AT the beginning of a war each side must consider its own and the enemy’s resources. This done, each side plans its “strategy” as best it may. “Strategy” is the plan of campaign. It is too narrowly defined as “the art of bringing the enemy to battle”, of course under conditions that promise victory. For “strategy” includes the art of avoiding battle altogether, of course under conditions which are likely to involve defeat. “Tactics” are a simpler matter. These imply that the armies or navies are face to face. “Tactics” are defined as “the art of defeating the enemy.” Tactics may win a battle and strategy may lose a war for the side which won the battle. On the other hand, good strategy may be hopelessly spoilt by bad tactics. A lost battle is a hard nut for strategy to crack. Yet there are times when tactical genius, like Alexander’s, may redeem strategical blundering. Pericles framed his strategy for the opening of the war in the light of the comparative strength in men, ships, and money, of the two sides, though also with particular regard to the “temper” of the enemy. This comparison must also be the prelude to a discussion of the wisdom or folly of that strategy, a question round which controversy rages furiously.
At Athens military service was incumbent on every citizen between the ages of 18 and 60. There was no need to improvise a conscript army as the war went on. This was but the common rule for every ancient city state. (Hence the idea of bestowing the franchise on women was, except in the buffoonery of comedy, incredible, even in Sparta.) The citizen army thus consisted of heavy-armed (hoplites), light-armed, and cavalry. The “hoplite” force consisted of 19,000 men.{42} Of these, 16,000 were citizens, and 3,000 were “metics”, resident aliens who had to perform military service. Of the 19,000 hoplites, 3000 were either too young or too old for service in the field, and served as a “Garrison Army” to guard Athens and Peiraeus and their connecting walls, and such small forts as were placed on or near the roads leading to the northern frontier. Besides the hoplite force there were “light-armed” troops and cavalry. The former were numerous, and according to Thucydides many more than 10,000 of these were engaged in the campaign of Delium in 424 B.C.{43} Their military efficiency was not highly regarded, and as these were called on in large numbers to man the fleet their organisation was loose.{44} Among these was a special corps of 1600 archers, who were supplemented by hired mercenaries. But all Greeks relied at this time on the hoplite to win land battles. The cavalry were a sorry handful, but 1200 in number, including horse-archers. They have won fame on the boards of the comic stage in the Knights of Aristophanes. They won no glory in the great war. Athens’ Thessalian allies ought to have remedied her own sore deficiency in cavalry, but the Thessalian horse belonged to that part of the population of that much-divided land which was most lukewarm in Athens’ cause, and, save on the occasion of the petty skirmish at “Phrygia”, a hamlet in Attica, in 431 B.C.,{45} Thessalian cavalry gave very little help to Athens.
Contingents could be requisitioned from the cities of the Empire, and formed part of the great armada which sailed to Sicily in 415 B.C.{46} Except when some such great effort was made, the “subject allies” rarely supplied troops except for minor operations on land near their own cities. Independent allies and mercenaries could also be enlisted on occasion. But for the war as a whole Athens must rely mainly on her 19,000 hoplites, and it was not an imposing force, even on the petty scale (in our own terrible experience of warfare) of all ancient inter-Greek warfare before the days of Alexander.
The land army of the Peloponnesian League, when mustered at strength, was by itself stronger in numbers than the full Athenian levy; and the Spartans, though few proportionately to the rest, supplied a stiffening of the whole of such priceless value that, with the one doubtful exception of the mysterious battle of Oenoe,{47} they had never yet been beaten in fair fight. Their northern allies in Boeotia were a doughty hoplite force, with whom the Athenians had, in recent years, measured themselves at the battle of Coronea to their own undoing. At the battle of Delium in 424 B.C. the numbers of Athenian and Boeotian hoplites were equal, 7000 on either side. Their courage was not equal. The cavalry of the northerners—Boeotians, Phocians, Locrians—were numerous and excellent, and nearly twice as strong in proportion to their heavy infantry as were the Athenian horse.{48} Their light-armed troops again were as many in number as the Athenian, and were more carefully organised and disciplined. Long before the next century had run its course the Boeotians were to prove themselves the sturdiest and best soldiers in Greece proper. Their day was not yet, but in the battles of the great war the coming events cast their shadows before. At its outbreak the northern army could be unduly belittled by clever Athenian strategists. One fact, however, was certain. Let the League forces on the south join hands with their northern allies, and there was no Athenian force strong enough to bear the brunt of the joint attack in the open field. An Athenian annalist of the time has set the total military strength of the enemy at the round number of 100,000 men.{49} The joint army which wasted Attica at the outset of the war numbered 60,00.{50} The figure seems out of all reason in comparison with the opposition it was likely to encounter. Archidamus, its general, certainly proposed to make sure, if the Athenians came out to fight. This, indeed, was his one great hope, and, had not Pericles already been stoutly resolved, as will be seen, not to fight, the very numbers of the invaders might have determined him upon this prudent if unheroic course. As it was, it cannot be charged against the Spartan king that he defeated his own object. And invasion is always a risky affair. In the American Civil War the army of the South defending Richmond numbered 60,000 men. When the Northern general, McClellan, moved against it on York River he brought 110,000 men, while yet another 100,000 men hung menacingly on the north. Outnumbered on land always by the enemy, the Southern generals won victory after victory in sheer hard fighting. The odds against the South were much the same, some two or even three to one, as were those against Athens in the great war. The Confederates’ strategy was different. Athens found no Lee or Jackson to lead her armies into battle. Her one brilliant general, Demosthenes, won notable victories, as will be seen. At the chief of these, the battle of Olpae, he had just sixty Athenian hoplites in his composite army. “The hoplite force at Athens seems to be in the sorriest condition,” wrote an Athenian a few years after the war began.{51} “In a single pitched battle”, Pericles himself admits, “the Peloponnesians and their allies are a match for all Greece.” Later he seeks to encourage his people. “Our enemies”, he cries, “have never yet felt our united strength; the care of a navy divides our attention, and on land we are obliged to send our own citizens everywhere. But they, if they meet and defeat what is but a part of our whole army, are as proud as if they had routed us all, and, if they are defeated, they pretend they have been vanquished by our entire army.” It were difficult to name any such victory won by Athens over the Peloponnesians in the lifetime of the majority of those of his hearers who would be going to war. Pericles’ argument can have encouraged but few of these, and must have deceived himself least of all his fellow-countrymen.{52} Assuredly on land Athens could not speak with her enemies in the gate. Her one hope was to sever north from south and keep the League army at home by some counter-irritation. Once again the vital importance of Megara to the security of Attica starts clearly into view.
Upon the sea the position was exactly reversed. In numbers, as in efficiency, the Athenian navy was every whit as superior to their enemy as were the latter on the land. Athens’ triremes numbered 300 by themselves.{53} Others were furnished by the two or three allies in the Aegean who still proudly contributed ships and not money to the resources of the Empire. Thus Chios had a navy of 60 triremes at least.{54} The new independent ally Corcyra could muster as many as 120, and actually did send 50 of these to help their friends in the first year of the war.{55} Then Corcyra’s enthusiasm evaporated, and Athens had little help from her afterwards. But at least Corcyra’s ships formed no part of the foemen’s fleet.
And a sorry fleet this Peloponnesian fleet was, as the “war by sea” was very quickly to show. In numbers, Corinth and her friendly colonies might muster 130 triremes, Megara some 40, Elis a miserable 10.{56} Once, before the war entered upon its final stage in 413 B.C., a Peloponnesian fleet of as many as 100 ships was found afloat in home waters.{57} Once again, greatly daring, a Spartan admiral, Alcidas, took a squadron of 40 ships right across the Aegean in 427 B.C., only, as will presently be narrated, to run in panic homewards at sight of just two Athenian triremes in the offing.{58} But most significant of all is the comment by Thucydides upon a naval battle when neither side won the victory outright. In the year 413 B.C. a Corinthian squadron of some 30 ships was lying at anchor in the bay of Erineus on the Achaean shore at the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf to safeguard the passage of merchantmen from Sicily to the Peloponnese. The Athenians, despite the strength of their navy, were never able to blockade the long coast-line of the Peloponnese even in the summer months when alone operations by sea were possible. So in this the eighteenth year of the long war the small Corinthian squadron lay in Erineus bay, stretched in close line from one promontory to the other on the opposite side of the harbour. Troops lined the whole circuit of the little bay. Presently Diphilus, the Athenian admiral, sailing from Naupactus on the coast opposite with 33 vessels hovered off the harbour mouth. Seeing the strength of the enemy’s position he did not attempt to force the entrance. The Corinthian admiral, Polyanthes, took his courage in both hands. He had carefully strengthened the “catheads” of his warships, a noteworthy device, and thereby made his ships the superiors of the lighter Athenian craft if it came to ramming. So he sallied out of harbour and bore down upon the enemy. His unusual courage and skill met with some well-deserved success. Three of his own ships were sunk, but he managed by ramming to put seven of the enemy out of action. With their oarage in disconsolate fragments the Athenians lay helpless on the surface of the sea. Luckily for the crews, the wind blew them northwards towards the friendly shore. So the engagement ended. Both sides withdrew to the ports whence they started. No prisoners were taken on either side. In itself it was a small and unimportant skirmish in a very secondary “theatre of operations”. It had no direct influence upon the course of the war. The Athenian command of the Greek and Western seas was not in any way seriously imperilled. But the Corinthians were enormously elated. They had fought by sea and they had not seen their fleet annihilated. They raised a trophy of victory on their coast with loud paeans of triumph. The Athenians, not to be outdone, presently, when all the enemy had sailed or marched away, also raised a counter-trophy on the Achaean shore some two miles off. But theirs was not so speedy nor so whole-hearted a jubilation. “For”, writes Thucydides, himself an Athenian admiral at one time in the war:
“The Athenians thought that they were defeated because they had not gained a signal victory: the Corinthians considered themselves conquerors if they were not severely beaten.”{59}
The battle of Jutland was a great strategical victory. Never again did the German fleet challenge for the mastery of the sea. But that fleet had, albeit with loss, escaped homewards from the battle. Who that recalls the memory of that June morning when the news reached England can bear to this day to think long on the consternation, the almost incredulous anger, of the English? Was this the second Trafalgar of their dreams? And all the joy-bells of Berlin were ringing.
This their grave naval inferiority irked the Spartan Government sorely. At the very outset of the struggle they indulged in wild hopes of raising their available fleet to a grand total of 500, and sent orders to their friends in Italy and Sicily to send them such ships as they had, and build the many more required to make up this number.{60} The Spartans could summon ships from the west as Owen Glendower could call spirits from the vasty deep:
“But will they come when you do call for them?”
It was not until the disaster at Syracuse had destroyed two-thirds of the Athenian navy that a score or so of ships, a twenty from Syracuse, a ten from Thurii, appeared in Aegean waters, when all men thought that Athens’ doom was sealed.{61} Thereafter, and then only, the numbers of the rival fleets were equalised. And still for many years victory by sea rested with the Athenians.
Maritime skill, the most valuable of all Athenian assets, acquired by fifty unbroken years of practice, was added to what was an overwhelming superiority of numbers if the Athenian Admiralty handled their numbers well. Light-heartedly the Peloponnesian thought that such skill could be either improvised or at least speedily acquired.
“As soon as we have brought our naval skill up to the level of theirs, our courage will surely give us the victory,” so Thucydides makes the Corinthians reassure the Spartans. “For courage is a natural gift which they cannot learn. But skill is a thing acquired, to be won by practice.”{62} With what grim amusement must the historian, himself an admiral, have written these words!
“How can they acquire skill, no sailors they,—mere tillers of the soil?” Pericles cried scornfully to his people. “Maritime skill is like skill of other kinds, not a thing to be cultivated casually, at any chance time, by the way. It is jealous of any other occupation which distracts the attention for one moment from itself.”{63} Every word of this is true, as the English beyond all peoples know. It needed a Phormio to drive the lesson home into the thick skulls of Spartan landsmen. How harshly, how unmeritedly, did Villeneuve suffer from the lashings of Napoleon’s tongue!
After men and ships comes money. In modern warfare money tends to take the first place, and, above all, money is credit. In the ancient world there was no credit in the modern financial sense. The State imposed taxes, with two preferences, the one for taxing the alien rather than the citizen, the other for indirect over direct taxation. But the State did not borrow at interest from either foreign nations or its own citizens. Recovery after war was an easier matter in consequence. Repayment of the costs of war might be among the terms imposed on the defeated side. But neither victors nor vanquished were burdened with debt charges or the repayment of capital borrowed in the years of stress.
“War,” said King Archidamus bluntly at Sparta when he was urging his people not to be swept away by the excited speeches of their allies, “war is a matter of money. We have no money in our Treasury, and we are never willing to contribute out of our private means.”{64} But when, despite his warnings, Sparta plunged precipitately into war, the lack of money seems never to have distressed her. The Peloponnesian troops received no pay. They went to battle when they were called out, and lived, so far as possible, on the produce and spoil of the enemy’s country. When there was nothing left, they marched off homewards gaily again. The army was disbanded, and off every man went to his farm. It was the duty of the Government not to call men to the colours at a time of year when sowing or harvesting had to be done. This was convenient also to the enemy, but it could really not be helped. No doubt any sustained or continuous military operations were sorely hampered if not altogether frustrated by this simple system of “war finance”. But to the Peloponnesians at least there seemed no other way possible. Hence on the outbreak of war there was no special war taxation imposed. “War needs no fixed charges,” the King himself remarked.{65} This happy-go-lucky casual system worked within its limits quite smoothly for the war on land. Some grandiose schemes for fixed contributions to the war chest or for borrowings on a large scale from the rich shrine of Delphi came to nothing.{66} Occasional demands for money from the allies might be made.{67} But Peloponnesian war finance seems to have been of a quite engaging simplicity. Perhaps Corinth had to pay her sailors. There is no information about this. Corinth, however, a rich merchant city, could well afford it. It was only in the last years of the war, when a big fleet had to be maintained at a heavy cost, that Sparta found herself in a sorry financial state, and “Persian gold” became the determinant factor of the struggle.
Things at Athens were totally different. The Athenian soldier or sailor expected to be paid, and paid well, when he was on active service. Such service for the fleet might be continuous for six months at least each year. The upkeep of a trireme was certainly as much as six talents a year, and there were the 300 triremes. The entire cost of the war to Athens during the first ten years has been reckoned at 1300 talents annually.{68}
Pericles was the most skilled of financiers. “Wars”, he declared, “must be paid for out of capital, not out of forced contributions.”{69} For many years before the outbreak of the great war he had been heaping up wealth in the State Treasury. In the happy days of peace the income of Athens may have been upwards of 1000 talents a year. The bulk of it came from the annual tribute exacted from the cities of the Empire. Part of it came from State property (the silver-mines of Laureion in particular), from indirect taxes such as customs dues and law-court charges (the folk were notorious for “loving litigation”), and from taxes on the many aliens living at Athens. The happy citizen paid nothing by way of direct taxation at all. Just when the struggle was about to begin, Pericles made a “financial statement” to his people. It is the most famous “Budget speech” in ancient history.{70} At one time, he declared, there had been as much as 9700 talents reserve fund in the Treasury. At the moment this was reduced to 6000, by the expense of public buildings and the costly siege of Potidaea. (This siege, when later it ended, had cost Athens 2000 talents by itself.{71}) To this capital reserve sum there might be added, he said, another 540 talents’ worth of uncoined gold and other precious treasure, available if wanted, even if it came to stripping the gold off the statue of the goddess Athena herself (the odd “40”). And the annual income from tribute was 600 talents, quite apart from the other normal sources of revenue. He was confident they had money enough in plenty to enable them to outlast their enemies’ endurance and survive the war, if they were prudent and avoided wild-cat schemes of distant enterprise, which would waste their resources too rapidly.{72} It was an encouraging statement. The flaw in the argument was the entire dependence on the capital reserve fund; for the heavy adverse balance of war expenditure over income must be met from this source primarily, and it was not a bottomless purse. It was found, as the war dragged on its weary length year after year, that the great financial advantage over the enemy with which Athens certainly had started was rapidly vanishing away. Strenuous efforts had to be made to find new money. In the fourth year of the war a direct property tax (bringing in 200 talents a year) was actually levied then for the first time on the citizens,{73} and for the next five years it was re-enacted year by year. The statesmen who succeeded Pericles were brought face to face with serious financial as well as military difficulties. It is part of Cleon’s fame, as will appear, that he dealt with these in a drastic fashion.
From the very first, however, it was clear to all concerned that the war was paid for in the main by the “subject-allies” of the Athenian Empire. The greater part of the reserve fund itself consisted of the accumulation of unspent tribute. This tribute made up the greater part of the annual income. None realised this better than the subject-allies themselves. Here, if ever, there was a perfect system of taxation without representation. Discontent and ill-feeling grew stronger year by year. There was constant risk of “secession” even in the days of peace. This risk was at once many times increased upon the outbreak of war. The disaffected looked longingly to Sparta, champion of liberty, to come and help them cut loose from the chains which bound them to the tyrant city Athens. Upon this chance of revolt within the Empire the enemies of Athens rested many hopes. “These are mostly islanders,” Archidamus remarked shrewdly. “Where is your fleet to defend them when they have revolted?”{74} In actual fact, this thought kept the whole Empire, with one exception, in obedience to Athens, sullen obedience though it was, until a great Spartan soldier, Brasidas, found a way to the north by land, seven years after the beginning of the war. The exception was Lesbos Island which in 428 B.C. dared to revolt, one city only upon it dissenting. This was the more striking because Lesbos still contributed ships of her own to Athens and therefore paid no money tribute. Athens’ preparations to subdue the rebels were vigorous, Sparta’s efforts to succour them were feeble. In due course the chief city, core of the revolt, Mitylene, was forced to surrender. “They learned nothing from the fate of other rebels,” cried Cleon bitterly; “they trusted recklessly to the future. Cherishing hopes which, if less than their wishes, were greater than their powers, they went to war, preferring might to right.”{75} So, except in the cities of the Thracian coast, where Brasidas wounded Athens in her Achilles-heel, the fate of Mitylene kept the disaffection in the Empire from open outbreak, so long as Athens was undisputed mistress of the Grecian seas. No sooner had the annihilation of her armament at Syracuse cost her this supremacy than, one after another, city after city of the Empire promptly, in the black years 413 and 412 B.C., seceded. It is quite idle to deny Athens’ great unpopularity as ruling city. “The revenues of the Athenians are derived from their allies,” the envoys of Mitylene at Sparta truly said.{76} Hence, in large measure, came Athens’ political weakness as well as that financial strength of which Pericles made boast. No man was more ready to admit than Pericles himself that Athens’ Empire was a “tyranny”, i.e. irresponsible government exercised in the ruler’s interest.{77} No man knew better than Pericles himself the risk involved in the hatred that tyranny might breed. Concessions of self-government he would not make. The first use made of such would have been the declaration of complete independence. Such generosity meant the destruction of the Empire from within. He was prepared to pay the price of tyranny, but he knew the peril. The great war was upon them. “Keep your grip of the Empire,” he implored his people. “You cannot and dare not relax it.”{78} It was not this part of his policy which went unheeded by his successors, however keenly they contended among themselves for the leadership left vacant by the great statesman’s death, as Thucydides bitterly declares.{79}
Here, then, was the balance-sheet of strength and weakness at the opening of the war. Sparta immeasurably superior on land, Athens on the sea. Both were able to pay their way for some years of war at least, but a protracted struggle would literally cost Athens much the more. Sparta was at the head of allies who wished her heartily well; Athens was queen of an Empire which was outwardly loyal but honeycombed with ill-will. But Athens could command her allies’ instant unquestioning obedience in any enterprise. Sparta’s more equal and independent allies could grumble and delay, or even carry a protest through against Sparta’s wishes. The one supreme Athenian asset was quick-witted energy; the one Spartan was a dogged courage. Athens had every qualification for a ruling State save two, the power of attraction and the hardihood of persistence in times of depression and discouragement. Sparta was confident of speedy victory, fighting to destroy the rival Empire completely. Athens, reliant on her cause, was at least confident of disappointing the expectations of the enemy, resolute to maintain, perhaps presently to increase, the Empire as the final issue of the war. “We shall survive” was the keynote of all Pericles’ encouragements to his people.{80} His successors hoped for more positive fruits of victory.
With all these considerations before him Pericles had to frame his, the first, “strategy” of the war.
From the very first day of war to the last day of his life, two and a half years later, Pericles played for safety. By disappointing the enemy of their confident expectations of a speedy victory he hoped to sicken them speedily of a fruitless war, and make them eager to suggest peace instead. That peace would doubtless be on the terms of the status quo ante bellum. This would satisfy Pericles and save Athens as an Imperial city. Her wealth could once again be built anew in the years following the short period of war. The foe would have found her impregnable and left her unshaken, still Mistress of the Empire and Queen of the Seas. Pericles’ object in the war was strictly “limited”, while that of the Spartans was more nearly “absolute”, i.e. the destruction of the enemy’s power.
Pericles’ strategy ran as follows.{81}
The Athenians were never to offer or accept a chance of battle by land with the Peloponnesian army. No serious resistance was to be offered to an invasion of Attica. The “linked fortress” of Athens-Peiraeus was to be regarded as an island. The countryside must be abandoned, when the enemy came, up to the very walls. “Do not lament over houses and land,” Pericles exhorted his fellow-citizens. “If I thought I could persuade you, I would have bidden you yourselves go out and ravage them and so show the Peloponnesians that you will not yield on their account at least.”{82} Only when the enemy went home again was the Athenian army to emerge from its shelter and deal the like treatment to the fields of the Megarians a few miles away.
This was the negative side of the plan of campaign. The positive side was to take the form of operations by sea. The fleet was from time to time to go coasting round the Peloponnese, and small landing parties might do what damage they could to those who lived in scattered hamlets by the seaside. Possibly even an appropriate spot or two off the coast might be occupied as a base for such descents when the fleet had gone home again. Corn-ships coming to Peloponnesian harbours might on rare occasions be caught. But nothing big was to be attempted otherwise, either in expeditions overseas or in the acquisition of new territory. Every island and member of the existing Empire, however, would be carefully kept in its allegiance by the omnipresence of the fleet. And all moneys due were to be exacted rigorously and regularly by the same means.
This strategy, so its author hoped, would quickly exhaust the patience and the resources of the enemy. The war would peter out without decisive result or any great loss of life. A citizen’s life was of very great value in the ancient Greek city—particularly where all had equal votes.
This plan of campaign was steadily pursued. Archidamus led his great army into Attica in 431 B.C., praying for the chance of a decisive battle.{83} He found no enemy to fight. It takes two to make a battle. To blockade the strong city was impossible, and to storm it was beyond the wildest hopes of any Spartan. Every year the invasion was repeated, except in 429 B.C. when the Spartans marched north against Plataea instead of wasting their time in Attica,{84} and in 426 B.C. when earthquakes sent the invaders in panic home again from the isthmus of Corinth where they were already mustered in force.{85} The longest time spent in any year by the invaders in Attica was forty days (in 430 B.C.), and the shortest incursion (that of 425 B.C.) lasted fifteen.{86} Only the capture of the Spartan garrison of Sphacteria Island in 425 B.C. stopped their coming. For the Athenians would have put their prisoners instantly to death had the enemy appeared outside the walls. The invading army all these years did just what they liked to the countryside. In the first year, it is true, there were a couple of small cavalry skirmishes at the villages of Rheitoi and Phrygia a few miles from the city, and after this the fear of unexpected sallies by the venturesome Athenian cavalry kept the foe from parading immediately under the city walls. But the rest of Attica lay helplessly exposed to the invaders’ plundering.
Twice every year, before the enemy marched into Attica and after they had returned home, Pericles retaliated upon an equally defenceless victim. The whole Athenian land army ravaged the country of the Megarid without opposition from within the unlucky little city or any help to them from their own friends outside. The claims of agriculture, which kept these last busy at home, were paramount.{87}
The Athenians also retaliated by sea. In the first year of the war two naval expeditions were simultaneously sent out from the Peiraeus. The first, a fleet of 100 ships, joined presently by 50 Corcyreans and others, sailed slowly right round the Peloponnese, making hostile descents upon the mainland or adjacent islands in the west at half a dozen places. They captured two towns and won Cephallenia over to the Athenian side. Then this fleet returned.{88} The smaller squadron of 30 ships ravaged the hostile coast of Locris to the north near Thermopylae and seized the small Atalante Island lying off Opus. They left a garrison here to help guard Euboea, an island all but vital to the corn transport and supply to Athens, and so came back home.{89} Next year, 430 B.C., Pericles himself set out in command of a hundred ships. He took on shipboard as many as 4000 hoplites and even 300 cavalry, then for the first time constructing horse transports out of old ships. Fifty more ships, sent by Chios and Lesbos, joined him. It was a great effort. But the expedition was curiously ineffective. Pericles had hopes of taking the considerable city of Epidaurus, but was beaten off. He then ravaged the lands of three other cities on the Eastern coast of the Peloponnese, and actually took a tiny little Laconian coast town and destroyed it utterly. Then the fleet made for home, never even rounding Cape Malea.{90} He might at least have distracted the thoughts of the men with him from the horror of the plague which then was raging through Athens, had it not also broken out on board his ships and sent him home again. He had not greatly impressed the enemy. For when, oppressed by their many miseries, the Athenians in spite of their statesman sent begging for peace, the Spartans contemptuously rejected the idea.{91} Only two years of war had passed, and Athens already showed signs of weakness. Sparta at least, though robbed of any chance of victory by land, was still quite confident of success. The angry Athenians turned upon the man whom they now regarded as the author of their woes. In vain he exhorted them to endure bravely and with confidence. Endure indeed they needs must, and once again they reconciled themselves to the idea of war. Pericles they fined, then, repenting, made him generalissimo again.{92} It was not for long. In the summer of 429 B.C. the old statesman died of a lingering form of the plague.{93} In recording his death, Thucydides stays his narrative of events to place on record the most striking eulogy which he has admitted to his cold dispassionate narrative.{94} For once the historian’s hidden enthusiasm for Pericles breaks out into flame. He was more than justified, the historian declares, in the conviction at which his foresight had arrived, that the Athenians would win an easy victory over the unaided forces of the Peloponnesians. Not even Persian gold would have ruined Athens but for faction within the city. There is no shadow of criticism in the account which Thucydides has given either of Pericles’ policy which led up to the war and helped to cause the war, or of the strategy which he invented and directed for the first two and a half years of the struggle. The panegyric is whole-hearted and the more emphatic because the historian so rarely passes judgment of his own, and still more rarely indulges in the luxury of praise.
It is easy to define and classify the Periclean strategy. Certain modern writers of our own day have found it also easy to disparage and to censure it. The approbation of such a historian as Thucydides was bound to be provocative of opposition. Let the squire win his spurs by tilting at the veteran knight, the acknowledged master in the lists of “historiography” All this is to the good. There is but one sure rule. In all history, ancient, modern, ecclesiastical, accept no man’s judgment “on authority” without discussion.
There are two types of strategy.
The first is called the “strategy of annihilation”, the “Niederwerfungs-Strategie” of German military writers. This means the attempt to discover and destroy the main army of the enemy in pitched battle. Strategy has indeed been simply defined just as “the art of bringing the enemy to battle”.{95} Everything else is subordinated to this object. “In spite of the sacrifices which it demands, the great decisive battle must in the future as in the past be our one object.”{96} Troops must not be squandered on minor operations or in “secondary theatres of war”. There must be, in Marshal Foch’s words, an “economy of forces”. Cromwell was a master of this strategy. “Never”, it has been said, “did he besiege a fortress whilst there was an unbeaten enemy in the field.” Such a strategy is the first instinctive desire of every great general. Even though his total forces are badly outnumbered by those of the enemy, he will abandon the hope of bringing the foe to battle only with the greatest reluctance. To fall back behind a Torres Vedras line will save a situation and gain time. It will not win a war.{97} Stonewall Jackson, general of a side all but hopelessly outnumbered from the first, over sixty years ago summed the matter up grimly and strongly.
“War”, he wrote, “means fighting. The business of the soldier is to fight. Armies are not called out to dig trenches, to throw up breast-works, to live in camps, but to find the enemy and strike him; to invade his country and do him all possible damage in the shortest possible time”{98}
It was by acting on these principles that he and Lee led the Confederate armies in the American Civil War to one amazing victory after another over the giant forces of the Northerners.
“War can never change its character; its true essence is found at all times in the destruction of the live force of both sides.”{99} The trench-warfare of the Great War was stalemate for both sides. The final victory was won when the war of movement became possible again and was directed by Marshal Foch, the one supreme general of the war.
If we revised and re-edited Stonewall Jackson’s words in the light of Periclean land-strategy, they would run:
“War means no fighting. The business of the soldier is to avoid fighting. Our army is called out to fortify our city and live behind its walls; to avoid the enemy, lest we be struck by him; to let him invade our country and do us all possible damage for so long a time as he may please, provided always that he cannot find our army to fight it.”
Cowardice this is not, but an illuminating example of the second type of strategy, called the “strategy of exhaustion”, the “Ermattungs-Strategie” of the German military writer.{100} It means that by depriving the enemy of every possible opportunity of fighting you on any large scale, you exhaust both his resources and his patience until he becomes ready to make peace.{101}
Obviously this can only be a possible strategy for the weaker side. If adopted by the stronger, it spells mere military lunacy. Politicians of the stronger side who for some inconceivable reasons wish to protract the war might impose it on their generals. The fury of these last can be imagined. But any soldier would accept such a strategy only of bitter necessity, or as a mere temporary device to gain time for mobilisation or reinforcements or to lure the enemy deep into the heart of a hostile land. As a strategy for an entire war even the weaker side must loathe it. For the stronger army it is suicide.
At the beginning of last century the English Government considered it but too likely that a French army of invasion might cross the Channel. In this event they proposed to employ this “strategy of exhaustion”. Our own army was to lay waste Sussex, to retreat before the invader, to worry him but not to stand and fight. Sir John Moore, that most splendid soldier, was furious. “The plan”, he cried, “leads to confusion and despondency...a warfare to which the English are the least adapted. The system should be to head and to oppose, and no foot of ground ceded that was not marked with the blood of the enemy.”{102} The most brilliant English military writer of our own day, Lieut.-Col. G. F. R. Henderson, declares that “the records of warfare contain no instance, when two armies were of much the same quality, of the smaller army bringing the campaign to a decisive issue by defensive tactics. Wellington and Lee both fought many defensive battles with inferior forces. But neither of them under such circumstances ever achieved the destruction of their enemy. They fought such battles to gain time, and their hopes soared no higher.”{103} After Cannae the Romans adopted the “Fabian” strategy of exhaustion for many weary years, and against a ludicrously weaker side. So great was the effect of Hannibal’s genius, so remarkable was the Romans’ confession of their tactical and moral inferiority. Thanks to it they recovered from their passing feebleness. It was not by its employ that they won the Metaurus battle, invaded Africa, and ended the second Punic War at Zama.
Can the “strategy of exhaustion” ever “win the war”? Of its employ there are two famous instances, the Periclean strategy in ancient history, and Frederick the Great’s use of it in modern history. At the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) the King of Prussia found himself threatened by Austrians and Russians in a great superiority of numbers. For two years he fought battle after battle. He could no longer afford to lose the numbers which his victories cost him. He fell back on the rival strategy. The military folly of the Austrian generals and the lukewarmness of their Russian allies (due to political reasons) allowed him the chance of its use. The Austrians played about, ravaging the country and looking at its fortresses. Frederick skilfully avoided battle. The war “fizzled out” and the Prussian triumphantly escaped from the terrible dangers which had seemed to threaten the weaker side.
Ought Pericles’ strategy to have led to a like success for Athens?
In the year 1884 a clever German, J. von Pflugk-Harttung, published at Stuttgart a brochure entitled Perikles als Feldherr (“Pericles as General”). Its few pages were devoted to a violent onslaught upon the whole of Pericles’ strategy. The writer had the merit of not resting content with a merely destructive criticism. He went on to point out what Pericles ought to have done, but did in fact leave undone. The more serious German historians, Beloch and Holm, have amplified the attack, and, both on its destructive and its constructive side, the pamphlet has been used by others, at times without acknowledgment of indebtedness. For its incisive interest it does merit recognition, appreciation, and discussion.
The writer is scornful of Pericles’ “system of boxing-up” his troops, “Das Einkapselungssystem”. It ruined the Athenian landowner and peasant, that is, half the State. These losses were quite disproportionate to the petty annoyances inflicted on the foe by the “military promenades round the Peloponnese” which Pericles loved. Such could never reach the heart of the enemy and were futile. All the while Athens’ own resources were rapidly draining away. Every year saw the two combatants becoming more and more on an equality in this respect. Athens’ original superiority quickly vanished. On heels of the material loss due to the strategy came the moral, and who can say which has the greater weight in war?
This plan of avoiding battle ruined the spirit of the Athenian troops and the temper of the people. Nothing could be so demoralising as this perpetual inactivity in face of the foe. A lost battle would have mattered less. If victory could have been won, Sparta in her depression would have been eager for peace. To Athens a defeat on land would not have shaken her hold upon her subject-allies, whom only the sea concerned. It was but fifteen years since the Athenian hoplites had stood up against the Spartan on the battlefield of Tanagra with courage and with honour. Now Pericles constantly preaches to them the inspiring fact that they are quite unfit to meet the enemy in the field. The natural consequences follow; they become quite unfit. They land on the island of Sphacteria to move against a mere handful of Spartans in overwhelming numbers and in a spirit of slavish fear. Against the Boeotians even, whom their fathers had soundly trounced at Oenophyta, they display contemptible cowardice on the battlefield of Delium. Such were the ripe fruits of Pericles’ strategy.
At the outset of the war, the God Apollo at Delphi, through the mouths of his ministers, promised his aid to the Peloponnesians. This particular Apollo had always loved the Dorians best. In the second year of the war the bubonic plague{104} swooped down on Athens. Like the Black Death in the fourteenth century, in which in 1348 Florence lost three-fifths of her inhabitants, Pisa four-fifths, and Siena 80,000 of her folk, or the Great Plague of London in 1666, the pestilence at Athens in 430-429 B.C. is one of the great plagues of all history, as the tale of the pest is one of the grimmest themes of the three great writers, Thucydides, Boccaccio, and Daniel Defoe. Apollo was the God of pestilence. And as the plague left every other part of the Greek mainland unharmed, save Athens only and her camp outside Potidaea,{105} the fundamentalist in Greek religion might have cited this proof of divine intervention triumphantly. But if Greek medical service was still too rudimentary to recognise the fact, it is now quite clear that great part of the ravages of the plague was due simply to the overcrowding of Athens by the refugees from the countryside, and to the lack of sanitation and the virulent infection which this caused. There had been plenty of time and warning before the coming of the plague to make provision against this overcrowding. Pericles did absolutely nothing. No precautions were taken; no accommodation was provided for the refugees. They lay about in every open space. They clustered thickly in every temple and sacred shrine unless stout fastenings could keep them out. They camped out in every turret of the city walls, and spread out in the space between these along the whole distance from Athens to Peiraeus harbour six miles away. They overflooded the harbour town itself. And all the while the blazing sun of a Greek summer beat down upon their heads.{106}
In our own day, the poverty-stricken and miserable Greek Government has at least been grappling bravely with the like disastrous flight to Athens from Smyrna and the Asiatic coasts of the masses of fugitives before the victorious Turk. In Pericles’ day, the rich Government did nothing. Why were not the refugees shipped over to neighbouring islands, to Salamis, to Aegina, to Euboea, out of reach of the enemy? Nothing could have been easier. Athens had idle ships enough! All that the monster fleet achieves, besides its foolish raiding, is to take a new army under Hagnon to Potidaea and with it, of course, the plague. The blockading army already there caught the infection from the newcomers. “Hagnon returned with his fleet to Athens, having lost out of 4000 hoplites a thousand and fifty men in forty days.”{107} We can faintly imagine the ghastly scenes in the stricken camp. We cannot estimate fitly the irremediable nature of the disaster of the plague to Athens’ military strength for many a year to come, long after the pestilence died down, then broke out once more, and presently vanished altogether. Athens never recovered from the plague. For its ravages Pericles, not Apollo, was responsible. Cowardice and poverty, demoralisation and despondency, these were the results of Pericles’ “strategy of exhaustion”. Exhaustion in very truth there was, and plenty of it. But it happened to be exhaustion of the wrong side.
The critic turns to the constructive side of his criticism.
Granted even the sorrowful necessity of avoiding battle, there was a simple means of averting the greater part of the evils, namely those which were the direct or indirect results of the invasions and the ravaging of Attica.
In the first place, was it quite impossible to “block the Geranea passes”? The ridge of Mount Geranea stretched 8 miles across the Isthmus of Corinth, rising to a height of 4000 feet and more. It is crossed or turned by three tracks alone. On the north the route skirting the Corinthian gulf ran from Aegosthena by Pagae, port of Megara, and by Megarian Oenoe to Corinth. This way never touched Attica. On the south, skirting the waters of the Saronic Gulf, ran the famous narrow track of the Scironian Way, hewn in the cliffs 600 feet above the sea, from Corinth to Megara itself. Hadrian it was, 500 years later, who first built a carriage way here. Then from Megara a broad high road crossed the Attic frontier to Eleusis. Between the two coast ways a mountain track in the centre of the isthmus led from Corinth by Tripodiscus to Megara. Brasidas used this track when in 424 B.C. he rushed to save Megara from falling into the hands of Athens.{108}
Clearly, however, the “Geranea passes” could only be “blocked” if the Athenians acquired Megara and Pagae. The unhappy plight of Athenian garrisons perched precariously at Tripodiscus and Megarian Oenoe, with a hostile Megara and Pagae cutting them off from Attica, and with the Peloponnesian army of invasion advancing from Corinth can be imagined. Pericles was certainly doing his feeble best all the while to get hold of Megara. Meanwhile, it must be conceded regretfully that the invasions could not be stopped by “blocking the Geranea passes”.
But is there not more hope of a “fort scheme” in Attica itself? The Spartans were notoriously incapable of siege-operations. They never could carry a fortified position, however small, by storm. Their failures at Mycale and Ithome long ago, at Plataea in this very opening stage of the great war, and, later, at Pylos were almost ludicrous. They admitted this serious flaw in their military skill themselves. Forts were as great stumbling-blocks to them as ever were those “ugly things” the Conqueror’s Norman Castles to the rebellious Saxons in East Anglia and the fens of Cambridgeshire.{109} There was another little Oenoe in the hills on the north-west frontier of Attica, just north of the road running south from Platea by Eleutherae to Eleusis. Archidamus invading Attica for the first time at head of his large and invincible army-tarried here some while, turning aside to assault the tiny fortress. Perhaps he misliked the notion of an Athenian garrison, however small, upon one of his lines of communication. Perhaps he thought it a useful preliminary towards the complete investment of Plataea. For the Athenians had pledged themselves to come to that heroic little city’s help, and might naturally march this way. The Spartan did not realise that Pericles would not lift a finger to redeem his promise. Perhaps, as his critics said at the time, the King was wilfully wasting time to let the Athenians repent of their obstinacy, when they saw the peril at their very doors, and so even at the eleventh hour submit. The King’s whole heart was never in the war. Whatever his reason, Archidamus spent many days at Oenoe, all the while the country folk of Attica were busy carrying their precious goods, so far as possible, unhindered within the safety of the walls of Athens. The wee fort held out desperately. It defied every effort to take it by storm. Presently the invading army sulkily left it alone, and marched on to its easier task of ravage and plunder of the undefended countryside.{110}
Here was a model for the hampering and the worrying of invaders! Why did not Pericles establish many another Oenoe in the threatened land? There were many admirable sites for forts, especially on the northern frontier, where the few roads crossed the great mountain rampart of Cithaeron and Parnés. Such a site was Eleutherae itself, on the Eleusis-Plataea road, which would also block the Megarian northern gate by Pagae-Aegosthena. Another was Phyle, on the direct road from Athens to Thebes. A third was Decelea, on the north road from Athens to Oropus and the eastern boundary of Boeotia. To have guarded her northern frontier effectively by these three forts might at least have stopped any Boeotian co-operation with their Peloponnesian allies, and kept the northern army penned within its own borders. This must in itself have been the greatest gain to Athens. For the southern army relied for its cavalry at least almost entirely on its northern allies. Forts just south of the frontier watershed, where military science must place them,{111} would stop the pincers from closing on Attica.
But what in effect was done? Eleutherae was never fortified. Phyle was garrisoned only at the very end of the long war. Decelea presently was fortified—by the enemy! Apart from the plucky small Oenoe just one other Athenian fort is mentioned, quite in passing, that of Panactum, an isolated mountain station a few miles east of Oenoe. It was “betrayed to the Boeotians” in 422 B.C.{112} Thereafter Panactum figured largely in the political disputes of the following years. Its military service to Athens earlier is not apparent.
Forts then and plenty of them, here and elsewhere, with active vigorous garrisons, always on the watch to make forays, cut off stragglers, “pinprick” the invaders, intercept supplies, worry the foe on every possible occasion—this was what, defensively, was wanted. The first invasion doubtless—at least from the south—must have come. The enemy might have thought twice before repeating such a doubtful and costly experiment.
Who would not commend such a “fort scheme”? And Pericles does—nothing!
It was somewhat feebly suggested by an Oxford writer thirty years ago that Pericles did in fact at first contemplate some such plan of the kind, but was scared off when the Spartans showed signs of intending to capture Plataea by more active devices than those of mere blockade.{113} As the Spartan attempt to storm Plataea proved a dismal failure, the suggestion of Pericles’ fright limps badly. Chronologically, too, it is not helpful. For the Spartan attack on Plataea took place many months after the beginning of the war. We cannot excuse Pericles’ neglect of the “fort scheme” by such laboured apologies.
Lastly, to a sounder defence by land there might well have been added a more spirited offence by sea. Constant descents upon the enemy’s coasts; a never-ceasing activity; houses in flames all over the Peloponnese; the helots encouraged to a servile war; the foe hurrying in bewilderment from place to place; a hundred thousand men hurled against Megara while the slow Spartans are arming; then at Thebes in safety—we become breathlessly excited at the glorious opportunities of ruthless war. Whereas, in fact, Pericles’ men spend the long summer weeks placidly gazing over their walls, admiring the smoke of their burning farms rising up to heaven. O for a man, a soldier, at head of the Athenian State, instead of this timid and respectable Bürgermeister!
“Themistocles made a weak State strong. Pericles set a strong State upon the downward path. His is the brilliance of a sun setting amid the clouds of a gathering storm, the Louis XIV. of Athens. Thucydides, who alone of his contemporaries writes well of him, is a mere advocate belonging to his Party.
What counter can be made to this spirited attack on Pericles’ strategy?”{114}
The exaggerations in its constructive scheme of offence are obvious. Its plea for more vigorous action is sound. The “fort scheme” of defence is doubtful. The lament over the ill effects of Pericles’ strategy upon the morale of his troops is justified. These ill effects cannot be denied. “May fortune preserve you from adopting a defensive attitude,” once wrote Carnot to Jourdan, “the courage of your troops will weaken and the audacity of the enemy will increase beyond all measure.” It was at least in loyalty to their tradition of Revolutionary and Napoleonic days that the French hurled themselves upon Alsace at the opening of the Great War when every available man was needed for defence in the north. Imperfectly informed, however, as to the strength of the German armies, they seized an apparent chance of a counterstroke aimed at the enemy’s communications all the more gleefully surely because it was a vigorous offensive movement.
The “fort scheme” loses its superficial charm upon further thought. “He who strives to protect everything protects nothing “runs the modern military maxim. But in ancient Greek warfare such a scheme had very particular disadvantages beyond this common one of uselessness. In modern warfare the capture of prisoners in large numbers is viewed with comparative equanimity by the nations at war. Harper’s Ferry falls, but Abraham Lincoln will not ransom his 12,500 soldiers by granting peace. The small ancient city state in Greece set a far higher value upon the life and liberty of its citizen soldiers. To redeem her prisoners after the defeat of Coronea in 446 B.C. Athens surrendered all her “land Empire” north of Attica. Two hundred and ninety-two soldiers were, in 425 B.C., taken alive on Sphacteria Island. Only 120 of these were Spartans.{115} Athens can have peace at any moment afterwards for their exchange. Pericles aimed at nothing better than what Beloch harshly labels a “rotten peace on the terms of the status quo”.{116} Sphacteria gave his energetic successors hopes of a greater and more positive gain from the war. So great was the effect of the capture of a mere handful of prisoners. Isolated forts in Attica meant as many deep anxieties as there were forts. At any moment it might seem required to march out in force to relieve the threatened garrison, unless Athens was willing to abandon this to captivity or death. Fight a pitched battle the Athenians could not. What, then, must happen to the forts? The ultimate fate of Plataea was certain, however heroic the little city’s resistance when no relieving army came to its succour. Eleutherae—Phyle—Decelea? Was Athens to have a Kimberley, a Mafeking, a Ladysmith planted permanently upon her northern frontier? There was always the risk of treachery, as the fate of Panactum showed. “The history of entrenched camps is almost a history of capitulations,” said the German Moltke, victor over France in 1870.{117} “It is an axiom of the art of war”, Napoleon declared, “that he who remains behind his entrenchments is beaten.” Sedan, Metz, Port Arthur preach the same lesson. Verdun of immortal memory is no disproof of the danger to a defence scheme of isolated forts. For the great fortress was but one link in an unbroken chain.
And yet—a criticism of Pericles surely remains possible.
“We should not”, wrote Sir John Moore, “shut up our force in detached garrisons which, by depriving us of a disposable force, prevent our deriving the advantages of our naval superiority to act offensively.”{118} In this pregnant sentence may be found the key to unlock the essential vice of Pericles’ strategy, even though we reject the “fort scheme” in which he never could indulge.
He used his army against Megara and against Potidaea. The former was a sound plan in itself, but failed continually. The latter was a wicked waste of troops upon a secondary operation of war.
He used his fleet to small purpose. These naval parades round the Peloponnese were extraordinarily futile. The Athenian admiral Tolmides had won much fame by a circumnavigation of the kind in the earlier war with the Peloponnesians, and Pericles now, a quarter of a century later, attached far too great a value to his recollection of Tolmides’ voyage and its results. His own second year’s expedition with troops on board did win some successes. But it was a half-hearted business, and the whole expedition quickly retired.
What Pericles should have done at the very outset was to seize Cythera with the fleet—a feat performed without difficulty by Nicias in 424 B.C.{119}—and then use his ships to transport a strong expeditionary land army there. A descent in force upon the southern Laconian coast would have brought the Spartans at top speed from Attica, had they ever dared leave their own unwalled city for the north. If the Athenians, threatened by the approach of the enemy in large numbers, dared not fight, the fleet gave their expeditionary force a mobility denied to the enemy, and a second invasion of Messenia by 10,000 good troops would have kept the Spartans too busy at home to indulge their taste for forays into Attica. This was the true defence of Attica, the conjoint use of fleet and army in great operations against the enemy’s own land. By itself, the fleet could achieve little or nothing by way of offence unless the enemy fleet would come out to fight it, than which nothing was more remote from the enemy’s intentions. An English General has recently declared that he knew of no example in history of a fleet, without the aid of land forces, capturing a large area of continental territory where there was a strong hostile army.{120} Certainly the Athenian fleet could achieve nothing of the least value against Laconia without a strong Athenian army on board of it. The war was to be won by the “disposable use” of the army in Laconia made possible by the fleet, and not by sedentary troops at home. This was the proper offensive use of Athenian sea-power, just as it was the inestimable service of the British Navy in the Peninsular War of 1808 and following years.{121} Moore’s small army of less than 30,000 men, plunging into north-west Spain in the Corunna campaign of 1808-1809, “gave the lockjaw”, as Napoleon himself said, to himself and his plans for the conquest of Portugal.{122} The English army saved itself because it was based upon the fleet, when the French legions twice its strength hurried to destroy it. In like manner, an Athenian army of 10,000 men based on Cythera and the fleet would have given the lockjaw to the Peloponnesian hopes of speedy victory by the invasion of Attica. And it would have saved the homeland from all the grievous hurts which did in fact result from Pericles’ inactivity and misuse of the land army.
Doubtless much more might have been done, when Attica was invaded, to worry the invaders by a proper and vigorous use of the Athenian cavalry and light-armed skirmishers. An earlier Iphicrates or an Athenian Stuart would have given the enemy many an anxious night of it, and their lot would have been far less happy a one than it was. Something greater even than such activity might have been attempted. An invading army which lives on the countryside must, at times, be somewhat dispersed through sheer necessity of foraging. The weakness and incapacity of the French armies on many occasions in the Peninsular War drive this lesson home again and again. A Wellington in Athens might have seized his opportunity and, even with inferior numbers, have dealt Archidamus so staggering a blow in pitched battle that the invaders would have gone reeling back in disorder and rout to the frontier again. But Pericles was certainly no Wellington, and there was a miserable lack of enterprise in the Athenian higher military command from the first. But the root criticism of “Pericles as General” is his failure to use his sea-power properly, i.e. in conjunction with and not as an alternative to the army.
Three reasons combined to explain this his failure.
The first may be called the “fascination of insularity”. “Athens an island.” It was a fatal phrase. For no strategy could make her such.
The second was that “dread of the Casualty list” which has cost so many lives needlessly in war. A recent writer on Italian activities in North Africa has remarked that
“military opinion chafed under the restrictions which are believed to have been imposed for political reasons, and the impossibility of bringing the war to an end by purely defensive methods was finally recognised. Italian opinion did realise that in order to make omelettes it is necessary to break eggs, while for a considerable time the authorities appeared to be searching for a substitute.”{123}
And the general who is also a politician directly responsible to an excitable people for the loss of life which he incurs in battle has many special reasons for hesitation. Marlborough at Malplaquet was credited with the lowest motives in his ruthless sacrifice of his men. The battle added little to his reputation.{124} Grant, in the Wilderness and afterwards, knew that he could spare four men for every one of Lee’s, and eventually won fame with victory by what else had been a callous and brutal expenditure of life. The disappointingly meagre results of Haig’s “Battle of the Somme” have been at times ascribed to this same cause, the dread of the casualty list. “The War should have ended in 1917,” it has been said. But perhaps the politician rather than the soldier was responsible for the delay. A surer instance is the campaign in Natal in 1900 when the English general failed to achieve decisive results, and his failure must be ascribed to this shrinking from casualties. So in the end a larger toll in soldiers’ lives was paid. “In war”, comments the German cold dispassionate and expert critic upon this campaign, “some sacrifices must be made, and the anxiety of commanders to curtail their casualty lists will only increase the number.”{125} It is often the hideous truth. It was never realised by the Athenians. The one great chance they had of acquiring Megara in 424 B.C. was let slip because their generals dared not push their initial advantage home.{126} Loss of life in the field might mean prompt trial at home for the Athenian general who could be held responsible for such sacrifice of his fellow-citizens. Hence came much of the weak generalship, the feeble leadership, which Athenian generals displayed again and again in the war. The Athenian jury had no mercy. Pericles himself could hardly escape with his life when fields and buildings were offered up to the enemy. He dared not run the risk of imperilling an expeditionary force on a great scale in enemy’s territory.
And on top of all comes the fact that Pericles himself was rather an Admiral than a General. His own successes in war had been won upon the sea in old days. In command of the fleet he had made long voyages. He had never faced a resolute foe on land. Hence he disparaged and distrusted an army which he knew to be inferior in numbers to the enemy. And by this fatal distrust he deprived that very fleet in which he took such pride of its best chance of service in the war, reducing its use to raids as futile as ever were those over the Great Lakes in the Canadian War of 1812. The Athenian Admiralty it was which framed the strategy at outset of the war. Not Pericles the Bürgermeister but Pericles the Admiral invented the “strategy of exhaustion”, a strategy which came near to ruining Athens in a couple of years and could never have won her the victory. It needed the enterprise and vigour of younger men to frame and execute a second “strategy of offence” which might promise happier results. Our admiration for Pericles’ character and work of many years for his City and her Empire must not deprive the mere rude politician Cleon and his soldier colleague Demosthenes of our praise for their sounder military judgment and strategical insight, when presently, some years after the old statesman’s death, the control of military and naval operations passed into their eager hands.
But Pericles died in 429 B.C. It is not until two years later that the vigorous Cleon, son of Cleaenetus, makes his first appearance in the pages of Thucydides. And it was first in the following year, 426 B.C., that, as will be seen, he and the able general, Demosthenes, infused life and vigour into Athens’ military policy. Meanwhile the Athenian ship of State lay in the doldrums. It is in these intervening years that the most dismal fruits of the Periclean defensive strategy were reaped. The fate of Athens’ loyal small ally Plataea was the heaviest price paid for this strategy, albeit it was not paid by the Athenians themselves in anything else save in honour.
For some eighty or ninety years before the outbreak of the great war the small city of Plataea in the south of Boeotia had been allied to Athens upon terms of closest friendship. In the wars and contentions between Athens and the Boeotian Confederacy under the leadership of Thebes Plataea’s sympathies had never failed the Athenians. Steadfastly she refused to join the other cities of Boeotia and make one of their Confederacy. The Spartan King Cleomenes, it is said, had first advised her to appeal to Athens for aid against her neighbours with the direct intention of creating a lasting feud between Athens and Thebes. His foresight was remarkable, and so justified by events during all the years that followed that he may have been given credit for an idea which never really entered his head when he gave Plataea the famous advice. However this may be, the alliance between Athens and Plataea did take place in 509 B.C. (or 519 B.C.) and remained unbroken to the end.{127} And as generation followed generation, the proud and morose Thebans, citizens of a far greater city, hated the Plataeans with an ever-increasing spite. In the Persian invasion of Greece the Plataeans had fought for the cause of liberty, the Thebans had sided with the barbarian. Outside the walls of Plataea had been fought the last great land battle of the Persian wars. In the market-place of Plataea Pausanias the Spartan, on the morrow of the victory, had offered the sacrifice of thanksgiving to Zeus the Liberator, and in the name of every city which had fought for freedom had declared Plataea forever free and independent and inviolate against attack.{128} Proud of her traditions, loyal to her friendship with Athens, the little city defied her grim neighbour, Thebes, from which but seven miles of open plain and the small Asopus river separated her.
It was the first watch of a black and moonless night in the early spring of the year 431 B.C., following a stormy day. Rain still poured down in torrents, and the Asopus rolled its swollen waters sluggishly seawards. A little knot of traitor Plataeans clustered at the north gate of Plataea in the dark. The gate swung open, and there rushed in a body of some 300 fully armed Theban warriors to seize the city for Thebes. There was as yet no war in Greece. The Treaty of 445 B.C. had still fifteen years to run. The cities were uneasy and arming. War was in the air. But the Theban surprise of Plataea was, in the historian’s words, a “shining breach” of the treaty.{129}
There was wild panic in the city. At first the citizens submitted to make terms. Then they rallied. First one, then a second, messenger hurried over the mountains through the darkness of the night to Athens. In the city itself the men mustered and in the blackest hour of the night, just before dawn, sallied out from the houses and fell fiercely upon the intruders. The enemy for a while, closing their ranks, made a stout resistance. At last they broke and fled. Up and down the narrow streets, as the rain poured down, the pitiless chase went on. The city’s gates were closed. The strangers had no knowledge of the ways. Many fled into a building abutting on the city wall, whose gates they thought to be the city’s, and were trapped. A woman in her mercy gave an axe to one other small party. They hewed through the bar of a deserted postern, and so escaped into the country. The rest were slain in house, courtyard, and alley, or taken alive.
Up to the city walls there marched a great Theban army. The flooded river had delayed their coming. The soldier’s “fifth element”, mud, had fought against them. As one of General Grant’s scouts reported to him in the “Campaign of the Wilderness”, “he guessed the road was there all right, but the bottom had fallen out”. The Theban army had meant to enter the city hard upon the heels of the 300. Now they found it alert, impregnable. A message reached them. Let them retire at once from Plataean territory, and touch no single thing therein, and they should have their prisoners back. So the Plataeans took solemn oath. The army marched away. The citizens hastily carried all their goods to safety behind their city walls. Then, in cold blood, they slew their captives, 180 in number, and sent word again to Athens. The herald presently arriving from this city with urgent bidding to keep their prisoners alive found the men dead.
It was a savage retaliation for a dastardly attack. The Plataeans denied the Theban story of the promise sworn to the army to give them the captives back. They quibbled about its terms. They denied at least that they had taken solemn oath. Treachery on the one side, bad faith upon the other, such were the fruits of a century of hatred. There would at least bescanty mercy for Plataea if the foe ever took the city. The non-combatants, the old and feeble, the women and the children, were sent off to Athens, under escort of an Athenian army, which marched at once to help the city. The harvest, with Athenian aid, was gathered within its walls. A sturdy garrison of Plataean and Athenian troops remained to guard it against its deadly foes, now for ever pitiless.{130}
The entry of the Thebans into Plataea was the first act of the great war. From this incident that war’s events are dated. Some eighty days later the Spartan army began to ravage Attica. The Boeotians already had been wreaking their vengeance on the countryside up to Plataea’s walls, ravening round these like wolves. War had long been threatening. It became inevitable in very truth on that dark night of storm and massacre.
Vile though the Thebans’ attempt was to take Plataea by betrayal and surprise, they had the soundest strategical reasons for desiring to be masters of the city before the coming war broke out.
Plataea was built immediately under the steep rocky northern slopes of Cithaeron, and only a few yards separated its southern wall from the beginning of the rising ground. It was thus, as it were, a low-lying bastion thrust out from the line of the Athenian frontier and a most admirable point of observation of all movements in Boeotia. In the hands of an enterprising folk indeed it might have given Athens the one chief advantage of what is called a “Re-entering” frontier against Thebes, that of threatening the line of communications of a hostile force advancing from the “salient” against a side of the “Re-entrant”—thus:
There were but two passes over the mountain barrier from Thebes to Athens, the one by Eleutherae, the other the direct and more easterly pass by Phyle. A Boeotian army of invasion by either route obviously exposed its flank and its communications to a hostile force operating from Plataea. And, more important still, on the western side of the city Plataea could threaten the one and only road linking the Isthmus with Boeotia, that by Aegosthena, which did not pass through Attica. In the whole land strategy of the Peloponnesian side in the great war, this connection between the Spartans in the south and their Boeotian allies in the north was of the most vital importance. Pagae and Megara in Athenian hands would have blocked it. But despite Athens’ efforts Megara held by Sparta. Beyond Pagae, however, there lay upon the flank of the road as it turned the end of Cithaeron the hostile city of Platea. This Aegosthena route was in constant use by the Peloponnesians. An active enemy in Plataea not only threatened any Theban invasion of Attica, but imperilled the whole co-operation of Athens’ northern and southern enemies. There were the most admirable strategic reasons for Thebes’ attempt to get hold of Plataea before the war began, added on top of all the political and “personal” reasons. It is only the Thebans’ method of the attempt which exposes them to a lively condemnation at which the Greek of the time himself would probably have been mildly amused.
It remains the fact that Athens did not play the part of an “active enemy” at Plataea. Passively she let the place be taken, after long and direful siege, to her eternal dishonour. But at the outset of the war the Thebans were not justified in relying upon the supine and inglorious inactivity of the Athenian army. Nor did they so rely. On the contrary, there is a curious bit of evidence lately discovered which shows that the Thebans were alarmed at the risk of an Athenian invasion of their own land, and cleared their defenceless village folk from the countryside into the city. “As soon as war between the Athenians and the Lacedemonians began”, says a newly-found writer (probably Cratippus by name, in the generation after Thucydides), “the Thebans made a great advance towards complete prosperity. For when the Athenians commenced to ‘threaten’ Boeotia, the inhabitants of Erythrae, Scaphae, Scolus, Aulis, Schoenus, and Potniae, and many other similar places which had no walls, congregated at Thebes, thus doubling the size of that city.”{131} The three villages first named lay south of the Asopus quite near Plataea. Aulis lay on the coast and might fear raids by the enemy’s fleet. But Schoenus and Potniae lay respectively six and one and a half miles to the north of Thebes. The Boeotians were in apprehension of an Athenian army of invasion. To that army Plataea would have been of the greatest possible value. That army never came. The Thebans were soldiers and considered what Pericles’ strategy might be. They came presently to realise all too clearly what in fact that strategy was.
For every possible military and political reason, therefore, the Thebans must get hold of Plataea. The attempt was made and miscarried. One great final motive, that of revenge, was now added to the rest.
It was not until the third year of the great war, that of 429 B.C., that the Thebans secured Spartan help against the hated city. In that summer King Archidamus with his army of invasion swerved aside from Attica and came down by Aegosthena upon Plataea. The garrison at once protested. He was outraging Pausanias the Spartan’s own promise to Plataea of independence for all time. The old soldier king was moved by an appeal which touched Spartan honour very closely. “The liberty you are guaranteed”, he replied, “would be best used in helping others to regain their own, in joining us now in our fighting for the liberation of Greece.” But none the less Archidamus made the Plataeans an offer which must have infuriated his valuable Theban allies. Make it, however, he did. “If you prefer to be neutral,” he said, “and we have already made you this offer once before, keep your lands, receive both sides in peace, but neither for any purposes of war, and we shall be satisfied.”{132}
Many years later the Athenian fleet came down upon the helpless little island of Melos. The Melians pleaded for just this same privilege of neutrality. The Athenians rejected the plea contemptuously. Might is always right, they said. Join us or take the consequences. The islanders trusted to the justice of the gods and perished for their trust.{133} Archidamus was more generous. To Plataea in its extremity he made the offer of neutrality.
In July 1914 the German Emperor made his offer of “neutrality” to Belgium in her peril. This offer was for his own “purposes of war”, that the huge German invading army might rush down unopposed by the shortest route upon France’s northern frontier. Belgium refused. The Germans crossed the Belgian frontier against their plighted troth, gained their immediate military purpose, lost their honour and the war.
The Plataeans answered Archidamus, pleading that their wives and children were at Athens. They must get Athenian sanction. Moreover, even so, they feared that, when the Spartans had gone, they “might not be allowed to observe the terms proposed”. Athens might come and prevent it. Thebes might try once more treacherously to seize the town when “received in peace”.
The Spartan king saw reason in their fears. In answer, he made a remarkable suggestion, wanting, says Thucydides, to reassure them.
“Then hand over your city and houses to us Spartans,” he said. “Mark the boundaries of your land, and number your fruit-trees and anything else which can be counted. Go yourselves whithersoever you please while the war lasts. When the war is over, we will give back to you all that we have received. Meanwhile we will hold your property in trust, cultivate your land, and pay you whatever rent contents you.”{134}
It was an honest and surely a tempting offer to the little company of 400 Plataeans left in the town. And the king granted them a truce that they might send messengers to Athens. Given Athens’ consent, they said, they would do as he advised. Never was ancient city more loyal to her troth than was the heroic little city of Plataea. Until the messengers returned, the Spartan army lay quietly outside the city walls, and refrained from any hurt.
The messengers came back, bearing this answer with them:
“Men of Plataea, the Athenians say that never at any time since you first became their allies have they suffered any man to do you wrong. They will not forsake you now, but will help you to the utmost of their power. And they conjure you, by the oaths which your fathers swore, not to forsake the alliance.”{135}
Never was promise of help more plainly given.
So the Plataeans resolved not to desert the Athenians, but rather to look on patiently at the wasting of their lands, if so they must, and to endure whatever else might befall. They made answer from the walls that they could not do what the Lacedemonians proposed.
Then Archidamus the king first of all cried upon the Gods and Heroes of the country, calling them to witness, and saying,
“O ye Gods who possess the land of Plataea and ye Heroes, be ye our witnesses that neither at the first came we unjustly against this land wherein our fathers, calling in prayer upon you, overcame the Medes, yea and you granted the land a fair field of victory to the Hellenes. For it is these folk who have first been false to the oaths then sworn. Neither now, if we do aught, shall we do injustice. For first we have made them many and fair offers and we fail to win them to consent. Be gracious now to us, and grant that they who first began the wrong may be punished for their iniquity, and that they may obtain vengeance who seek it lawfully.”{136}
So the garrison, 400 Plataeans, 80 Athenians, and 110 women kept to bake bread for the defenders, were straitly shut in, and the long siege began.
It lasted for two years. At first the Spartans made the most vigorous efforts to carry the city by storm. Their siege engines were destroyed and their storming parties were hurled back. They desisted sullenly, and fell to a blockade. Their entrenchments encompassed the city. Month after month passed by. No succour reached the beleaguered garrison from outside. In the second winter of the siege, food began to fail the garrison. They planned to escape, if it might be, scaling by night the enemy’s great double wall which ringed them round. The hearts of some failed them at the last. Two hundred and twenty made the desperate attempt on a moonless night of furious wind and rain which turned to snow. They planted their ladders, scaled the walls, and dropped down on the other side to the fosse. This was filled with water, and its surface was covered with a thin layer of ice. The enemy were upon them and the fight raged by torchlight. The Plataeans struggled through the deep half-frozen water, the ice giving way beneath them, and gained the farther bank. One archer only had been taken at the fosse, and seven men more had turned back to the city. Two hundred and twelve made good their escape and fled over the mountains to Athens.{137}
The blockade went on. Not until they were starving did the end come, yet many months later. The last crust of bread was eaten. The remnant of the garrison were too weak to man the walls. One assault must have carried the city. The enemy’s commander held back his men. Sparta preferred the city’s voluntary surrender to its capture. For if surrendered, it might be exempt from any later terms of peace requiring the giving back of places taken by force of arms. The defenders were invited to deliver themselves up to the mercy of the Spartans. “The guilty should be punished, but no man without just cause.” On these terms they capitulated. Plataea had fallen at last.{138}
Five men came from Sparta to “judge” the prisoners on the spot. There was a mere mockery of a trial. The Thebans demanded the glutting of their vengeance. The Spartans dared not deny their allies the sweets of revenge. Archidamus was dead, and lesser men commanded in his place. There was a streak of old Phoenician cruelty in the Theban nature. The long speeches recorded or invented by Thucydides do but needlessly protract the agony. Sentence was given. The men, 200 Plataeans and 25 Athenians, were executed at once: their women were made slaves. When another year had passed, the Thebans destroyed the city to its foundations. Amid its ruins they erected one huge caravanserai for travellers and a temple for the Goddess Hera. For forty years the city site lay desolate, and all Plataeans left alive were exiles from their home.{139}
In the most famous of all Punch’s cartoons of the Great War, that of October 21, 1914, the artist shows the two monarchs together, the German who offered neutrality, the Belgian who refused. “So, you see,” the Kaiser taunts, “you’ve lost everything.” To whom King Albert: “Not my soul.” The Plataean boys in their refugees’ home at Athens or at Scione later,{140} like the Belgian boys in England, had their inheritance, the memory of faith kept, of desperate courage defiant of overwhelming odds. Can a father leave his son a nobler gift?
But what of Athens and her honour? What of her solemn adjuration to the Plataeans to stand fast, of her own pledge to send all the help she could? How was the pledge redeemed?
Nearly thirty years ago a sheet of ancient papyrus, sold in Cairo market in 1898, came to Strasburg University library. A most ingenious German editor proclaimed it to contain notes of novelties found by some surprised student of Nero’s days in an unknown Greek historian of the fifth century B.C. One mutilated fragment, two incomplete lines in length, talks of an Athenian expedition sent at three days’ notice to the help of—someone or other, of “men being warred on.” Then the word “Thebans” follows, and then comes another gap. Could it be that the men warred on were the Plataeans, and those who made the war the Thebans? Did the Athenians send out a force to attempt to redeem their pledge? Does the unknown historian fill up a gap in Thucydides’ story, and the student take special note of the fact as he read the unknown’s pages in Egypt five centuries later?{141}
A second still more learned German tracked the matter home and tore his compatriot’s whole fantasy ruthlessly to shreds. It turned out to be a “nightmare’s nest”. These fragments of papyrus are but sorry notes upon one of Demosthenes’ orations, that against Androtion. They tell us nothing new. The Athenians did send help under Timotheus in 357 B.C.—to Euboeans—and let their enemies the Thebans depart in peace.{142} No light is thrown here by any flickering Egyptian Will-o’-the-wisp upon the darkness of the Athenian dishonour seventy years earlier. Had, perhaps, the dying Pericles roused himself to bid his citizens give Plataea the pledge? It was given before he died. Had he lived, might the army have crossed Cithaeron in the early autumn instead of ravaging Megara’s fields again? Pericles lay dead, and the pledge was not redeemed. After the two years’ siege, Plataea fell. But would Pericles himself have made any attempt to save the town? His own strategy forbade it. Silence settles down upon this black page in Athenian history. It is time to lay aside the story of Plataea, lover of Athens. Satis legisti.
And yet, over all Athenians of all time there towers this one superb figure of Pericles, patriot and orator. His mistakes may be forgotten. He himself is enshrined forever in the memory of mankind. For Athens, his city, he had that passionate devotion which some few great men in every land have felt for their country, but none have felt it in greater measure.{143} It was this passion of adoration which inspired him eighteen months before his death and breathes through every sentence of the speech which he was then called on to deliver in honour of the Athenian dead who, in the first year of the war, had laid down their lives for their city. The “Funeral Oration” of Pericles is the one unrivalled masterpiece of the whole of ancient oratory. “Athens our Country is worthy her sons’ devotion. How can they be more fitly praised than by praising her?”
“So when the moment came, these men were minded to stand and suffer rather than by yielding to save their lives. They fled from dishonour: on the field of battle their feet stood fast, and in an instant, at the crisis of fate, they passed away from the scene, not of terror, but of glory.
“Such was the end of these men. They were worthy of Athens. I would have you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, and become her lovers; and when you see her glory, reflect that this Empire has been won by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it; who in action feared dishonour; who, should they ever be worsted in an enterprise, freely gave their lives to their country as the fairest feast offering which they could make her.
“So they received again each one for himself the praise which grows not old, and the noblest of all sepulchres—I speak not of that wherein their remains are laid, but of that in which their glory survives in everlasting remembrance, recalled always as every chance of word or deed may serve.
For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men. Not only are they commemorated by graven stones in their own country, but far away in alien lands there lives also an unwritten memorial of them, set in the hearts of men.”
Then after a few brief words of consolation to the kinsfolk, the parents, sons, brothers, and womenfolk of the fallen, the great orator ends quietly with the thought of the children bereft of the father’s care:
“The dead have been interred with honour. It remains only that their children should have maintenance from the city until they are grown. This is the prize with which Athens crowns her sons after a struggle like theirs. For where valour has the greatest rewards, there the noblest citizens are enlisted in the service of their Country.
“And now, when you have duly mourned, each his own, depart.”{144}
Once again, and perhaps once only in the long annals of the years, has an orator on the like occasion rivalled, or it may be surpassed, the greatest of the Athenians. To the English public schoolman or University student Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, is too little known, one of his own blood though the speaker is. On the very field of battle, where four months earlier, there had raged that tremendous three days’ struggle, so heroic, so glorious to both sides, in which over 40,000 men were killed or wounded and two great armies “tore themselves to pieces”, the President of the Republic spoke so simply, so earnestly, so greatly, that his words have sunk deep into the hearts of all the English-speaking peoples, however widely sundered by the seas:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Here once more it is the larger ideal, the nation and that for which it stands, which consecrates the individual soldier’s life and death.
This ideal of liberty—to what has it not moved men?
A year and a half later, in his “Second Inaugural” on March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln once again encouraged his war-weary people to endure to the end. Six weeks later the President was foully murdered, to the irreparable loss of the victors in the war, loss in honour, loss in wisdom, loss in magnanimity. Pericles too, shortly before his death, had striven a second time to encourage his faltering citizens to persist.
“The visitations of heaven”, he cried, “must be borne with resignation; the sufferings inflicted by an enemy with manliness. This has always been the spirit of Athens. Let it not die out in you. Our city has the greatest name in all the world because she has never yielded to misfortunes, but has spent more lives and endured severer hardships in war than has any other. Wherefore also it is that she has the greatest power of any nation up to this day, and the memory of her glory will last forever. Even though we be compelled at last to abate somewhat of our greatness (for all things have their seasons of growth and of decay), yet will this recollection live, that of all Hellenes we governed the greatest number of Hellenic subjects; that we withstood our enemies, single or united, in the most terrible wars, and were inhabitants of a city endowed with every manner of wealth and magnificence. Hatred we have earned thereby, as have all who aspire to Empire. He judges well who accepts hatred in a great cause. Hatred lasts not long. Great deeds win immediate splendour, but their renown endures forever. So persist. Send no herald to the foe. For the greatest states and the greatest men, when troubles come, are least downcast in spirit and the most resolute in action.”{145}
So with these words of Imperialism, proud and defiant, Pericles passes from us in the pages of Thucydides. Lincoln’s are the nobler words,—after longer years of war than Athens had so far endured:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
We in these latter indolent and self-seeking days, remembering those who have so lately died for liberty, for England, for the Empire,—may we not still draw strength from the inspiration of these voices speaking down the centuries?
“L’ Italia ѐ Garibaldi”—Italy is Garibaldi—the hero saint, Ugo Bassi cried. “Athens, nominally a democracy, was in fact a Government by the First Citizen,” declares Thucydides, in concise summary of the power and the glory of Pericles. Of no other Athenian statesman, throughout the city’s many long years of freedom, can the same be said. Athens was Pericles.{146}