Was Athens—or Greece itself—destroyed by the war? An entire industry of classical scholarship once argued for postwar Hellenic “decline,” and the subsequent tide of fourth-century poverty, social unrest, and class struggle as arising after the Peloponnesian War. Victorians, in turn, felt the loss was more a “what might have been,” a conflict that had ended not just the idea of Athens but “the glory that was Greece” itself and the Hellenic civilizing influence in the wider Mediterranean.
Bernard Henderson, for example, ended his military history of the Peloponnesian War with the melancholy reflection that the romance of Greek history “for a half-century illumined the Imperial Democracy of Athens and the people’s leaders. Athens falls, and the gleam lights on her no more. The City, for all Demosthenes’ fiery if mistaken eloquence, lies henceforward in perpetual shadow.” Alfred Zimmern, a utopian who was deeply involved in the work of the League of Nations, summed up best the Victorian view that the war had been the tragic divide of ancient, and indeed world, history.
For a wonderful half-century, the richest and happiest period in the recorded history of any single community, Politics and Morality, the deepest and strongest forces of national and of individual life, had moved forward hand in hand towards a complete ideal, the perfect citizen in the perfect state. All the high things in human life seemed to lie along that road: “Freedom, Law, and Progress”; Truth and Beauty; Knowledge and Virtue; Humanity and Religion. Now the gods had put them asunder.1
In the short term, perhaps such bleak assessments rang true. Soon after the fighting stopped in autumn 405, democracy, saddled as it was with the humiliation of military defeat and the loss of thousands of unfortunate supporters who had gone down in the Aegean during the nearly decadelong Ionian War, began to unwind. After the formal capitulation of spring 404, it was replaced by a narrow and mean-spirited oligarchy (the Thirty Tyrants), as Athens’ old tributary subjects abroad were “liberated” and left to their own devices. Aegospotami marks the official end of direct Athenian-Spartan hostilities, yet the war was not formally concluded until a besieged Athens gave up the democracy in spring 404.
In place of an enlightened democratic hegemony, an incompetent Spartan protectorate clumsily tried to impose on Athens’ former subjects oligarchies that left the most vulnerable states in Asia Minor open to either direct or insidious Persian suzerainty. In peace, the conquering Lysander quickly proved to be a different sort of statesman from Pericles, an oligarchic rather than a democratic imperialist whose brutality was not mitigated by any sense of majesty.
After a brief civil war and the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants, by late 403 democratic government was firmly once more in control at Athens, in glorious fashion. It would provide another six decades of relative tranquillity and stability, if not a dangerous laxity, before the onslaught of Philip of Macedon in the 340s. A second Athenian maritime league, without the odious tribute or forced confiscations of land, was in place in 378, within thirty years of the war’s end. The Aegean was to be patrolled by yet another fleet of some 300 active triremes, and reminiscent more of the balanced Delian League than the old exploitative empire. Athenian citizens were even now paid to attend the assembly, perhaps because so many of the urban poor who had once routinely done so had been killed off in the sea battles of the Ionian War.
Some scholars even believe that the fourth-century Athenian fleet at times grew larger than that of the fifth. The walls that Lysander had once pulled down to the music of flute players were rebuilt within eleven years, along with a growing line of refitted Attic border forts, which allowed the city more strategic flexibility and in theory the chance to stop enemies before they reached the richer cropland around the city. Since the real wartime damage to Attic agriculture had been confined to annual losses of grain and an inability to reach fields, almost immediately after the war agrarians were back at work in their vineyards and orchards. Once Athens had capitulated and the six-month siege was lifted in late spring 404, there was surprisingly little postwar famine, nor a massive pool of ruined Attic farmers eager to list abroad as mercenary hoplites.2
In the troubled world after the war, the old imperial Athens did not look so bad after all. In comparison, the real threat of Persia reappeared, Sparta proved cruel, and there was less imperial largess for plays and majestic temples. Despite Mytilene, Melos, and Sicily, it remains one of the great controversies of history whether, in fact, the old Athenian empire that Sparta destroyed really was a coercive hegemony that extorted money and trampled on local autonomy. Or was Pericles’ Athens a cultural engine for Greece that channeled capital into the arts even as it served as an aegis for the poor and dispossessed throughout the Aegean?3
For their own part, Sparta and Athens soon enjoyed a reconciliation based on their mutual suspicion of the growing power of Thebes and its resurgent and reunited Boeotian Confederacy. Twenty years after the Peloponnesian War’s conclusion had the ruin and genocide of the past merely become a bad dream? In such a revisionist view, did Thucydides (the supposed determinist, who may well have lived into the early 390s) cease his history in medias res in 411 for reasons other than illness or an untimely death? Perhaps as he toiled in the 390s to finish up his grand tale of Athenian folly and its inevitable punishment and decline, the resurrected democracy instead right before his eyes arose from the ashes of war and oligarchy, calling into question many of the historian’s sweeping pessimistic judgments forged during his wartime exile.
Xenophon, whose narrative takes up at 411, seems to have been one of the few contemporary historians who accepted Thucydides’ notion of a twenty-seven-year-long war beginning in 431 and ending in 405 with the defeat at Aegospotami, followed by the capitulation of the city in 404. Other observers, like the historians Theopompus and Cratippus, felt that the Peloponnesian War did not really end until 394, a thirty-eight-year war in all. In this view, hostilities actually ceased when the Spartan fleet was defeated by Athens at the sea battle at Cnidus (394). Then its expeditionary army was forced home to Sparta from Ionia to meet a new rising threat from Thebes, while the Long Walls of Athens were rebuilt, thereby ending once and for all the saga of the old fifth-century bipolar world of Athenian and Spartan hegemony.
The histories of Theopompus and Cratippus are lost except for a few fragments. Yet they might have reflected a generally held view that Athens did not lose the “Peloponnesian War” in 405–404 as much as suffer a two-year setback—not unlike the Sicilian disaster—before pressing ahead to find rough parity and permanent peace with Sparta somewhere around 394.
Very early in his history, Thucydides justified his lengthy narrative in part by the magnitude of suffering that took place in the conflict:
But the length of the Peloponnesian War was drawn out over a long time; and in the course of the war, disasters unfolded in Greece such as never had occurred in any comparable space of time. Never had so many cities been taken and left in ruins—some by Barbarians, others by Greeks themselves as they warred against each other. Indeed several of those cities captured suffered a change of inhabitants. Never had so many human beings been forced into exile or had there been so much bloodshed—either as a result of the war itself or the resulting civil insurrections.4
Clearly something had been lost in the twenty-seven years of fighting of what was, in fact, the first great civil war in Western history. But precisely what was this damage that might explain why Athens, which had once spearheaded a Panhellenic coalition to trounce a Persian invasion of some 250,000 combatants, could not by the mid-fourth century protect itself from another northern invasion of a mere 40,000 Macedonian combatants? Between the brilliant victories over the Persians at Marathon and Salamis (490 and 480) and the traumatic rout by Philip and Alexander at Chaeronea (338) looms the Peloponnesian War, whose steep costs were as much psychological as material trauma.
Much of the present-day notion of a lost brilliant classical fifth-century Hellenic culture was the creation of fourth-century Athenian orators themselves. Rhetoricians like Demosthenes and Isocrates habitually reminded their audiences how eminent their grandfathers had once been before the outbreak of the great Athenian war. That was the catastrophe, according to an understood consensus, that had reduced the Greeks to small men like themselves who now kowtowed to, rather than routed, the king of Persia and a half-Greek thug from the badlands of Macedon. A half century after the end of the war, Isocrates could still remind an Athenian audience of the carnage that awful war wrought on the city in bombastic, if often inaccurate detail.
In the Decelean War they lost 10,000 hoplites of their own and the allies, while in Sicily 40,000 and 260 ships. Finally, in the Hellespont 200 ships were lost. But who could count up those ships that were destroyed in groups of five, ten, or more—or the men who perished in armies of one or two thousand?5
In Isocrates’ worldview, empire and arrogance had wrecked Athens and later Sparta as well, once the Greek city-states abandoned their Panhellenic alliances against the common enemy of Persia. A resurrected fourth-century Athens, despite the still towering presence of its intact Parthenon, the genius of Aristophanes and Plato, and the florescence of red-figure ceramic art and idealistic marble sculpture, was altogether a different place. Ostensibly the decline was from the loss of tribute, the destruction of and cost to rebuild a fleet, the consumption of thousands of talents of reserves, political turmoil, and the humiliation of an occupied homeland. The combination of suffering from the plague and the nightmare of Sicily and the awful losses of the Ionian War, coupled with the violence wrought against Mytilene, Scione, and Melos, which haunted the citizenry, had also made Athens a different city.
Such an idea of a declining Hellenic postwar culture is the general consensus, then and now: fifth century great, fourth in decline, and the Peloponnesian War the great dividing line between the two. Of course, some of this thinking is also arbitrary, an artifact of the modern calendar. Our current system of dating, which replaced the older reckoning of Greece and Rome—classical systems based, respectively, on the founding of the Olympics and the date of the establishment of Rome—was worked out only sometime in the sixth century A.D. Then an odd historical artifact emerged: the past was seen through a series of distinct “centuries” delineated by the birth and death of Christ. Thus, ancient Athens had lost to Sparta sometime near the “end of the fifth century B.C.” Was there a proper connection between defeat and a fin de siècle transformation?6
For at least fourteen centuries, students of Greece thought so. Hence Westerners have loosely equated the close of the great Athenian hundred years that started roughly after the victories over Persia with the finale of the Peloponnesian War. Because moderns put stock in value-laden ideas about the uniqueness of centuries—eighteenth-century America, nineteenth-century values, twentieth-century modernism—they have become accustomed to seeing fourth-century B.c. Athens as somehow decadent and a pale imitation of its grand fifth-century predecessor, which was decimated by a hideous war that ended in 404.
Add that Socrates, embodiment of the fifth-century Athenian enlightenment, was executed in 399, and the picture of a sharp departure (or, rather, downturn) from the previous majestic hundred years is nearly complete. In this way of thinking, a great man like Pericles and his sober counterpart Archidamus had started the war. But it wound down with the likes of a different sort in Alcibiades and Lysander, who were both more versatile and more reprehensible than the older generation of Athenians and Spartans.
In addition, the master playwrights Sophocles and Euripides probably both died in 406. This coincidence reinforced the common belief that the lofty triad of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were fifth-century, not fourth-century, minds. Did the excellence of tragedy pass away once the singular atmosphere of imperial Athens was brought down by Sparta? And did fifth-century Old Comedy end with Aristophanes’ final plays in the decade after the war?
Surely modern perceptions would be different had the war begun in 470 and ended in 440. But then there is an equally disturbing afterthought: Did the chaos and suffering of the Peloponnesian War itself have something to do with the explosion of Greek accomplishment in the last third of the century? Can Thucydides’ genius be explained only by the conflict, Euripides’ greatest plays—Medea, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, and Bacchae—as a response to the ongoing brutality at Athens, the thinking of Plato in the 380s and 370s likewise as a product of both the teacher Socrates’ wartime prowling through the city and the student’s own alienation during the prior strife, and Aristophanes’ best comedies—Acharnians, Peace, Lysistrata—as reactions to the ongoing setbacks of the war? Such ideas of war alone producing works of genius are perhaps too disturbing to be taken seriously, especially given the fact that intellectuals like Antiphon, Gorgias, and Thucydides were not merely affected by the conflicts but key players in the drama itself. Still, what precisely in human and material terms was lost during the awful twenty-seven years?
By material standards, the immediate damage to the Greek world from this three-decade-long civil war was staggering. For that reason radical material recovery within a decade was all the more astonishing. The roll call of ruin and death makes depressing reading. Almost an entire generation of Athenian leaders was consumed by the war, its members, who ventured abroad more widely than their Spartan counterparts and lost far more battles, either killed in action, exiled, or somehow destroyed by the political fallout from the conflict. In this regard, Isocrates was not really exaggerating when he claimed that the “great houses” of Athens, which had survived the earlier nightmares of revolution and occupation by the Persians, were wiped out. Few of the most prominent Athenians died a natural death, or at least met an end that was separate from the events of the war that they helped wage.
At Athens almost every statesman who assumed a role of major political or military leadership during the conflict perished. A brief review of dead generals and political leaders is appalling, as the death toll was steady year by year throughout the entire war: Alcibiades (d. 404; twice exiled, assassinated in the war’s immediate aftermath); Androcles (d. 411; assassinated at Athens); Antiphon (d. 411; executed at Athens); Asopius (d. 428; killed on Leucas); Charoeades (d. 426 in Sicily); Cleon (d. 422; death at Amphipolis); Cleophon (d. 404; killed at Athens); Demosthenes (d. 413; executed on Sicily); Euripides of Melite (d. 429; killed while in command at Spartolos); Eurymedon (d. 413; killed in naval battle at Syracuse), Hippocrates (d. 424; killed at Delium); Hyperbolus (d. 411; murdered at Samos); Laches (d. 418; killed at Mantinea); Lamachus (d. 414; killed on Sicily); Melesander (d. 429; killed in Lycia); Nicias (d. 413; executed on Sicily); Pericles (d. 429; plague); all three of his sons (lost to the plague or executed at Athens); Philocles (d. 405; executed after Aegospotami), Phormio (d. 428; after being charged with corruption), Phrynichus (d. 411; assassinated at Athens); Procles (d. 426; killed in Aetolia), Thrasyllus (d. 406; executed with the generals after Arginusae); and Xenophon (d. 429; killed at Spartolos).
While at least 22 Athenian elected generals were killed in combat or the immediate aftermath of battle during the war, the carnage among the leadership at Sparta was marginally lighter, due only to the fact that for the first two decades of the war the Spartans did not send their commanders all over the Greek world—and then Sparta eventually won the conflict. Nevertheless, the sharpest Spartan military minds (not always an oxymoron) were mostly gobbled up by the war, often in its last decade in the eastern Aegean: Alcamenes (d. 412; killed at Spiraeum), Brasidas (d. 422; killed at Amphipolis); Callicratidas (d. 406; drowned near Mytilene); Chalcideus (d. 412; killed near Miletus); Epitadas (d. 425; killed at Pylos); Eurylochus (d. 426; lost at Olpae); Euthydemus (d. 413; killed on Sicily); Hippocrates (d. 408; killed at Chalcedon); Labotas (d. 408; killed at Heraclea); Macarius (d. 426; at Olpae); Mindarus (d. 410; killed at sea in the Hellespont); Salaethus (d. 427; executed at Athens); Thorax (d. 404; executed for financial impropriety); Timocrates (d. 429; killed off Naupaktos); and Xenares (d. 420; killed in northern Greece). In the text of Thucydides alone, 22 Spartan or Athenian infantry generals are explicitly noted as being killed in some sort of land battle.
How many ordinary Greeks died in the war? In ancient sources, the adjectives “a great number” (polus arithmos) or “many” (polloi) are more frequently used than exact figures. Such generalizations refer to tens of thousands of Greeks whose lives remain forever anonymous and forgotten. Nevertheless, if one were to count up all the explicit figures of the dead as reported by Thucydides, Diodorus, and Xenophon during the twenty-seven-year war, from well over 150 engagements, ambushes, sieges, executions, and various assorted types of combat, there are some 43,000 Greeks listed as killed in battle proper—again, a fraction of the true total, since in the vast majority of battle reports that wind up in ancient historians’ accounts, no figures at all are given.
For Athenian combat losses at least, Barry Strauss once made a similar effort to collate all our literary evidence, combined with commonsense conjectures, and arrived at a minimum and very conservative figure of some 5,470 hoplites killed in battle, along with at least 12,600 from the poorer thetic class. In some sense, the fact that the last decade of the war proved to be a bloodbath for the poor who rowed in the triremes that were lost across the Aegean might explain why Athenian democracy was somewhat more tranquil in the fourth century after the war. It was then another legacy of the Peloponnesian War that the critical balance between landless poor and middling hoplite citizens was altered by inordinate losses at sea, reducing the thetes by perhaps 20 percent in relationship to the better-off middle and upper citizens.7
But even the conservative figure of about 20,000 Athenian fatalities in recorded combat is just the tip of the iceberg. The adult-male-citizen population of the city, either from the effects of extended service, plague, or hunger, itself shrank from some 40,000 at war’s outbreak to around 15,000 by the surrender, or a 60 percent loss over some three decades. If, in addition to the hoplites, at least some 80,000 residents of Attica of all ages who perished from the plague are tallied (there are no figures on those lost to hunger or disease in other years), well over 100,000 Athenians of all classes (well apart from imperial subjects and allies) died as a direct result of the war. To imagine in contemporary terms the effect on Attica of losing an aggregate third of the population, assume that the United States suffered not a little over 400,000 combat dead in World War II out a total population of roughly 133 million (.3 percent), but rather over one hundred times that figure—or some 44 million killed in combat in the European and Japanese theaters.
Thebes, in contrast, which was never occupied and never risked its hoplite strength in any battle encounter after Delium, came off pretty well. Its light losses in comparison to those of its traditional rivals, along with Boeotia’s eventual democratization, in part explain its growing prominence in the fourth century. The Thebans also plundered at will across the border in rural Attica, a region that had become legendary in antiquity for its bounty. Only 500 Boeotian hoplites perished at Delium and an additional 1,000 light-armed troops. Perhaps another 1,000 or so Boeotians were lost either attacking or defending small towns such as Plataea, Mycalessus, and Thespiae. In any case, the war was good to Thebes and bad to Athens and Sparta, and the political events of the following thirty years would reflect that reality.
Just as Sparta and Athens had fallen out after spearheading the Panhellenic victory over Persia, so too Thebes and Sparta almost immediately were at each other’s throat as soon as Athens was vanquished. Ostensibly they fought over the ample shared spoils taken from Attica that had accrued at Decelea. But the problem that would divide Greece for the next half century was intractable: Thebes was as powerful as Sparta; its infantry was both larger and, soon, superior; and its political institutions were becoming more liberal as exclusive Sparta’s regressed into even greater insularity.8
There is little information on the number of those killed in the other city-states. For example, how many allies died when an aggregate of almost 500 Athenian and Peloponnesian triremes went down in the eight years of the Ionian War is simply unknown. Much less is there recorded any exact number of those Greeks butchered at Mytilene, Corcyra, Scione, or Melos, or the total who perished from over twenty-one sieges, hundreds of skirmishes and raids, or the Sicilian expedition that took almost 45,000 Athenian and allied seamen and hoplites, with an untold number of Sicilians as well.
Material losses were equally severe, but they are even harder to calibrate. The Athenian fleet at war’s end was no more than 12 triremes. Perhaps well over 400 or 500 Athenian ships, even apart from those of the imperial allies, were lost during the war. For Greece as a whole, the losses may have been double that number. The entire financial reserves of Athens were depleted. In the fourth century, liturgies for the building of ships were shared among several wealthy citizens, the implication being that there were no longer hundreds of Athenians of sufficient wealth who could outfit a trireme for a season.
While the agrarian infrastructure of Attica was not permanently destroyed by the annual Peloponnesian invasions—trees and vines, for example, were too numerous and too difficult to eradicate to ensure systematic agrarian damage—many of the wealthiest farms in the Athenian plain had been plundered for nearly a decade. Ancient sources speak of more than 20,000 slaves who fled to Decelea, and they comment on the growing wealth of neighboring Boeotia, once its robbers and raiders had a free hand for the last years of the war.9
Other Greek cities, like Melos, Scione, Torone, and Plataea, ceased to exist. Their physical infrastructures were either leveled or their abandoned houses resettled by foreign populations. Some major states, such as Argos, Chios, Corcyra, Lesbos, and Samos, were torn apart by civil war. Others, including Amphipolis, Corinth, Mantinea, and Megara, had been crisscrossed by armies and were the scene of constant fighting. Megara had been invaded twice a year for most of the Archidamian War. It probably suffered more rural damage than did Attica or, indeed, any other region of Greece—provisioning thousands of Peloponnesians as they passed through on their way to and from Attica and then in their absence being ravaged by furious, revengeful Athenians.
Yet the result of the killing, looting, and disease was not that Greece was reduced to abject poverty, much less that its farms were ruined for a half century, or that the countryside was depopulated because of the war deaths. Rather, the cost was more in terms of the material surfeit and the intellectual energy of Greece that were depleted. Thus, the prosperity and affluence accrued from the prior centuries were gone. In the years following the war there was hardly any margin of security to fund and subsidize the artistic and literary endeavors of the past. The psychological wound of the Peloponnesian War—the myriad ethnic hatreds, political factions, and private vendettas—would plague Greeks for decades, even though its consequences came to light only through bits and pieces of incidental anecdote and gossip in later extant literature.
The postbellum comedies of Aristophanes, Xenophon’s minor treatises, and Plato’s utopian literature all reflect some sort of crisis of confidence in the Athenian state. Implicit political or economic advice is offered about how to resurrect lost glory through elevation of the public over the private good. Athenian oratory of the fourth century, for example, perhaps reflects this sense of eternal wrangling over a shrinking pie—with stories of once prosperous families who were undone by the war, their petulant orphans and descendents still lamenting the lost fathers and uncles or property confiscated or destroyed. Again, the perception of lost splendor and wealth, rather than abject poverty, seems to characterize postbellum angst.10
Sparta, for a time at least, felt it had done well despite its terrible losses in the Ionian War. As the Athenians had warned the doomed Melians, Spartan rhetoric was never quite matched by action and sacrifice, at least when there were real risks in deploying Spartiates far from home. Other than raids on the Peloponnesian coast, the motherland of Laconia escaped the war virtually unscathed. When Epaminondas torched it a half century later, a variety of sources recorded the shock in the Greek world of a landscape that had previously been “aporthêtos” (“unplundered”) for nearly seven hundred years.
War, however, can alter winners as much as losers with a variety of unintended consequences. Republics, whether Rome of the third century B.c. or America of the 1940s, that are drawn into global wars can find their ensuing success, both the wealth that accrues and the resources needed to meet newfound military responsibilities, as challenging as defeat. So Sparta learned that in the 390s it was psychologically, economically, and culturally incapable of administering an empire, even one far smaller and less demanding than the one Athens had ruled for a half century. Its parochial elites were easily corrupted abroad, in direct proportion to the length of time they stayed away from the mess hall and the amount of gold they were offered by a variety of Persian grandees. As Spartan hoplites took on new responsibilities in Asia Minor, the helots back home grew stronger and the Spartan state weaker. By 398, a disenfranchised Spartiate, Cinadon, was found guilty of organizing a massive rebellion of all non-Spartiates in Laconia and Messenia against the Spartiates, whom, he claimed, his supporters wished to “eat even raw.”
Within thirty years of the conclusion of the war, overseas service and constant campaigning to preserve their newly won empire had created a permanent class of Spartan proconsuls and generals, the net effect of which was a rapid decline in the number of Spartiates. Forty percent of all the land in Messenia and Laconia was soon to be owned by women, not surprising given the deaths and long absences of the shrinking Spartan elite. The number of Spartiates sank to a mere 1,500 by the time of the battle of Leuctra (371), while Athens, the loser of the great war, in its aftermath recovered to a population of over 25,000 citizens.11
Over three decades of fighting unleashed the creative talents of thousands of Greeks in the singular effort to kill one another without ethical restraint or much ostensible deference to past protocols. Just as the horror of World War II even today still prefigures all current military strategy and practice—from strategic bombing and atomic weapons to massed tank assaults and carrier war—so too innovations over thirty years of fighting ended old concepts and for the next three centuries, until the coming of Rome, unleashed the Greek creative talent for killing.
Before the Peloponnesian War the Greeks at least paid lip service to the notion of protocols, or the “laws of the Greeks” (nomima). These were murky and supposedly widely shared Hellenic ideals that had arose to mitigate the destructiveness of war. While there were always violations and atrocities in the past centuries, there was nonetheless the dream that war could and should still be decided by two opposing land armies in an open battle. It mattered little whether such reactionary idealism actually was true in all wars between the city-states. Rather, the nostalgia tended to retard military innovation and curb the brutality and length of many wars.12
The Peloponnesian War—in the manner that the carnage of World War I, with its massive conscript armies, machine guns, gas, and artillery, ended the romance of a good nineteenth-century fight—put such parochial notions to rest. More than sixty years after the war ended, the orator Demosthenes lamented how the old understandings of a past age had not survived into his own time:
Whereas all the arts have made great advances, and nothing is the same as it was in the past, I believe that nothing has been more altered and improved than matters of war.… The Lacedaemonians, like all the others, used to spend four or five months—the summer season—in invading and ravaging the territory of their enemy with hoplites and civic armies and then retire home again.… They were so bound by tradition or rather such good citizens of the polis that they did not use money to seek advantage, but rather their war was by rules and out in the open.13
War “by rules and out in the open” was rightly seen as an impediment to the sheer efficacy of killing as many as possible given the constraints of time and space. Winter campaigning was common on both sides. After Delium, Athenian dead from Sicily to Asia Minor were left to rot. Captives, whether in Plataea, Melos, or Scione, were often butchered, perhaps cumulatively in the several thousands over the course of the war. Civilians were the only targets at Mycalessus.
The tenets of the Peace of Nicias were almost immediately violated. Slaves were critical to the fleets of both sides, as their desertion and emancipation were key strategies in the war. Sanctuaries, whether at Delium or on Sicily, were not considered sacrosanct. Those who surrendered were either butchered or mutilated after Aegospotami, and held hostage with threatened execution after Pylos. Generals like Demosthenes and Nicias were executed after defeat—something that did not occur in the earlier wars of the fifth century in Boeotia. Even the reactionary Spartans early on in the war recognized that the old hoplite protocols had become “moronic” (môria) and irrelevant, echoing the Persians’ earlier slurs that the pedestrian Greeks had once fought “foolishly,” “without wisdom,” and “absurdly.”14
Spartan hoplites not only lost their battle on the island of Sphacteria to once despised light-armed troops but also surrendered and were willing to become hostages, an act that would have shamed Leonidas and his 300 a half century earlier at Thermopylae. The hoplite myth was over. To win the Peloponnesian War, Sparta not only built a fleet but also enrolled thousands of helots and created a large corps of horsemen. In the war’s fourth-century aftermath fighting became far more deadly, amorphous, and concerned with the ends rather than the ethical means.15
Status, wealth, and reputation—“all that” was integral to how war was waged in Greece prior to 431. Yet by the war’s end an Athenian’s wealth or parentage no longer necessarily determined the nature of his military service. This too was a revolutionary breakthrough and throughout the next centuries would soon improve the overall ability of Greek militaries. Of course, aristocracies never quite die, and their twin offspring of influence and nepotism always favor those blessed by money or birth. But for the great majority of Greeks, the old prewar social calculus—the wealthy on horses, agrarians as hoplites, the poor as rowers and skirmishers, slaves as baggage carriers, infantry attendants, and cooks—was rendered obsolete.
The losses from the plague, Sicily, and the slaughter of the Ionian War all meant that bodies were needed, with scant attention paid to wealth or status. Furthermore, it was not clear that a horseman was always more valuable than an infantryman, or the latter in turn more deadly than a rower. The result was that in times of crisis the wealthy sometimes fought as infantrymen, farmers rowed, and the poor were equipped by the state as hoplites.
Because such newfound forces were actually superior to the old class-demarcated services, the ultimate wage was an increase in military efficacy and a democratization of warfare. A half century later, the new national army of Philip of Macedon was the beneficiary. Although he was a thug, he was also a military visionary who could not care less whether his hired killers were rich, poor, citizens, or former slaves; but he did worry a great deal about whether they could be trained to fight his way and follow his orders.16
The Peloponnesian War taught Westerners that the logic of military efficacy should trump tribalism, tradition, and arbitrary constructs of wealth and power. Plato, who wrote in the aftermath of the three-decade disaster, saw this more clearly than any other Greek thinker—and resented it bitterly.17
Before the Peloponnesian War, a fundamental expression of full citizenship was infantry or cavalry service. Aristotle thought the very rise of the polis was a direct result of a growing class of small landowners who could afford arms. That way the farmers established a more inclusive citizenship by a property qualification in lieu of birth, the new cutoff line being those who could obtain their own heavy armor and thereby fight as hoplites in the phalanx.18
After the devastating losses from the initial years of the Peloponnesian War, the limitations of such a parochial idea were soon transparent. At Athens, there may have been over 20,000 resident alien males of military age, many of them prosperous and intensely patriotic. Their numbers were dwarfed by more than 100,000 slaves—adult males and quite capable of fighting. Sparta for its part sat atop a volcano of 250,000 helots. Even Corinth, Argos, and Thebes all had sizable numbers of rural servants, who often carried the armor and supplies of hoplites on brief campaigns.
The trick was to tap such huge manpower reservoirs without undermining the rather exclusive civic premises of the parochial city-state. The Greeks soon found themselves in some of the same dilemmas as the tottering old Confederacy during the American Civil War: in times of crisis slaves could be valuable combatants; but should they fight well, then their very courage might undermine the entire logic of their purported inferiority. Outside of Messenia and Laconia chattel slavery in Greece was not predicated on race or ethnic identity. Thus, it escaped the paradoxes brought on by an unsupportable pseudoscience of racial inferiority. People became slaves through accidents—a captured city, a lost battle, or a servile parent. Nevertheless, once the unfree were allowed to fight in exchange for their freedom, a natural question arose: what exactly was the capricious logic that made them remain forever inferior?
Brasidas, for example, drafted thousands of helots and extended freedom to them. The ultimate dividend from such emancipation may not have been just increased Spartan manpower but a subsequent rising unrest among the helot population in the decades after the war, when such stalwart Brasideans returned home and constructed their rather vicious fallen commander as a great crusading “liberator.”
At Athens, from the very start of the conflict resident aliens, or metics, served as reserve and garrison troops, while slaves probably rowed far more often in the imperial Athenian fleet than was noted by the aristocratic Thucydides. At Arginusae the assembly promised freedom to any slave who would embark on a trireme. Thousands went on to prove that they were indispensable for the Athenian victory. Prebattle observers may have thought the Peloponnesians had the far better crews; but the Athenian victory proved that there was something about the democratic élan of the empire that could turn slaves and the poor into rowers as good as Sparta’s more experienced and skilled mercenary seamen.19
Later Greek and Roman history reflects this additional revolutionary legacy of the Peloponnesian War, as the fourth-century Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman armies were multicultural, multiracial, and professional. The militaries of both Sparta and Athens in the war’s aftermath were full of mercenary slaves and exslaves, without which they could never have replaced the manpower losses of the prior thirty years. In the chaos following the war, the Ten Thousand mercenaries who accompanied Cyrus the Younger on his quest to claim the Persian throne were a motley assortment of Peloponnesian War veterans, ex-slaves, and resident aliens, united only by their skill at arms, their shared need for money, and often the notion of being Greek.
Before the war, far more adult male Greeks were noncitizens than citizens of the city-states. But it took the war to strip that veneer of pretense away, and show that a man’s status did not predetermine his value on the battlefield. War, then and now, is a destroyer of protocol, privilege, and tradition, and that is not altogether always a bad thing.20
In Book 1 of Thucydides’ history Pericles outlines the limitations of the Peloponnesian adversaries. They had no capital. Unlike the Spartiates, most of the allies in the Peloponnesian coalition were agrarians who needed to farm at precisely the time it was best to fight. In contrast, Athens was a sophisticated polis with vast sums of coinage in both circulation and as specie on reserve. Pericles’ adversary, King Archidamus of Sparta, agreed, and so warned his rural Peloponnesians that they were not equipped to fight a long, multifaceted war with even a seasonal militia. This new conflict, he warned, was quite different: “War is not so much a matter of men as of monetary expense.” He proved absolutely right.21
The great irony of the war was that the very requisites for victory—an enormous fleet, money for rowers’ pay, and officers deployed overseas for long periods of imperial service—were inimical to the historic assumptions of rural and isolated Sparta, which heretofore had had no monetary economy. Persia finally filled the void, gave Spartan generals untold amounts of gold, and made up losses in men and matériel almost immediately. As long as Greeks were killing Greeks, the satraps of the Persian Empire were happy to subsidize the carnage.
Yet in the war’s aftermath, with the Persian subsidies gone, the implosion of the Spartan empire was directly attributable to its new financial responsibilities of administering a fleet and distant subject states that were so at odds with its old insular moral code. Money and manpower, not always just courage and class, quite literally won wars. The Peloponnesian War offered another bitter lesson, one that would also arise during the transition of Rome from republic to empire. Consensual government started in Greece as a limited enterprise. These constitutional states were predicated on a civic militia cloaked in amateurism and localism, and determined to protect the property of a minority of its citizens. But as the invective of Athenian conservatives from Plato to Aristotle illustrated, war over decades and across thousands of miles required mobilization, weaponry, and capital—and only the new resources of a more centralized and powerful state could meet those vast burdens.22
In the Greek psyche wars were traditionally purported referenda on courage and discipline, not to be decided by tricks, the quality of weapons, or accidents. Add to that code the intrinsic aristocratic distrust of rote labor so common in Greek thinking. Factor in also the ubiquity of slavery, whose cheap labor tended to discourage technological innovation. Thus, a good case could be made that for all the genius of the Greek city-state, until the later fifth century it was remarkably slow in applying its clear achievements in science, philosophy, and architecture to a practical crafting of weapons of destruction. A society that could sculpt the Parthenon friezes and easily lift them high up on the architraves of the temple apparently had no means of tearing down a simple enemy wall during a siege.
That stagnation too began to end in the Peloponnesian War, as both sides scrambled to invent new siege techniques at Plataea, weird devices like fire cannons at Delium, and constant naval modifications at Syracuse. Innovations from horse transports to the idea of forward fortified bases (epiteichismata) and swarms of missile troops were commonplace throughout the war, and often deeply resented. Thucydides reports the lamentation of one Spartan prisoner from Sphacteria, who, when chided about the surrender of Greece’s best infantrymen to poor javelin throwers and archers, snapped that the old hoplite courage was not worth much when an enemy showered his phalanx with womanly arrows and missiles, killing the brave and cowards alike.23
The major sieges left an indelible impression on both attacker and besieged, especially when the belligerents had experimented with siege towers, flamethrowers, and elaborate circumvallation. As a result, within six years of the end of the war, Dionysius of Syracuse, during the siege of Motya (399), crafted the first true artillery in history, crude nontorsion catapults that were known as “belly bows” (gastraphetes), and resembled something like oversized medieval crossbows.
Such ad hoc artillery soon led to true torsion catapults, perhaps first crafted by the engineers of Philip II of Macedon in the 340s. Considerable propulsive power could be stored by twisted hair, rope, or sinew through the use of stocks, winches, or springs. On release such machines might hurl stones or specially crafted bolts over three hundred yards, as efficiently and accurately as seventeenth-century gunpowder artillery. All this innovation marked not just a technological continuance of the ingenuity shown at the sieges of Plataea, Delium, and Syracuse but was made possible by the liberation from traditional moral restraint upon war making that had occurred during the Peloponnesian War. The success of the war’s major campaigns, from Potidaea and Plataea to Mytilene and Syracuse, depended on craftsmen who could either build or tear down walls in the most efficient and rapid manner.
Defensive engineers were also quick to grasp the lessons of the value of fortifications and the need to counteract them with even more powerful artillery, as a veritable arms race ensued, characterized by constant response and counterresponse. Most of the present-day ruins that dot the Greek countryside date not from the fifth century but from the fourth and later, as the arts of military construction and destruction accelerated, hand in glove.
The vast circuits of the Peloponnesian cities of Mantinea, Megalopolis, and Messene and rural forts on the frontiers of Attica, Megarid, and in the Argolid were constructed in just this period of the early and mid-fourth century. The chief improvements learned from trial and error during the Peloponnesian War consisted of a systematic use of ashlar blocks, binding courses, embrasures, internal trussing, more extensive foundations, and drafted corners to assure wall stability at vastly increased heights and breadths. Forts were framed with towers over thirty feet in height that housed small antipersonnel nontorsion catapults to prevent besiegers from approaching too near the circuits. Some of the embrasure windows were equipped with elaborate shuttering systems designed to open and close as wheeled catapults laid down continuous fire.
Historians could argue over whether the rush for both urban and rural fortification in the postwar period was an unwise diversion of Greece’s finite resources, or itself spurred on economic activity while providing needed defense. But the archaic dream that Greece should remain unwalled was dead except at Sparta. Citizens, not just soldiers, began to plan for their collective defense in wars that were as likely to break out at their doorsteps as in distant fields.24
Before the Peloponnesian War it was rare for Greeks to entrust too much power to the hands of any one commander. It was neither a Spartan nor an Athenian trait but a Panhellenic custom that most generals led the army or fleet from the first rank and so frequently died in battle, a fact that precluded both long military careers and evolving tactical innovation. The old ideal was perhaps best reflected in the seventh-century poet Archilochus’ encomium to the hoplite brawling leader: “short and bandy-legged, firmly set on his feet, full of heart and courage.”25
But throughout the three-decades-long war, commanders discovered that a general could do more to kill large numbers of their enemies than by merely wielding a spear on the right wing of the phalanx, displaying the cardinal virtues of sobriety and self-control (sophrosynê). Armies were no longer the glue that held together the consensual government of the old polis but became simply military assets that carried no particular civic or political weight. Personalities such as Alcibiades, Cleon, Demosthenes, Thrasybulus, Brasidas, Lysander, and Gylippus were not anonymous warriors but leaders who were expected to exercise intellectual options that might achieve victory by superior logistics, tactics, finance, or public relations. A man like Brasidas or Lysander (the latter of questionable background) was seen as a valuable asset in his own right, whose worth was almost impossible to calculate but now appreciated as never before.26
Pagondas, for example, was more responsible for the victory at Delium than was the strength of his Theban agrarian infantry, in the same manner that Sphacteria and Pylos were Athenian victories due largely to the vision of Cleon and Demosthenes. Without Alcibiades and Lysander, Sparta would never have successfully built a large fleet. Only Gylippus’ arrival at Syracuse saved Sicily. To marshal the new diverse forces of mercenaries, slaves, and combined arms, thinkers, not just warriors, were needed.
A veritable revolution in the idea of generalship unfolded in the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath, especially in the hysterical reactions to it, as philosophers and rhetoricians debated the proper credentials for military leadership.27 Before the war generals were considered regular folk; afterward they often appeared publicly as mounted horsemen and were feared and worshipped. The careers of Epaminondas and Alexander the Great are testimony to the idea that single men could galvanize an entire state—democratic or otherwise—and through sheer brilliance and audacity raise sophisticated armies of invasion.
Whatever the controversy, immediately following the defeat of Athens there appeared an entire genre of military literature for the specialist. Some itinerant sophists, like the Dionysodoros of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, promised that they could teach one “how to be a general.” In the war’s aftermath, veterans often enlisted as mercenary commanders—men, for example, like Phalinos of Boeotia, who claimed that he was an “expert on tactics and arms-drill.” Fourth-century utopian literature stressed the new need for professionalization, specialization, and careful training.28
At Athens an entire array of mercenary captains, such as Iphicrates, Timotheos, Chabrias, and Chares, took over the military in a way undreamed of in the prior fifth century, when Nicias and Alcibiades had debated as politicians first and generals second. One of the great mysteries of the Peloponnesian War is why inward and blinkered states like Sparta and Thebes produced brilliant strategists and tacticians like Brasidas, Gylippus, Lysander, and Pagondas, while liberal, freethinking Athens entrusted so many of its critical commands to timid dullards like Nicias; inspired but often reckless entrepreneurs such as Alcibiades, Cleon, and Demosthenes; or anonymous functionaries whose names are known mostly by reason of their death in defeat, such as the otherwise obscure Hippocrates or Laches. Perhaps it was the intrusion of the assembly into military decision making, a factor inherent in the radical democracy at Athens, or a naval tradition that great commanders of the past—like Themistocles, Pericles, and Phormio—were admirals, not infantry generals. In any case, the Peloponnesians, not Athens, produced the better military minds. At key junctures—Sicily and Aegospotami stand out—the outcome of the war itself hinged on just such superior leadership.29
Not all the legacies of the Peloponnesian War were material, social, or political. There was ideological and philosophical fallout as well. Much of Greek literature both before and after the Peloponnesian War, whether the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus’ dictum that “War is the father of us all” or Plato’s postbellum appraisal in his Laws that war is a more natural phenomenon than peace, envisioned war as tragedy, but not therein necessarily evil. Rather, the moral landscape of the times—who fought whom, why, how, and with what result?—determined the ethical appraisal of wars that had been mostly short and economical.
Again, the growth of such a Greek tragic acceptance of war, so common from Homer to Sophocles, was also predicated on two more practical realities. Most wars of the eighth to fifth centuries between Greeks had probably been both short and seasonal. The rare cosmic struggles for national survival, such as the Persian conflicts between 490 and 479, were conducted exclusively against foreigners and still ended with a single climactic pitched battle.
The Peloponnesian War was different. When the Greek world tore itself apart in national suicide for almost three decades, some Greek thinkers—in the manner of the postwar 1920s generation, who recoiled at the trenches of World War I—began to associate their own dissatisfaction over the conduct of this particular war with the nature of war itself. Thus, wartime plays such as Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Peace, and Lysistrata, as well as Euripides’ Andromache, Helen, Hecuba, and Trojan Women, while they betray no love for the Spartans, seem to offer a new wrinkle in Greek attitudes toward war: such conflicts themselves are awful human experiences that transcend the reasons for hostilities. The farmers and women of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Peace, and Lysistrata, like the captured and suffering civilians of Euripides’ Hecuba, Trojan Women, and Andromache, reveal that everyday Greeks found shared experiences across the battle line. Thus the playwrights offer the idea that there is something wrong with war per se—not just with the Spartans.
While the totality of postbellum thought never became therapeutic, much less pacifist or utopian, the Peloponnesian War at least introduced into Western philosophy the comprehensive idea that war was not always noble or patriotic but often nonsensical, suicidal, and perhaps intrinsically wrong, especially when it lasted twenty-seven years, not a few hours on a summer day. Homer, of course, had questioned the morality and logic of motives and sacrifices of unthinking warriors in the Iliad, but Achilles did not doubt the nobility and heroism inherent in armed conflict.
Fourth-century Greeks, however, realized that the Peloponnesian War had been something uniquely awful in the Hellenic experience. It destroyed the idealism and spirit of Panhellenic unity that was so critical in the defense of Greece against the Persian invader. The war left in its wake the more self-interested idea that Greeks, if they were going to kill so savagely, should at least kill Persians, the mantra that Philip and Alexander would soon so brilliantly manipulate. In any case, to win the war the Spartans had used Persia to destroy Athens—a strategy brilliant in the short term but calamitous in the conflict’s aftermath, when Spartan hoplites were stationed in Asia Minor to check the Persian resurgence in Ionia that they had ensured by earlier bringing the satraps into the war effort.
Given the absence of resolute action or inspired Spartan leadership in the twenty years before the Ionian War, one asks that question rather than “How did Sparta pull it off?” Thucydides himself emphasizes how rare capable men like Brasidas, Gylippus, and Lysander were at Sparta, and how Athens, despite the advantages that democratic government brings to war, made mistake after mistake.
In his narrative there emerge four reasons why Sparta triumphed; none of them can be attributable to the oligarchy’s strategic insight or imaginative tactics. The plague was nature’s bane. Sicily was Athens’ own strategic mistake and was compounded by tactical blunders. The creation of a fort at Decelea and the use of Persian capital to build a fleet are attributed by Thucydides and Xenophon to the advice and machinations of Alcibiades, an Athenian. So naturally observers look to what Athens did wrong rather than to what Sparta did right to explain how such a dynamic imperial city was not merely beaten but nearly ruined.30
Yet Athens no more lost its war with Sparta than Nazi Germany did its offensive wars with France or Poland. By 425, in the seventh year of the conflict, almost all of Athens’ limited objectives had been achieved in line with Pericles’ original goal of a temporary stalemate—or perhaps more charitably seen as not losing in a war of exhaustion. Athens’ empire was still intact. It exercised continual naval supremacy over all potential enemies and, indeed, would finish the first decade of the war with its fleet still at its prewar level of 300 ships. True, the problems with Sparta were not solved, only postponed; but the city at least had shown that its own destruction might be beyond the capabilities of Sparta’s original alliance.
Athens, after all, had proved to Sparta that hoplite invasions of Attica, despite the horrific plague, would not bring the city to its knees. With the capture and detainment of the Spartiate prisoners from Sphacteria, who were to be executed the moment a Peloponnesian army again crossed the borders of Attica, the general outline of the Peace of Nicias, which would transpire four years later, was already established. Pericles’ vision, though tattered and torn, seemed fulfilled. Contemporaries in 421 thought Sparta was checked and demoralized after Pylos and the failure to make headway in Attica. Whether a shaky peace and a return to the status before the war were worth the cost of a decade of fighting and the plague is another matter altogether.
In contrast, the reasons for Athens’ later and utter defeat after the failed peace were probably twofold. First, even before the Sicilian expedition Athens had not simply fought Sparta but for a decade of the Archidamian War was holding off Sparta, its entire Peloponnesian alliance, and Corinth and Thebes. These two latter states proved their vehemence by not even becoming signatories of the shaky peace achieved in 421. In the trireme fighting in the Corinthian Gulf, at Solygia, and at Delium both allies had frequently fought Athens mostly on their own, without help from Sparta.
The powers formally allied with Sparta for most of the conflict were not weak. Peloponnesian states like Elis, Tegea, and at times even a reconstituted Mantinea and Argos provided hoplites for a Spartan-led enterprise or later occupation at Decelea. The Boeotian army was as formidable as the Spartan. Its bitter hostility ensured a two-front war, a permanent condition after the failed Athenian effort at Delium. Corinth controlled much of the lateral sea traffic in and out of the Gulf, and all routes to and from the Peloponnese by land. The continual Athenian failure to take over the Megarid only ensured the Peloponnesians perpetual access to Attica anytime they thought they could devise some better strategy than the earlier failed annual invasions, such as the final occupation of Decelea.
In the first few years of the war Athens conducted massive operations abroad, but quickly learned that the permanent deployment of some 100 to 200 ships was exhausting its treasury without bringing decisive results. But with the capture of Pylos and Sphacteria in 425 it achieved a stunning psychological victory, made all the more so once the Spartans were shamed by the surrender of their crack hoplites and were willing to withdraw from Attica for good.
Once more, by 421 the Athenians had not won; but they had proved that even after suffering horrendous losses to the plague they could find innovative new methods of not losing the war. Yet the city-state’s most creative thinkers, from Alcibiades to Demosthenes, gauged stalemate a disappointment rather than a windfall. Thus they began to devise further probing operations in the Peloponnese that might weaken Sparta without taking on her formidable hoplites. The result was a doubly disastrous policy, a renewed war with the Peloponnesians and misplaced faith in expanding the theater of conflict in lieu of confronting and defeating the Spartan army outright as a way of freeing the helots and dismantling Spartan apartheid.
Second, despite taking on all at once the three largest of the city-states, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes; losing well over a quarter of its population to the plague; and not destroying the hoplite or naval resources of any of its three adversaries, in 415 Athens invaded Syracuse. Immediately it found itself at war with a larger city than its own and almost as democratic. Not only had Athens diverted its precious resources to a far distant campaign at a time when Spartans were soon to be thirteen miles from its walls, but in attacking democratic Syracuse it also weakened its propaganda that its war was in large part ideological, taken up on behalf of democratic peoples and their resistance to foreign-imposed oligarchies.
Sicily drew blood, and the hemorrhaging attracted a whole host of new enemies. Perhaps worst of all, after Sicily Athens was in a war against itself, as the revolution of 411 and the ultimately failed oligarchic putsch proved. By 412 Persia was soon to be a de facto belligerent. Without Persia’s vast capital for crews and triremes, Sparta could never have prosecuted the Ionian War, which eventually forced Athens to capitulate. In that narrow strategic regard, Athens really was like the Germany of World War II, which fought the old European allies of France and England, took on the vast industrial might of the United States, and tried to invade Soviet Russia. Hitler might have defeated or obtained a draw with any of the three powers individually or in succession, but never two, much less three, in combination.
It was the belief of Thucydides that if democracies brought multifaceted advantages to war, their raucous assemblies, constant second-guessing, grandstanding, and hypercriticism severely hampered military operations. Only a towering figure such as Pericles could rein in the raw emotions unleashed in open forums and, as first citizen, by sheer power of his moral authority run the country by near fiat and still take full advantage of democratic dynamism. Whether that pessimism of the historian was warranted or fair to democracy, it was certainly clear that Sparta had more patience with an occasionally lax Brasidas, Agis, or Lysander than Athens ever did with its own generals.
True, Sparta could execute generals like Thorax and shun the returning prisoners from Pylos, but in comparison to Athens it gave latitude to commanders in a way unknown at Athens. If Thucydides was exiled for failing to save Amphipolis from Brasidas, later in the same theater Brasidas most surely was not recalled to Sparta after failing to reach Torone in time and thus losing the entire city to Cleon. That the Athenian assembly exiled, executed, or fined almost every notable general it ordered on campaign did not make commanders more accountable as much as timid and prone to second-guessing. Thus, after any setback, whether in the Delium campaign or at Arginusae, they would most likely not come back to Athens, in fear of a trial. So the city did not often learn from its mistakes but almost always scared generals into being too cautious or reckless, their decisions based on anticipating what the voters back home might approve on any particular day.
Whether Thucydides entertained preexisting views about the nature of war and sought to use the events of the Peloponnesian War to confirm his pessimism, whether his philosophy emerged inductively from the mayhem that he witnessed over three decades, or both is not really known. But his history is more than a narrative of now obscure battles and massacres. Instead, as he predicted, it serves as a timeless guide to the tragic nature of war itself, inasmuch as human character is unchanging and thus its conduct in calamitous times is always predictable.
If the Peloponnesian War still teaches us something about men at war, it is the lesson that interim armistices may quiet down the fighting but cannot with any degree of consistency end the conflict unless they address why one party chose to go to war in the first place. More often resolute action, for good or evil, can bring lasting peace, usually when one side accepts defeat and ceases its grievances through a change of heart or government—in either freedom or tyranny. In that sense of how to make a war end for good, the no-nonsense Lysander understood the nature of this awful conflict far better than the stately Pericles or naive Nicias.
Both states initially went to war unsure of how to defeat the other. Yet after nearly twenty years of futile killing, the war was resolved in about seven years when Sparta realized how Athens could be vanquished (keep its people inside the walls, its tribute and food outside, and sink its fleet). The disturbing message here is that discussions follow the sway of the battlefield, and diplomatic solutions work best when they accurately reflect military weakness or strength.
It is common to label this appreciation for power and its role in state affairs “realism” or “neorealism.” But Thucydides—and this is why he is truly a great historian—is too discerning a critic to reduce strife down simply to perceptions about power and its manifestations. War itself is not a mere science but a more fickle sort of thing, often subject to fate or chance, being an entirely human enterprise. The Peloponnesian War, then, is not a mere primer for international relations studies, and the historian does not believe that “might makes right.” Tragedy, not melodrama, is his message.
Yet Thucydides does recognize that humans are also subject to other inexplicable emotions that make them do things that do not quite make sense, whether that means Spartans who “fear” Athenian success, the poor Plataeans who choose to resist the siege, the supposedly stern Spartans who panic after the fall of Sphacteria and cease all their invasions into Attica on news that a mere 120 of their elite might be executed, the Melians who in vain hold out for Spartan support, or the once haughty Athenians who sail to Syracuse and persist in folly with the same reliance on “hope” that they had earlier damned the naive Melians for entertaining. If moderns wonder why entire countries of several million people can be held hostage when masked criminals threaten to behead a single one of their citizens on global television, we could do worse than to remember why panicked and shocked Spartans simply abandoned their entire strategy of invading Attica.31
For a writer who is supposedly interested in power rather than tragedy, Thucydides misses no occasion to note how heartbreaking the losses of particular armies were. What seems to capture the historian’s attention is not, as is so often claimed, the role of force in interstate relations but the misery of war that is unleashed upon the thousands—the subject of this book—who must fight it.
Thucydides sometimes opines that a particular campaign was wise or foolish, but he nearly always adds enough detail and editorializing to convey to us that the soldiers who believed in the cause for which they were dying deserved commemoration in terms that matched their sacrifice. So one discovers that the Thespians who perish at Delium are not around the next year to save their city when their erstwhile allies, the Thebans, tear down the walls. The town of Mycalessus loses not merely its schoolboys but even its animals—and we, his readers, should know that and mull it over. The Athenians are not merely slaughtered at the Assinarus River but perish as they fight one another to drink the blood and mud of the river. Whereas historians search for messages about the “lessons” of Thucydides embedded within his text, the general reader has no problem in sensing immediately what his history is about precisely from those memorable passages that will never go away, reminding us of the passions and furor that are unleashed on otherwise normal men when they go to war.
The young men of Athens, on the eve of the initial Spartan invasion or during the debate about Sicily, are always eager for war, inasmuch as they have had no experience with it. In contrast, “the older men of the city,” the more experienced, who know something of plagues, assassinations, terror, and sinking triremes, always are reluctant to invade, and thus often strive to give the enemy some way out during tough negotiations that otherwise might leave war as the only alternative. Thucydidean war can have utility and solve problems, and it often follows a grim logic of sorts; but once it starts, it may well last twenty-seven years over the entire Greek world rather than an anticipated thirty days in Attica and kill thousands at its end who were not born in its beginning.
Such recognition is not necessarily cause for pacifism; rather, to Thucydides it calls for acceptance that thousands will end up rotten in little-known places like the Assinarus River and Aetolia, the logic that follows from decisions made far away in the hallowed assemblies of Sparta or Athens. A wild-eyed Sthenelaidas or sophistic Alcibiades might rouse his volatile assembly to war without good cause, while an Archidamus or Pericles might think that his own sobriety and reason will either preclude or mitigate the killing. But between emotion and logic resides the fate of thousands of the mostly unknown—Astymachus and Lacon executed at Plataea (427), the Tanagran Saugenês cut down at Delium (424), Scirphondas butchered at Mycalessus (413), and the Spartan Xenares falling at Heraclea (419)—who will surely then and now be asked to settle through violence what words alone cannot. Remember them, for the Peloponnesian War was theirs alone.32