined. In our own age, more people died in Rwanda or Cambodia in a few days than were lost in twenty-seven years of civil war in fifth-century B.C. Greece.

Nor were Greeks themselves especially lethal warriors, at least by later historical standards. Rudimentary wood and iron of the preindustrial age, not gunpowder and steel, were their shared weapons of destruction. Even the soldiers themselves who fought the war were not much more than five foot five and 130 pounds. They were often unimpressive middle-aged men who would appear as mere children next to contemporary towering two-hundred-pound GIs.

Yet for ancient folk so few, small, and distant, their struggle during the Peloponnesian War seems not so old even in this new millennium. During the weeks after September 11, 2001, for example, Americans suddenly worried about the wartime outbreak of disease in their cities. In October and November 2001, five died and some twenty-four others were infected from the apparently deliberate introduction of anthrax spores by unknown terrorists. During the spring of 2003 a mysterious infectious respiratory ailment in China threatened to spread worldwide, given the ubiquity of low-cost transcontinental airfare. The panic that ensued in Washington and Peking during a time of global tension evoked ancient wartime plagues, such as the mysterious scourge that wiped out thousands at Athens between 430 and 426. Similarly, at about the same time, Sicily, Melos, and Mycalessus were all cited in contemporary media, as millennia later the world once again watched military armadas head out to faraway places, saw democracy imposed by force, and read of schoolchildren killed by terrorist bands.

But even before September 11 the Peloponnesian War was not really ancient history. Scholarly books regularly appeared with titles like War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War, or Hegemonic Rivalry: From Thucydides to the Nuclear Age. Thucydides had long been assigned reading at the U.S. Army War College. And an array of statesmen such as Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and Eleuthérios Venizélos either taught or wrote about Greek history, in which the use of Thucydides’ war loomed large. More recently, controversial thinkers known as neoconservatives (“the new conservatives”) were for a time influential in American strategic thinking, and the text that they purportedly consulted frequently was once more Thucydides’.¹

What is it about this particular ancient clash that causes it to be called to mind during our present wars? Why were the conflict’s supposed lessons both astutely and clumsily applied to most of our own struggles of the last century? Russia—or was it really Hitler’s Germany?—supposedly resembled oligarchic Sparta in its efforts to destroy a democratic, seafaring America. Did not the Cold War, after all, similarly divide up the world into two armed leagues, led by superpowers who had united for a time against the common enemy only later to face off for decades of bipolar hostilities? Was the Sicilian expedition a precursor to Gallipoli, Vietnam, or any proposed great democratic or imperial crusade abroad? Or does the disaster at Syracuse show, as Thucydides oddly concluded, what happens when folks at home do not support the troops abroad? Because Thucydides first framed the important issues that haunt us still, we naturally return to his original and seemingly unimpeachable conclusions.

The Sorrows of War

Why exactly is this rather obscure ancient war between minuscule Athens and Sparta still so alive, and used and abused in ways that other ancient conflicts, such as the Persian Wars (490, 480–79) and Alexander the Great’s conquests (334–323), are not? Many intriguing reasons come to mind.

First, it was a brutal and very long struggle. King Xerxes and his enormous Persian military were routed from Greece in about two years. Alexander destroyed the later Persian Empire in a third of the time it took Sparta to defeat Athens. Lasting twenty-seven years, or almost a third of the fabled fifth century of classical Greece, the Peloponnesian War, like the Second Punic War, the Thirty Years War, or the Hundred Years War, was a mess that eerily crossed generations. Those born after the first years of the war often fought and died in the fighting before it was over.

So the catastrophe devoured entire families across generations. The carnage reminds us of imperial Britain tottering after the First World War, the end of empire, aristocracy, and unquestioned patriotism all inextricably tied to trenches that gobbled up the British elite. The Peloponnesian War spared few Greeks, regardless of wealth or family connections. The “great houses” of Athens, or so the postbellum lament went, were almost wiped out.²

Take the most famous branch of the exalted Alcmaeonid family. Pericles, the spiritual and political leader of Athens, died of the plague at Athens in 429 in only the third season of the war. His sister, also in her sixties, had perished a year before from the same epidemic, along with his sons Paralus and Xanthippus. Neither of those young men reached thirty.

Later, a much younger bastard son, Pericles the Younger, was elected an Athenian general. He was in part responsible for the great sea victory at Arginusae, some twenty-three years after his father’s death. Yet the younger Pericles was subsequently executed by an Athenian jury in an infamous scapegoating frenzy during the battle’s aftermath. And Pericles’ nephew, the thirty-two-year-old bright and upcoming Hippocrates, fell at the forefront of the battle of Delium (424). Thirty years’ worth of plague, political intrigue, general hysteria, and enemy spears more or less wiped out the family of the most powerful man at Athens.

The war also started at the high-water mark of Greece’s great Golden Age (479–404). Yet the attendant calamity ended for good such great promise that started with the defeat of the Persians (479). The capitulation of Athens (404) and the end of the fifth-century Golden Age remain symbolically interconnected events to this day. They are also loosely associated as well with the near-contemporaneous trial and execution of Socrates (399), the last and most notable casualty of a once wonderful world seemingly gone mad in a few decades. Contemporaries, among them the comic poet Aristophanes, believed that with the end of the Peloponnesian War, Attic tragedy as emblemized by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had lost its splendor.

Indeed, players in and observers of the war were the greats of Hellenic civilization—Alcibiades, Aristophanes, Euripides, Pericles, Socrates, Sophocles, Thucydides, and others—many of whom flourished, were discredited, or perished because of their involvement in the fighting. Much of the greatest classical literature, such as Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Plato’s Symposium, and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, either deals with issues of the war or employs the conflict as dramatic landscape, leaving with us the depressing possibility that war, not peace, prompted the greatest explosion in the Greek creative genius, a frenzied outburst before a weary collapse. Most Greeks saw the bloody struggle through the eyes of Athens, whose writers enjoyed a near monopoly on reporting, praising, and condemning the war—shocked that in just three decades the entire dream of a cultural renaissance was brought to an end. So north of the Isthmus of Corinth the fight was soon known universally as the “Peloponnesian War,” the conflict against those awful supermen who inhabited the southern peninsula of Greece—not, as the parochial Peloponnesians saw it, as a Spartan-led struggle against imperialists in an “Athenian War.”

The Peloponnesian War pitted against each other two Greek states that were antithetical in nearly every respect. Athens had 300 warships, a population of over 300,000 residents, a fortified port, a vast countryside, some 200 tribute-paying subject states abroad, and plenty of coined money. Sparta was landlocked. About 160 miles to the south, it relied on an army of only 10,000 infantrymen—less than half of them full citizens—to enforce rule over 250,000 inferiors and serfs, and a hegemony of neighboring communities, without any tradition of either seapower or cosmopolitan culture.

Rightly or wrongly, the fighting was assumed to be a final arbitrator of the contrasting values of each. Which would prove to be the more viable ideology: cultural and political liberalism or a tough, insular conservatism? Does an open society reap military advantages from its liberality or succumb to a license unknown in a regimented and militaristic oligarchy? And who is the most resourceful in an asymmetrical war when both sides either cannot or will not face each other in conventional battle: the ships of a “whale” like imperial Athens or the ponderous armies of the “elephant” Sparta?

Thucydides

Then there is the matter of Thucydides himself. Greece’s preeminent historian was not merely an analytical and systematic writer of a great extant military history of Sparta and Athens. He was also a brilliant philosopher who tried to impart to the often obscure events of the war a value that transcended his age. In his own boast, his narrative would prove to be “a possession for all time,” far more important than the actual war itself.³

Precisely because of this didactic nature of Thucydides’ lengthy narrative—predicated on the belief that human nature is unchanging across time and space and thus predictable—the conflict of Athens and Sparta is supposed to serve as a lesson for what can happen to any people in any war in any age. A central theme is the use and abuse of power, and how it lurks behind men’s professions of idealism and purported ideology. What men say, the speeches diplomats give, the reasons states go to war, all this “in word” (logos) is as likely to cloak rather than to elucidate what they will do “in deed” (ergon). Thucydides teaches us to embrace skepticism, expecting us to look to national self-interest, not publicized grievances, when wars of our own age inevitably break out.

Still, Thucydides was not an abstract theorist but a chief player in the war he wrote about. He nearly died of the plague and was cooped up in the city with tens of thousands of other Athenians who sought refuge there from the invading Peloponnesians. He fought and lost to the cagey Spartan commander Brasidas as an Athenian general in the struggle over the northern allied city of Amphipolis. For that setback he was unfairly exiled in his late thirties by an angry people back home (423), whose leaders are later prominent in his own history. Like Caesar’s and Napoleon’s, Thucydides’ writing is inextricably mixed up with his past life as a man of action—and he too sometimes refers to himself in the third person as a character in his own history.

In response to that injustice of expulsion, the historian traversed the Greek world for twenty-some years of the war as an embedded reporter of sorts. Thucydides was eager to hear from veterans the Peloponnesian and Boeotian sides of the story as well, and his subsequent balanced treatment is riveting. The history is also full of bizarre examples of how ingenious Greeks diverted their singular energy and talent to find horrific ways of killing and maiming one another, from crafting a fire cannon to torch trapped soldiers to throwing overboard thousands of captured rowers.

Yet for all his personal autopsy and firsthand graphic detail, Thucydides can also be hard to read for a modern audience: a difficult vocabulary, strange-sounding names and places, often tedious listings of invasions and expeditions—and long, sometimes contorted speeches whose odd grammar and syntax seem almost impossible for even his contemporary audiences to have understood. While it is fashionable lately to suggest that Thucydides was our first “postmodern” historian whose preconceived theories required that he invent “facts” in the interest of constructing “objectivity,” he is much too complex a mind for such a simple sham.

Modern readers are instead more struck by Thucydides’ attempts at objectivity, by how this historian went to great lengths to interview combatants, consult written treaties, and look at records on stone. Thucydides was an observer who at various times expressed admiration for the democratic imperialist Pericles. But he also clearly liked the Spartan firebrand Brasidas (whose more brilliant career ended his own). He waxed eloquently over the Athenian right-wing coup of 411 and its eccentric godhead Antiphon—even as he praised the wartime resiliency of democracies. And though a commander of sailors, Thucydides was nevertheless still more enamored with infantrymen. Because his history is a classic of literature and philosophy, the war is known to us in a manner not true of subsequent larger and far more bloody conflicts.⁴

Athens as America

Contemporary America is often now seen through the lens of ancient Athens, both as a center of culture and as an unpredictable imperial power that can arbitrarily impose democracy on friends and enemies alike. Thomas Paine long ago spelled this natural affinity out: “What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude.” Like ancient Athenians, present-day Americans are often said to believe that “they can be opposed in nothing,” and abroad can “equally achieve what was easy and what was hard.”⁵ Although Americans offer the world a radically egalitarian popular culture and, more recently, in a very Athenian mood, have sought to remove oligarchs and impose democracy—in Grenada, Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq—enemies, allies, and neutrals alike are not so impressed. They understandably fear American power and intentions while our successive governments, in the manner of confident and proud Athenians, assure them of our morality and selflessness. Military power and idealism about bringing perceived civilization to others are a prescription for frequent conflict in any age—and no ancient state made war more often than did fifth-century imperial Athens.

So great were the dividends of envy, fear, and legitimate grievance against the ancient world’s first democracy that the victorious Peloponnesians who oversaw the destruction of the Long Walls of Athens—the fortifications to the sea symbolic of the power of the poor and their desire to spread democracy throughout the Aegean—did so to music and applause. Again, most Greeks concluded that, as Xenophon wrote, Athens’ defeat “marked the beginning of freedom for Greece”—without a clue that the victorious Sparta would move immediately to create its own overseas empire in the vacuum.⁶ Blinkered idealists in America who believe that the world wishes to join our democratic culture might reflect that at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, “the general good intentions of people leaned clearly in favor of the Spartans” and that “the majority of Greeks were deeply hostile toward the Athenians.”

The wealth and very liberality of Athens also encouraged dissent and hyper-criticism at home and abroad. The Athenians’ detractors expected a much higher level of fairness from them than they ever would have from the Spartans. Not until fourth-century Sparta incurred commensurate jealousy and envy as the Hellenic world’s only superpower, following its victory in the war, would the Greeks at last cease their distrust of imperial Athens.⁷

This paradox was an exasperating experience for Athenians. And it perhaps presages the dilemma faced by generations of subsequent powerful Western liberal and imperial republics that were singularly chastised to match their idealistic and high utopian rhetoric with deeds. Just as states reprimanded Athens but preferred to visit the Acropolis rather than the unimpressive national Spartan shrine to Menelaus, so too the West’s Cold War detractors roundly condemned its realist foreign policy but usually preferred to accept a visiting professorship at Oxford, the Sorbonne, or the University of California, Berkeley, rather than a teaching slot in Moscow, Havana, or Cairo.⁸

Sparta counted on these inconsistencies in its upcoming war with Athens: the rest of the Greek world would subject Athens to a standard of behavior that it would never apply to illiberal Sparta. The privileged citizens of a consensual and affluent Athens would purportedly have a much lower tolerance for a drawn-out war’s pain and sacrifice than the militarists at Sparta, whose society was on a constant war footing and reflective of the barracks. And the volatile assembly would vote for and then reject military operations in a way unheard of at oligarchic Sparta.

Consequently, many have carefully read Thucydides in just that historicist context. Our leaders and pundits are eager to learn from the Athenians’ mistakes and successes. They are unsure whether the fate of Athens is to be our own, or whether Americans can yet match the Athenians’ civilization and influence while avoiding their hubris. Perhaps never has the Peloponnesian War been more relevant to Americans than to us of the present age. We, like the Athenians, are all-powerful, but insecure, professedly pacifist yet nearly always in some sort of conflict, often more desirous of being liked than being respected, and proud of our arts and letters even as we are more adept at war.

Good and Bad Wars

“A war like no other” and a conflict “great and more noteworthy than any that had preceded it.” So years afterward wrote the battle veteran Thucydides of the long-anticipated breakout of war between Athens and Sparta.⁹ The brutal war seemed to have brought down much of everything great men had raised up. It clearly baffled Thucydides that a Hellenic civilization that had once given man so much now began to self-destruct so quickly. For many Greeks, such a fight between Hellenic speakers was not even properly to be called “war” (polemos) at all. Instead, it was something far nastier—“strife” (stasis), more like plague or famine than a noble conflict of resolute warriors.

In a good “war,” noble Greek city-states fought a few dramatic sea and land battles against foreign barbarians over ideas like freedom and autonomy. But “strife” implied no clear-cut end to civil war, terrorism, murder, and executions. Such killing involved a blurring between civilian and combatant. There were elements of the Peloponnesian War that were traditional, but it was still more often an awful novel experience of Greek killing Greek on a scale that dwarfed all civil discord before and most after.¹⁰

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 democratic 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 in 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.

Aristophanes, the brilliant comic dramatist, argued that the nonending war made the farmers broke, the male leaders silly, the generals bloodthirsty, the poor too reckless, and the arms sellers rich—and nevertheless trusted that Athens was more right than wrong. Patriotism, in both its exalted and its debased forms, finally overshadowed Socratic pretensions that all Greeks were citizens of the world. As Socrates himself is made to say in Plato’s later Protagoras, it is a “noble” thing (kalon) to go to war.²⁶

Behind the contradictions of politics and philosophy, and the hypocrisies of the Hellenic world’s greatest generation, remain the thousands of ordinary Greeks—the subjects of this book—who were slaughtered for nearly three decades for the designs of fickle men, shifting alliances, and contradictory causes. No war of the ancient world—not Xerxes’ earlier invasion of Greece, the later grandiose invasions of Alexander the Great, or Hannibal’s romp into Italy—is more riveting and yet contradictory than the three decades of intramural fighting between Athens and Sparta.

Just think of it: a land versus a maritime power, the starkness of the Dorians contrasted with Ionian liberality. Oligarchy was pitted against democracy, practiced dearth set against ostentatious wealth. A rural hamlet dethroned a majestic imperial city; and a garrison state professed the cause of Greek autonomy abroad even as a humane imperialism killed the innocent.

No one foresaw such carnage in 431. Who believed that in just two years, the majestic Pericles would end up covered with pustules, grasping an amulet as he coughed out his life in the fevers of the plague? The millionaire Nicias never imagined that twenty years later he would beg for his life before having his throat slit eight hundred miles away on Sicily. Nor did the handsome Alcibiades, the rage of Athens, envision that he of all people would be murdered by assassins in an obscure hamlet in Asia Minor. Everything considered wisdom at the beginning of the war would be proven folly at its end.

Hopes and Dreams

There was little surprise that Athens and Sparta fought a final war to the finish in 431. Perhaps the wonder instead was that they had not done so far earlier. Indeed, between 461 and 446 (the First Peloponnesian War), the two great powers had battled on and off, although most of this earlier conflict was waged between their respective surrogates, the Boeotians, Megarians, Corinthians, Argives, and Thessalians. Still, rarely since their brief alliance to repel Persia (480–79) had there been real affinity between the two states. Not more than a handful of Athenian elites and generals had ever visited Sparta. Almost no Spartans other than a few envoys had ever gazed upon the Acropolis. True, both Athens and Sparta were still Greek poleis. They shared a common language and were in matters of religion similar; but on core political, social, and cultural issues they remained mostly antithetical to each other.

By 431 each of the two city-states was in its own way militarily powerful precisely because it had bucked the old Hellenic agrarian tradition that had heretofore moderated the normal conditions of warfare: brutal battles of an hour or so defining war between reluctant farmers with harvest responsibilities at home. Astute prewar observers began to understand why there would be neither natural constraints nor easy victory for either side when helot serfs and galleys meant there was little need for the soldiers of either state to stay home and farm.

Pericles himself, for example, on the eve of the fighting said, “War is inevitable.”²⁷ The idea that Persia might reinvade a divided Greece was unlikely after its calamitous defeat a half century earlier. Instead, there was a general uneasiness that this would be a new, unrestricted civil struggle. The Corinthians rightly warned the Spartans to jettison their “old-fashioned” strategies of war—consisting of attacking farms in hopes of prompting battle—and find new ways to destroy a city like Athens.²⁸

The conflict between the principal rivals officially started when the Spartans violated the sworn thirty-year peace treaty and invaded Attica in spring 431. They crossed the border a mere eighty days after their ally Thebes, without warning, had also sought preemptive action by attacking the neighboring Boeotian city of Plataea, a protectorate of Athens about fifty miles away.

Both sides claimed detailed grievances. Sparta’s ally Corinth, the rich Greek city on the Isthmus, felt that Athens earlier had belligerently intervened on the side of the rival island of Corcyra against it in a series of disputes. The small nearby state of Megara chafed under an Athenian trade embargo and asked for Spartan support. The nearby island of Aegina, which loomed on the horizon within easy sight from the Acropolis—Pericles once dubbed it “the eyesore of the Piraeus”—claimed that Athens interfered in its internal affairs and expected Sparta to preserve its sovereignty. Athenians, in turn, alleged that the Peloponnesians had encouraged their own tributary ally, the northern city of Potidaea, to revolt. The Boeotians residing to the immediate north of Athens wished to eliminate the outpost city of Plataea, which had brought the old fear of Athenian imperialism to their doorstep—and on and on.²⁹

Of course, an Athenian embargo against Megara, past Athenian interference in the nearby island of Aegina, rivalry over the allegiance of a powerful Corcyra with “its very large fleet,” and disputed lands on the border of Megara or Boeotia were no small matters.³⁰ But more frequently it was again the perception of grievance, involving matters of fear and honor, that propelled Sparta to act while it could, especially among generations in both Athens and Sparta that “were unfamiliar enough with war to welcome it”³¹ Athens apparently thought that over the long duration its culture really could either ignore or, if need be, overwhelm Sparta, even without demonstrating in any real way in the short term how it could make Sparta pay dearly if it dared send thousands of its hoplites into Attica. Pericles’ own goal, instead, was “to survive.”³² Yet planning to just not lose was a poor way in the short term to deter Sparta from acting on its fears; all Spartans believed that they could cross the Attic border with near impunity.

Pericles saw less of a need to enter into any direct squabbles that might endanger the empire or the decade-and-a-half peace since its last brush with Sparta, an armistice during which it reached an unprecedented level of wealth and security. The Athenians apparently felt that the Spartans would grasp that they could not win and so would not try, foolishly thinking in terms of long-term deterrence rather than immediately about how to warn their enemies that invasion across the border was synonymous with their destruction. Pericles was determined to take the first blow and so offered no credible counterthreat because he never really had any clear strategy for how to mount an offensive action that might knock Thebes or Sparta out of the war.

He was at heart an admiral. Before the war Pericles had conducted successful sieges of recalcitrant maritime states and fought sea battles. So he had never directed a long infantry campaign or even led a hoplite army into pitched battle. He apparently envisioned Athenian naval superiority as a tool for unfettered raiding rather than the transportation of a large army to the enemy’s rear. Sparta and Thebes were singularly unimpressed. Thousands were to die on both sides because their leaders took them to war without a real plan of how to defeat the enemy on the battlefield and destroy its power.

The Mythical Spartan Fleet

The Spartans had their own problems as well. A modern comparison can illustrate some sense of their dilemma: it would be as if in a world without nuclear weapons the old Soviet Union at some point before the 1990s had presciently accepted that ultimately it could not compete with the freewheeling democratic and capitalist juggernaut of the United States. Thus, the Soviet hard-liners would have felt it necessary to send 300 divisions into Europe before their own allies, and the world at large, shared this pessimistic appraisal of their future and thus abandoned allegiance to their empire.

The Spartans could field hoplite soldiers who were unbeatable in an open fight. Their tough agrarian ally Boeotia could muster even more heavy infantrymen—perhaps 7,000 to 12,000 if need be—who were every bit as formidable as Spartan professionals. And the league of allied states in the Peloponnese under Spartan leadership could for short periods march out an enormous army of 60,000 that could sweep any adversary off the field of battle. The best cavalry in central Greece was Boeotian and on the Spartan side.

For all these reasons, an impressed Thucydides emphasized that Sparta herself “occupies two-fifths of the Peloponnese, exercises control over the whole, and possesses many allies on the outside.”³³ Even if Sparta and its allies could not win such a war against a maritime empire, at least they were confident that such “hard power” precluded an Athenian army occupying the Spartan acropolis.

Yet the strength of Sparta and its league was in some ways a chimera. At the war’s outbreak the allied Peloponnesian force could not be projected by sea. It was certainly not sustained through real economic power. Sparta started out with no capital, few ships, and almost no cavalry or light-armed troops. Under the regimented totalitarian system founded by the mythical ancestor Lycurgus, civic virtue, not economic efficiency or individualism, mattered.

For example, iron spits, not coinage, served as money precisely because in such a strange moral universe they could not be used with the ease of ordinary (and thus corrupting) currency. Third-party boatbuilders or rowers for hire did not flock to Sparta in hopes of being compensated with a hoard of metal barbecue skewers. The Spartans had been warned on the eve of the war by their allies that their ossified manner of envisioning war as hoplite battle was a formula for suicide. The harping Corinthians continually urged them to strike out to help friends around the Aegean to resist Athenian imperialism.

Pericles was probably right when he claimed, “The Peloponnesians have no money, public or private.” There was certainly no imperial tribute pouring into the Spartan acropolis, and there were few Spartan colonies. Should Athens choose not to fight a pitched battle, Sparta possessed neither the capital nor the material reserves to keep an army in the field for any great length of time. Much less did it have either the know-how or the desire to conduct an unconventional low-intensity war of raiding, plundering, and sustained sieges.³⁴

A generation before the war the Spartans had swallowed their pride and called in Athenian siege engineers to help them storm insurrectionist helot strongholds. If Spartans had once needed Athenians to control their own subordinated peoples, what would happen when Athens would inevitably use its money and expertise to incite rather than subdue helot rebellion?³⁵

The combined fleet of Corinth and a few other Spartan allies counted only a little over 100 ships, less than half the size of the active Athenian imperial fleet. What triremes the Peloponnesians had existed only because of recent breakneck Corinthian efforts at naval construction to match the fleet of its rival Corcyra, but there was little accumulated capital to ensure that even a 100-ship armada could be deployed for very long. Warriors in heavy armor perched on tossing decks and powered by bought rowers were not Sparta’s idea of martial virtue.

In desperation, Sparta ludicrously proposed that her allies build a colossal fleet of some 500 triremes—a pipe dream from a state that had no port other than Gythium, some thirty miles away from the city proper. War planners imagined that the hated Persians might provide capital to lay down triremes and allure new allies to box in the Athenians—strategies that would work only if Sparta could first show some success, such as either a hoplite victory or substantive damage to the cohesiveness of the empire.

These were all grand aspirations that were not well suited for a blinkered and landlocked state. At war’s outbreak, only the three city-states of Corinth, Corcyra, and Athens had sizable fleets, and two were hostile to the Spartans.³⁶ So at least some Peloponnesians realized that eventually they would have to embrace a multifaceted strategy: defeat the Athenians at sea and disrupt her empire, while finding a way to cut the city off from its hinterland permanently. To accomplish those goals, they needed more and diverse allies, both Greeks and Persians, as well as innovative thinkers. Until then, they had to accept the bitter fact that in a simple contest between Sparta and the Athenian empire, the money, manpower, variety of military assets, and experience of military leadership were all on the Athenian side. Indeed, two decades later, even after the Athenian disaster at Sicily (413), when the Greek world predicted an imminent Athenian collapse, Sparta still found it hard to organize a Peloponnesian fleet—so reluctant and timid were her allies to challenge long-held Athenian superiority at sea.³⁷

Spartan Calculations

When war broke out in 431, the Spartan generals remained unimaginative. Two hereditary kings were by law leaders of the army and were often annoyed by the board of ephors, some of whom accompanied the royalty on campaign as overseers. Strategy at Sparta merely reflected the thinking of a closed hierarchical society of group messes and the unquestioning assumptions of a brutal indoctrination that began at age seven, when young boys were inducted into military life. Because so few Spartan statesmen had seen mercantile cities in action, they were both naive about interstate relations and the size of enemy populations and unusually prone to corruption and bribery.

The larger and prouder allied states of the Peloponnese, like Mantinea and Elis, resented brutal Spartan leadership and were in the process of liberalizing their constitutions. In the Peloponnesian way of traditional war, harvesttime was the flash point of battle: infantrymen tramped in to burn ripe dry grain or consume it; defenders tried to evacuate it; and farmer-warriors all worried that there were harvests back home to tend that were far more important than campaigning. The Athenians had once (460–446) controlled the routes through Megara to Attica; now, however, they did not. In the Spartan mind, then, marching into Attica was possible in a way that had been difficult during the First Peloponnesian War.

Nearly 250,000 long-suffering indentured servants in the surrounding territories of Laconia and Messenia (the so-called helots) worked farms under coercion to feed the Spartan military messes. Because of the nature of barracks life and the near-constant drilling and policing in occupied Messenia, male Spartiate warriors were seldom at home. Thus, the population of the city continually fell even as the number of oppressed helots grew. If 8,000 true Spartiates had once fought Persia, by the time of the Peloponnesian War, fifty years later, there were fewer than half that number. The result was a garrison state that could scarcely cobble together 8,000 to 10,000 hoplite soldiers of varying status, while it sat atop a volcano of tens of thousands of male serfs (“a disaster waiting to happen”) who purportedly wished, by their own admission, “to eat their masters even raw.”³⁸

The helots and their dream of a free Messenia were not the only fault lines in Sparta’s complex pyramidal society. In its immediate environs there were also 20,000 to 30,000 adult male Laconian perioikoi (“those who live around”), nearby villagers who enjoyed free but subservient political status and were sometimes just as unhappy as the helots with Spartan hegemony.

Even without the worry of controlling a vast Messenia and its quarter million helots on the other side of Mount Taygetus, Sparta, like many contemporary Western societies, was in perpetual demographic crisis, entirely dependent on the menial labor of serfs. On the eve of the war King Archidamus in vain tried to remind his constituents that they were contemplating war against a state that “had a greater population than any other in Greece.” What had developed into the finest infantry in Greece was by nature a domestic police force, or perhaps a Waffen-SS if you will, whose original reason for existence was to thwart domestic insurrection and ferret out alleged dissidents.

Finally, the cause of the volatility of most helots was not, as in the case of chattel slaves elsewhere, merely their inferior status. Instead, their zeal arose out of a sense of nationalism about their occupied home of Messenia. They were an entire tribe, in their dispossession somewhat akin to the modern-day Kurds, who despite the absence of a homeland understood that they had once been a free people with a territory and population larger than that of their conquerors.³⁹

At the beginning of the conflict, Spartan strategy was as simple as it proved to be naive: the old Pavlovian response of when in doubt “invade Attica.” King Archidamus would march a massive force of allies into Attica to challenge the Athenians to battle.⁴⁰ If the enemy did not venture forth from their walls, Archidamus would then systematically ravage Attic agriculture, causing famine, or at least humiliation, to make the arrogant and sophisticated city come to terms. Throughout his history Thucydides reiterates that the Spartans were flabbergasted that their simplistic reliance on ravaging had not worked. How, after all, could the Athenians call themselves an imperial power when they could not stop enemies from marching in view of the Acropolis?⁴¹

Sparta saw no reason to alter its strategy after some two hundred years of success, even if Athens had evolved into a city that could survive despite enemies at its gates. Indeed, the Spartans seemed to have had no clear idea of the size or rural defenses of Athens. They knew even less about the maritime economy of Athens and its theoretical ability to import food to replace the third to half of the city’s supply lost out in the countryside. Even more naively, the Spartans believed that if they ravaged Attica the overseas subject states of the Athenian empire would take heart and revolt, despite the reality that Sparta had no real means to send any warships to aid them if and when an angry retaliatory Athenian fleet sailed in.

While the actual degree of Athenian self-sufficiency in grains is unknown, it should have been common knowledge that in a crisis, importing sufficient additional food into the city was assured—especially since Athens had the money to pay the increased costs. Later, even when the Spartans were camped right outside the walls at Decelea (413–404) and the Athenians were denied use of their lands for much of the year, King Agis lamented that his raiders could still not bring the city to its knees as long as he could see grain ships continually sail into the Piraeus.⁴²

Too many of the Spartans had also forgotten that during the invasion of Xerxes of 480, well before the construction of the Long Walls, Athens under Themistocles had survived not only the complete evacuation of its farmland but even the very abandonment of its city as well. Of this fact Pericles would later remind his far wealthier and larger citizenry. If a weaker Athens in 480 could have overcome 250,000 Persians arriving by land and sea, and endured the torching of its Acropolis, surely a half century later, with far greater assets, Athens in its maturity could once more survive the temporary loss of its farmland to a force one-quarter the size of that of its old enemies.⁴³

At the eleventh hour, even Archidamus finally seemed to grasp the dilemma of fighting the new war the old way. On the eve of invasion, he warned his followers in vain that Athens had ample “public and private wealth, ships, cavalry, weaponry,” as well as allies, tribute, and a vast population. It could be opposed only when there were sufficient Peloponnesian “money and ships.” Athens’ hinterland was no larger than Sparta’s. But the key difference was that, unlike the Peloponnesians, Athens had plenty of ways to augment its impressive local harvests with food imported from as far away as the Aegean Islands, Asia Minor, the Black Sea region, and Egypt.⁴⁴

The Logic of Athens

The Long Walls, built between 461 and 456, and connecting the city to the Piraeus, were the most revolutionary development in the history of Greek strategy. At a single stroke the fortifications provided immunity from the age-old tactic of attacking agriculture to prompt pitched battle or induce starvation through the burning of a dry grain crop. With the Long Walls, Pericles had vastly expanded on Themistocles’ earlier achievement. He grasped that with the proper fortified lifeline, only the countryside, not the city proper, needed to be evacuated before the onslaught of a superior enemy. This was a brilliant twist perhaps, but also utterly ruthless and divisive in abandoning the property and livelihood of thousands of his citizens to the enemy.

Athens understood that its ramparts not only offered the city a greater range of defensive options but also had the effect of strengthening democratic constituencies inside the walls. Thus, it later began promoting the concept of long walls at other Greek states such as Argos and Patras.⁴⁵ The deleterious consequences were not confined to conservative Athenian rustics, who were left outside the municipal walls. Sparta and her allies also later complained that the construction of such extensive fortifications had changed the very strategic calculus of Greece itself, giving one state an unfair immunity from traditional pitched battle, and thus should have never been allowed to happen. No wonder they hired flute players to mark their destruction at the war’s end.⁴⁶

Athenian silver “owls” were the common currency of the Aegean world.* At the beginning of the war, Athens garnered 600 talents of annual tribute, in addition to perhaps some 400 talents of internal income generated through mining, trade, overseas rent, and commerce. By 431 there were some 6,000 talents in reserve in the temple treasuries on the Acropolis. That pile was the equivalent of 36 million man-days of labor, or over 100 drachmas per person among the 300,000 residents in Athens and Attica, enough wherewithal, in theory, to build 6,000 triremes!⁴⁷ In today’s purchasing power, the treasury would be similar to a medium-sized American city of about 300,000 people possessing an endowment of some $3 billion in cash reserves. In this regard, tragedy, comedy, and the Parthenon were not so much expressions of native genius as reflections of lots of money.

After the Persians withdrew in 479, a Hellenic defense league insidiously, over a half century, transmogrified into an Athenian empire of nearly two hundred states run by seven hundred imperial officials. Due to fifty years of naval construction, tribute, and the integration of subject states, Athens was far more powerful at the outbreak of the war than at any time in its history. To maintain such an empire, in the fifth century Athens had fought three out of every four years, a remarkable record of constant mobilization, unrivaled even in modern times.⁴⁸

The population of Athens grew at over 2 percent per annum for most of the decades preceding the Peloponnesian War. And Athens, unlike Sparta, crafted a more inclusive society, whose critics complained that to the naked eye slaves, metics, and citizens were nearly indistinguishable in such a crass culture—in opposition to the more utopian efforts at Sparta to create a republic of virtue among a smaller and more static number of citizens.⁴⁹

Athenian infantry, nearly 30,000 of both frontline and reserve garrison hoplites, was at its core probably as good a fighting army as any except for the Spartans and Boeotians. Yet like the Victorian British army, which was hardly designed to fight imperial German divisions in the trenches of Europe, the Athenian phalanx was never intended to face anything like Spartan hoplites, but was perfectly capable as a seaborne force for putting down recalcitrant tributary allies. In addition, there were reserves of imperial manpower far from Attica that were safe from Spartan ground intrusions—what King Archidamus worried about as the “plenty of the other land” out of his army’s reach.⁵⁰

True, the states of the Peloponnese could marshal a large alliance of autonomous Greek militaries, among them real powers like Corinth, Elis, and Thebes. Yet the Athenians retained two real advantages in such coalition warfare. First, Athens had the more ideologically zealous friends. It led not only democratic subjects in the Aegean but also outcasts like the Plataeans in Boeotia, the Messenian expatriates scattered around Greece, and the quarrelsome Corcyraeans, all of whom had real enemies in Thebes, Sparta, and Corinth quite apart from their alliance with Athens.

Second, Athens was a true hegemon, not, like Sparta, the premier state in a coalition of the willing. Thus the Athenians could craft strategy in a unilateral fashion impossible among the Peloponnesians. Another of the ironies of the war was that oligarchic Sparta was far more democratic in its attitudes toward its coalition members than was democratic Athens in relation to its own imperial subjects and allies.⁵¹

In the eleventh hour before the fighting, Pericles outlined to the Athenian assembly a conservative strategy of attrition. He called for a plan “to overcome” or, better yet, “to survive,” counting on the inability of the enemy to kill or starve Athenians. To win, Sparta really needed a fleet. For all its grand talk about creating a vast armada of 500 ships, without foreign money and long training it had little chance of matching the Athenian navy for at least a decade. Instead, faced with unsustainable expenditures of marshaling a huge army to invade Athens, the Spartan oligarchy would soon appreciate the futility of the war. This plan of exhaustion—the enemy would tire itself out without getting inside the Long Walls of Athens or disrupting its empire—counted on time and patience insidiously to do their work.⁵²

If Athens’ immediate strategy did nothing to prevent a war, its ultimate logic might at least achieve a stalemate that, in turn, would be defined as victory: (1) evacuate the rural population and infantrymen inside the walls for a month or so during the annual Spartan invasions; (2) keep morale high, mitigate losses, and defend the countryside through cavalry patrols and rural garrisons; (3) launch naval patrols in the Aegean to guarantee that the subject states were timely in their dues and grain ships protected; (4) send out triremes with marines to harass and blockade the Peloponnesians far to the rear of their expeditionary army, while besieging rebellious subjects; (5) look to occasional opportunities in nearby Megara or Boeotia to pick off allies friendly to Sparta by either fomenting democratic revolution or even invading places where Spartans could not or would not easily deploy; (6) at all costs, avoid both expensive expeditions abroad and pitched battles against the Spartan phalanx.

Do all that, Pericles implied, and the city’s message of Greek equality and the prosperity of an Athenian Aegean might find greater resonance. If one were poor, it might be preferable to be a subject of a democratic Athenian empire than a nonvoting citizen of an autonomous agrarian oligarchy. The trick was to back such idealism with action, since what states would like to do and what they could were two entirely different propositions, always predicated on whether a Spartan phalanx or Athenian trireme was closer at any given moment.⁵³

So confident was Pericles of a draw that he apparently envisioned a war of no more than three or four seasons of campaigning. By then Sparta, frustrated in Attica and furious over attacks on its sacred coastal plains, would sue for peace. Perhaps another war of attrition—like the First Peloponnesian War, which had lasted fifteen years (461–446)—would lead to another stalemate that, likewise, would allow another spurt of unimpeded growth of Athenian power.⁵⁴

Relating the War

How, then, should one tell such a complex story? The contemporary historian Thucydides, who sought to provide a military and political framework for the war, chose to narrate events in the annalistic tradition. He recorded the fighting year by year from 431 to 411. But at that point his incomplete history breaks off nearly in midsentence. The last seven and a half years are continued by his successor Xenophon, down to the end of the hostilities in 404–403.

Thucydides is a brilliant narrator. Yet, again, he is not easy to follow in Greek or English. Nor, speeches aside, is he always lively. His greatest moments are when he turns to graphic descriptions of representative horror: the ordeal at Corcyra, the blockade of Plataea, the battle of Mantinea, and the killing spree at Mycalessus. Most of the really gifted modern narrative historians of the Peloponnesian War of the nineteenth century—Julius Beloch, Hermann Bengtson, Georg Busolt, George Grote, and Donald Kagan—have followed Thucydides’ notion of a war told by campaigning seasons. They relate events of the Peloponnesian War in roughly the same chronological order as the great historian narrated them. It is the most logical method for traditional history, but it also presents problems because the Peloponnesian War was fought not merely between Athens and Sparta but rather by a host of other powers as well—Corinth, Thebes, Argos, Syracuse, and Persia—which sometimes conducted operations on their own without coordination with either of the chief belligerents.

But even within his rather neat annual presentation of the events, Thucydides himself sometimes swings widely back and forth from fighting on mainland Greece and in the Aegean to Sicily and Asia Minor, a sentence noting an Argive expedition here, suddenly a paragraph devoted to Sicilian civil strife there. He seldom makes tactical or strategic connections between nearly simultaneous operations. It is not because he is ignorant of the main plot of the war but, rather, because there often was none: Spartans, Athenians, Sicilians, Argives, Corinthians, and others fought in a series of often disjointed and confusing battles, and then seemingly did not fight much at all for months and even years on end. Local rival states, like Argos and Epidaurus, for example, might suddenly battle over disputed pastureland, yet often called such brief and confined struggles part of the larger ideological and ongoing war.

There are other problems in a chronological presentation of events. Indeed, Thucydides’ contemporaries were not sure, as he apparently was, that there really was a distinct and continuous “Peloponnesian War” at all that started in 431 and ended with the defeat of Athens in 404. Some Greeks thought the war had begun in 433, when Corinth fought Corcyra at sea, or in March 431, when Plataea was attacked by the Thebans, rather than in May 431, when Spartan soldiers reached Attica. A few ancient historians, such as Theopompus and Cratippus, doubted that the war had even ended in 404 with Lysander’s destruction of the Long Walls. Instead, in their views perhaps it did not cease until Athens defeated the Spartan fleet at Cnidus (394) and thus at last the two belligerents put aside their century-long rivalry.

In any case, here is a brief synopsis of the war, one providing a generally accepted outline of events that gives the reader a political and strategic context to the sometimes-confusing experience of battle that follows.⁵⁵

PHASE ONE: THE ARCHIDAMIAN WAR (431–421)
Chapters: Fire, Disease, Terror, Armor, Walls

PHASE TWO: THE PEACE OF NICIAS (421–415)
Chapters: Terror, Armor, Walls

PHASE THREE: THE SICILIAN WAR (415–413)
Chapters: Horses, Ships

PHASE FOUR: THE DECELEAN AND IONIAN WARS (413–404)
Chapters: Ships, Climax