Seen from above, their shape would have resembled that of a giant bone, gnawed clean and tossed carelessly across southern Attica by some satiated god far to the north on Mount Olympus. One joint-like extremity rested on a rocky crag; the other just touched the water’s edge. Total length was about six miles, but swellings at each end made the circumference seventeen. Four miles of implausibly thin shank connected them: set upright, the structure couldn’t have borne its own weight. That wasn’t its purpose, though, for these were walls, the longest ever built surrounding two cities.1
Athens, at the northeastern end, had some two hundred thousand inhabitants when the walls were finished in 457 B.C.E. Piraeus, to the southwest, had fewer people but more space: it was the Athenians’ port for trade throughout the Mediterranean, as well as the construction, repair, and supply base for their navy, whose “wooden walls” had brought victory at Salamis twenty-three years earlier. Long after Athens lost the primacy it won on that occasion, Plutarch the historian found “a bloom of newness” in the city’s buildings and public spaces, as if “some perennial spirit and undying vitality mingled in the composition of them.” The rebuilt Acropolis, still bearing the scorches of Persian fires, presided over it all from its crag, as after many other afflictions it does even now.
The walls linking Athens and Piraeus were about five hundred feet apart: wide enough to accommodate a two-way flow of people, animals, carts, commodities, and treasure; narrow enough to make defense feasible. They were solid—some ten feet thick and twenty-five feet high—but strangely at odds with the elegance they guarded. Stones sat awkwardly in their mortar. Broken columns stuck out, as did the fragments of tombs. The explanation, officially, was memorialization: you were meant to recall the depredations of Xerxes as you walked the walls. Your ancestors were there to remind you.2
Xerxes had brought everything with him across the Hellespont except a grand strategy: if his aspirations were his capabilities, why bother to align them? He came to know scarcity only after the land, the sea, the weather, the Greeks, and their oracle introduced it to him. Believing himself strong in all respects, he held none in reserve: when one failed, others followed. And so he lost, it’s been estimated, over nine hundred triremes, and a quarter of a million men.3
The Greeks, in contrast, knew only scarcity. Unlike the Persians, whose empire sprawled from the Aegean to India, they occupied a small rugged peninsula that fragmented resources and resisted authority. Towns and cities had to protect themselves: no King of Kings could do that for them. There were alliances, even colonies, but obligations were vague and loyalties often shifted. That made Greece a hothouse for rivalries, and hence for strategies.4 Two stood out after Xerxes’ defeat. They differed in all respects—excepting that scarcity required specialization.
I.
The Spartans, who fought to the last man at Thermopylae, had long been warriors. Bound to the Peloponnese but not as farmers—agriculture was left to slaves (helots)—their strategy was to make their army the best in Greece. Having no other objective, they failed to produce even respectable ruins. As military professionals, they trained constantly in order to fight infrequently: they’d missed the battle of Marathon in 490 because they’d been celebrating a moon festival. But when aroused, as by Xerxes’ invasion, the Spartans’ fury far exceeded their numbers. That’s why, despite Thermopylae, Athens entrusted its land defenses to them. When these failed, Thucydides tells us, the Athenians “broke up their homes, threw themselves into their ships, and became a naval people.”5
They were already a maritime people whose trading network stretched from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. The Athenians had also grown wealthy, extracting profits and protection payments from their dependencies, while mining silver in a nearby corner of Attica. That financed the fleet at Salamis, but Themistocles had more in mind than just seaworthy wooden walls. He wanted walls on the ground on a grand scale. By encircling Athens and Piraeus, these would make those cities an island—immune from attack by land, supplied in all necessities from the sea, poised to deploy a navy as formidable as the Spartans’ army.6
Spartans and Athenians, therefore, became tigers and sharks, each dominant in its own domain.7 Common sense might have called, at that point, for cooperation, since Persian dangers were still clear and present. Instead what happened made no sense. The Greeks embellished, unforgettably, the civilization they’d saved—after which they almost destroyed it.8
II.
The Peloponnesian War, fought between Athens, Sparta, and their respective allies from 431 to 404, resembled the much briefer Persian Wars in one respect: each had a great chronicler. Thucydides warned his readers, however, that he wouldn’t be Herodotus. His history would refrain from attractiveness “at truth’s expense.” Its “absence of romance” might “detract somewhat from its interest,” but he hoped for what Plutarch would later find in the remains of Athens: preservation from the effects of time, and hence, “a possession for all time.” It would suffice, Thucydides wrote, to have his history judged useful by those seeking “knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.”9
The past and future are no more equivalent, in Thucydides, than are capabilities and aspirations in strategy—they are, however, connected. The past we can know only from imperfect sources, including our own memories. The future we can’t know, other than that it will originate in the past but then depart from it. Thucydides’ distinction between resemblance and reflection—between patterns surviving across time and repetitions degraded by time—aligns the asymmetry, for it suggests that the past prepares us for the future only when, however imperfectly, it transfers. Just as capabilities restrict aspirations to what circumstances will allow.
To know one big thing or many little ones is, therefore, not enough: resemblances, which Thucydides insists must happen, can occur anywhere along the spectrum from hedgehogs to foxes and back again. So is he one or the other? It’s as useless to ask as it would be, of an accomplished athlete, to try to say. Thucydides’ “first-rate intelligence” accommodates opposing ideas so effortlessly that he entrusts us with hundreds in his history. He does so within time and space but also across scale: only Tolstoy rivals him, I think, in sensing significance where it seems not to be.
It’s no stretch to say, then, that Thucydides coaches all who read him. For as his greatest modern interpreter (himself a sometime coach) has gently reminded us, the Greeks, despite their antiquity, “may have believed things we have either forgotten or never known; and we must keep open the possibility that in some respects, at least, they were wiser than we.”10
III.
The Spartans never had a wall, trusting in their military prowess alone to deter adversaries. On hearing of Themistocles’ plan to build one, they tried to convince the Athenians that no city should: such a ban would encourage unity among Greeks while denying the Persians fortifications in any future invasion. But the Spartans’ real purpose, Thucydides argues, was to limit Athenian naval capabilities, which had proven so effective at Salamis. The absence of walls, with the resulting vulnerability of Athens and its port, would accomplish this.
Themistocles persuaded the Athenians to appear to welcome Sparta’s proposal, even to the point of sending him there to conduct the negotiations. Meanwhile, Athens began a crash wall-building program. Men, women, and children all participated, using anything they could find: haste as much as memorialization, therefore, explains the walls’ use of rubble. When the Spartans wondered why the talks were taking so long, Themistocles claimed to be waiting for inexplicably delayed colleagues. Eventually they arrived, but so did reports of what the Athenians were up to. If worried, Themistocles told the suspicious Spartans, they should send observers to Athens to see for themselves. He then secretly instructed the Athenians to detain their Spartan guests until the walls were nearing completion.
Once satisfied that they were, Themistocles abandoned all pretense: Athens, he announced, was now sufficiently walled to protect its people. Any future discussions would assume the Athenians’ right to determine their own interests and those of other Greeks. The Spartans showed no anger; still, Thucydides notes, “the defeat of their wishes could not but cause them secret annoyance.”11 They’d been screwed—if such a thing is possible—by a wall.
IV.
All of this happened in 479–78, four and a half decades before the Peloponnesian War broke out. Thucydides makes it a flashback, unusual in his history. He wants us to see the connection, even if distant, between a great war and an almost comic collision of Spartan stolidity with Athenian trickery: small causes can have big consequences. It’s not as though there was no turning back. Progress forward, however, would take place warily, for each aspect of the Athenian-Spartan relationship now carried multiple meanings.
Take, for example, the building of walls: was it a defensive or an offensive act? The Athenians intended their walls to secure their “island,” the base from which, with their commerce and navy, they’d control the seas around Greece and much beyond. The Spartans saw safety in an absence of walls, but only because their army was and would remain the strongest in Greece. That, though, is why the Athenians thought they needed walls in the first place. The categories are too categorical.
Both Spartans and Athenians acted strategically, however, in that they were aligning aspirations with capabilities. Each sought security but by different paths; neither could afford to be, simultaneously, tigers and sharks. Collaboration, in theory, could have secured the sea and the land from all future dangers. That would have required, though, the extension of trust, a quality with strikingly shallow roots in the character of all Greeks.
Having outmaneuvered the Spartans, Themistocles returned in triumph to Athens, as he had after Salamis. But with the passage of time, his welcome wore thin: by 470 the Athenian assembly—which feared as much as it rewarded success in its leaders—had used its power of ostracism to ban him from the city. Ever resourceful, the organizer of victory over the Persians defected, in due course, to the Persians, spending the rest of his life in their service. And so the recently assassinated Xerxes, despite Aeschylus, got a kind of revenge after all.12
V.
One of the producers of The Persians was Pericles, an Athenian aristocrat who gave his name to the age that followed. Gracious, modest, but adept in attracting followers, he was a patron of the arts, an accomplished military commander, an experienced diplomat, an astute economist, a constitutional theorist of enduring originality, one of the finest orators ever, the rebuilder of Athens as we still know it, and for over a quarter century the leader of that city and the empire it ran.13 Nonetheless it was Pericles who, more than anyone else, unleashed the Peloponnesian War—the unintended result of constructing a culture to support a strategy.
The Spartans needed no new culture because the Persian Wars had left their old one largely intact. That of the Athenians, however, was upside down. They’d shown their ability to fight on land by defeating the Persians (without the Spartans) at Marathon in 490, and (with the Spartans) at Plataea in 479. But Themistocles’ “island” required relinquishing that proficiency: Athens, he feared, could never compete with Sparta’s army.14 By the mid-450s Pericles, who agreed, had finished the walls around Athens and Piraeus, allowing total reliance on the sea in any future war. The new strategy made sense, but it made the Athenians, as Thucydides saw, a different people.
Farmers, traditionally, had sustained Athens: their fields and vineyards supplied the city in peacetime, and their bodies filled the ranks of its infantry and cavalry when wars came. Now, though, their properties were expendable and their influence diminished. They’d become refugees if the Spartans invaded, crowding into the city to watch from its walls as their villas, crops, and olive trees were destroyed. Pericles, himself a landowner, promised as a show of resolve to torch his own. Eventually, he assumed, the Spartans, worried about unreliable helots on their own estates, would give up and go home—but not because of anything the former stabilizers of Athenian society had done. Meanwhile, ships operating out of Piraeus would support Athens from its overseas dependencies, while its navy would harass the Spartans’ unprotected coastline, thereby hastening their departure.15
A merchant fleet and a navy, however, would be expensive. To fight on land, an Athenian hoplite—an infantryman—needed only a sword, a shield, a helmet, minimal armor, and absolute confidence in the man next to him, for Greek phalanxes advanced as a unit: improvisation ensured disaster. The navy, though, required port facilities, ships, sails, and banks of rowers willing to wallow in bilge water befouled by their own excretions (triremes rarely made pit stops), unable to see how the battle was going, at risk of drowning if it didn’t go well. Something had to embolden them beyond visions of villas (which most had never possessed) or close order drill (impractical in smelly, slippery close quarters.)16
The need for motivation went well beyond rowing. Triremes were warships, useful only for ramming others. Their builders—whether private citizens or the public treasury—could hardly expect profits: there had to be less tangible benefits. Nor could the Athenians force their colonies to feed them: crops, livestock, and fish require encouragement, not instructions. Nor could the city pay women and children to work on walls: the interests of families would have to coincide with requirements of strategy. Massive enterprises must have major incentives. Somebody has to show everybody—or almost everybody—that sacrifices made now will bear fruit later. And the ones Pericles had in mind were not to the gods, as in earlier times,17 but for a city that had become a state that was becoming an empire.
Which had to remain, nonetheless, a community. If Athens were to rely upon the ardor of individuals, then it would have to inspire classes within the city and peoples throughout the empire—even as it retained the cohesiveness of its rival Sparta, still in many ways a small town. That’s why constructing a culture became, for Pericles, a priority.
VI.
Pericles used his “funeral oration,” delivered in Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War’s first year, to explain what he hoped for. The dead had given their lives, he told the mourners, for the universality of Athenian distinctiveness: Athens imitated no one, but was a pattern for everyone. How, though, to reconcile these apparent opposites? Pericles’ solution was to connect scale, space, and time: Athenian culture would appeal to the city, the empire, and the ages. Fortunately Thucydides, or someone he trusted, was there to take notes as the great man spoke.18
Since well before Pericles, Athens had been edging toward democracy, which he defined as favoring “the many instead of the few.” By the time he took power, any adult male citizen who wasn’t a slave could speak and vote in the Athenian assembly: with five to six thousand regular attendees, it was the largest deliberative body the world had—or still has—ever seen.19 “[O]ur ordinary citizens,” Pericles claimed in his speech, were “fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, we regard the citizen who takes no part in these duties . . . as useless.” Discussion was “an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.”
The assembly functioned by divorcing virtue from status. If a man wished to participate—a virtue—then “the obscurity of his condition”—status—wouldn’t prevent his doing so. It followed that anyone who could strengthen a fortification, repair a boat, power an oar, pay others to do these things, or even bring up a child who might someday do them, would be serving the state. Experience was useful, but the specializations stratifying other societies were unnecessary. “I doubt if the world can produce a man,” Pericles boasted, who “is equal to so many emergencies, and graced by so happy a versatility as the Athenian.”
With their reliance on walls, ships, and rowers, the Athenians had democratized the waging of war. They’d have no warrior elites, trained from childhood in the manner of the fiercely hierarchical Spartans. But they would have more warriors, on whom the state could depend to protect and to determine its interests. “[W]here our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger.”
Democracy within the assembly would be a model for the city: what, though, of the empire? By contracting their commitments on land, the Athenians had expanded their need for control by sea. Some two hundred allies or subject states owed them allegiance as the Peloponnesian War began.20 But circumstances, attitudes, and even languages varied widely: could Athens trust other cultures to sustain its own?
The city had acquired its “friends,” Pericles acknowledged, by granting favors, “in order by continued kindness to keep the recipient in [its] debt; while the debtor [knows] that the return he makes will be a payment, not a free gift.” Nevertheless, the Athenians had provided these benefits “not from calculations of expediency, but in the confidence of liberality.” What he meant was that Athens would make its empire at once more powerful and more reassuring than that of any rival.21
It could in this way project democracy across cultures because insecure states, fearing worse, would freely align with Athens.22 Self-interest would become comfort and then affinity. Transparency, for this reason, was vital: “We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing.” Athenians found “the fruits of other countries” to be “as familiar a luxury as those of [their] own.” The walls made their citizenship global.
Pericles’ appeal to the future would be remembrance. The heroes he honored needed no markers: they “have the whole earth for their tomb.” But their culture would construct memorials as “mighty proofs.” These would include the architecture and adornment of cities, upon which Pericles lavished so much time and treasure. There would also be texts—the philosophical works, the plays, the histories, his own speeches—messages in bottles to distant ages confirming the singularity of his own. And ruins: “[W]e have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us.”
As oratory, Pericles’ speech compares only with Lincoln’s at Gettysburg. But where Lincoln linked the costs of war to military success, Pericles was acknowledging strategic failure. He’d hoped, after all, to avoid a war with Sparta by balancing its land superiority against Athenian naval supremacy, while building a new kind of empire whose appeal would allay whatever suspicions it might provoke.23 How, then, did Pericles find himself defining a culture meant to prevent a war after a great one had already broken out?
VII.
Thucydides provides three explanations. The first is that, in 435, the small and remote town of Epidamnus, facing civil war, sought help without success from its sponsor Corcyra, but did receive assistance from Corcyra’s rival Corinth, thereby angering the Corcyrans, who sent a fleet to Epidamnus, provoking Corinth into dispatching its own ships as well as an army and settlers, after which both sides sought aid from the Athenians, who granted the Corcyrans a defensive alliance that dragged Athens into a naval battle with Corinth, leading the Athenians then to besiege Potidaea, a colony of the Corinthians, who at that point asked the Spartans to invade Attica, but they instead invited the Athenians and the Corinthians to justify their positions before the Spartan assembly. After which that body, moved less by the arguments it heard than by fear of “the growth of the power of the Athenians”—Thucydides’ second and more succinct explanation—voted in 432 to declare war.24
The first account traces a causal chain in numbing detail. The second confirms that it was a chain, not a random assortment of events. Neither, however, reveals how “some damn foolish thing in the Balkans”25—Epidamnus is Durrës in modern Albania—provoked a war as devastating for Greeks as, proportionately, the Thirty Years’ War was for Europeans in the seventeenth century, or the two world wars for all their participants in the twentieth.26 To understand this, we need Thucydides’ third explanation, which is that Pericles’ reliance on reassurance had not reassured.
Thucydides provides it—more implicitly than explicitly—in his reconstruction of the debate at Sparta. This was, in effect, a “trial of Pericles,” with the Corinthians prosecutors, the Athenians defenders, and the Spartans—the only speakers Thucydides names—serving as judges. At issue was how universal a distinctive culture could or should be.
The Corinthians began by blaming the Spartans for the Athenian long walls. Their “bluntness of perception” had allowed Themistocles’ trickery decades earlier, from which Athens concluded that the Spartans “see, but do not care.”
You, Spartans, of all the Hellenes are alone inactive, and defend yourselves not by doing anything but by looking as if you would do something; you alone wait till the power of an enemy is becoming twice its original size, instead of crushing it in its infancy. And yet the world used to say that you were to be depended upon; but in your case, we fear, it said more than the truth.
The Athenians, in contrast, were “adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond their judgment.” The speed with which they acted enabled them “to call a thing hoped for a thing got.” They “take no rest themselves and . . . give none to others.” For these reasons, the Spartans should aid the Potidaeans by invading Attica. Not to do so would “drive the rest of us in despair to some other alliance.”27
The Athenians responded by recalling the Persian Wars, even though “we are rather tired of continually bringing this subject forward.” Despite the Spartans’ sacrifice at Thermopylae, “we left behind us a city [Athens] that was a city no longer; and staked our lives for [one] that had existence only in desperate hope, and so bore our fair share in your deliverance and in ours.” As for the empire, “[W]e acquired [it] not by violence, but because you were unwilling to prosecute to its conclusion the war against the barbarian, and because the allies attached themselves to us and spontaneously asked us to assume the command.” The Athenians did, therefore, what anyone would have done. Given “the vast influence of accident in war,” the Spartans should “[t]ake time” in deciding what they should do. It was all too common “to begin at the wrong end, to act first, and wait for disaster to discuss the matter.”28
Archidamus, the Spartan king, supported the Athenians. War, he warned, required not so much arms as money, especially if between a continental and a maritime power. For “unless we can beat them at sea, or deprive them of the revenues which feed their navy, we shall meet with little but disaster.” Diplomacy was the wiser course, leaving open the possibility, if it failed, of seizing parts of Attica but not laying them waste: that would benefit no one. Corinthian complaints about Spartan “slowness” neglected the likelihood that hastening a war would delay its conclusion, leaving it “as a legacy to our children.”29
The Spartan assembly would make the final decision, however, and Sthenelaidas, one of several ephors—magistrates—carried the day. Because the Athenians had fought the Persians but mistreated the Spartans, he argued in loopy logic, they deserved “double punishment for having ceased to be good and become bad.” More talk would do only more harm. “Vote therefore, Spartans, for war, as the honor of Sparta demands, and . . . with the gods let us advance against the aggressors.” The yeas and nays were unclear, but when asked to stand and divide, the assembly supported Sthenelaidas. That was how, Thucydides repeats, “[t]he growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.”30
VIII.
Pericles didn’t attend his “trial” in Sparta, but he would have selected his spokesmen carefully. It’s all the more striking, therefore, that their defense was so unpersuasive, even with the Spartan king’s cautions about the dangers of war. Pericles had built his career and his city’s culture on persuasion.31 Something had gone badly wrong.
Perhaps his representatives lacked his eloquence, forcing them to fall back on the claim that all empires become oppressive instead of Pericles’ insistence that his would liberate the human spirit. Perhaps Pericles himself would have wilted under the Corinthians’ prosecutorial zeal: they made it clear that encounters with the Athenians hadn’t liberated their spirit, and that the Spartans shouldn’t expect that either. Perhaps also, though, there were loops in Pericles’ logic, which the debate at Sparta brought out.
The Greeks thought of culture as character. It was predictability across scale: the behavior of a city, a state, or a people in small things, big things, and those in between.32 Knowing who they were and what they wanted, the Spartans were wholly predictable. They saw no need to change themselves or anyone else. The Athenians’ strategy of walling their cities, however, had reshaped their character, obliging them restlessly to roam the world. Because they had changed, they would have to change others—that’s what having an empire means—but how many, to what extent, and by what means? No one, not even Pericles, could easily say.
Pericles was not Xerxes. “I am more afraid of our own blunders than of the enemy’s devices,” he admitted as war approached. Knowing that the Athenians’ empire could not expand indefinitely, Pericles “unsparingly pruned and cut down their ever busy fancies,” Plutarch explained, “supposing it would be quite enough for them to do, if they could keep the [Spartans] in check.”33 But as Pericles’ agents acknowledged before the Spartan assembly, allowing the empire the equality he celebrated within the city could cause contraction, perhaps even collapse.
[O]ur subjects are so habituated to associate with us as equals, that any defeat . . . that clashes with their notions of justice, whether it proceeds from a legal judgment or from the power which our empire gives us, makes them forget to be grateful for being allowed to retain most of their possessions, and more vexed at a part being taken, than if we had from the first cast law aside and openly gratified our covetousness.
The Persians had treated their empire more harshly, but that was in the past and “the present always weighs heavily on the conquered”—a strange word to use for Athenian “equals.” If the Spartans were to take over, then they too “would speedily lose the popularity with which fear of us has invested you.”34
Equality, then, was the loop in Pericles’ logic. He saw both it and empire as admirable, but was slow to sense that encouraging one would diminish the other. His funeral address reflects the contradiction: he spoke of voluntary alliances pursuing a common good—but he also congratulated the Athenians for having forced themselves on “every sea and land . . . , whether for evil or for good.” It’s as if, instead of holding opposing ideas simultaneously in his mind, he’d sequentially split his character: Dr. Jekyll gave way, in mid-speech, to Mr. Hyde. Pericles’ last years traced a similar trajectory.
IX.
A molehill made into a mountain shows how. Megara was—and is—a small town at the northeastern end of the Corinthian isthmus, the only land connection between the Peloponnese and the rest of Greece. Its citizens had long feuded with the Athenians, while posing no military threat to the larger city. What the Megarians could do was join a hostile alliance: that of Corinth, close by, was the most likely. If this happened, others might follow, so in 433 Pericles persuaded the assembly to deny the Megarians trading privileges within Athens and to ban their use of harbors throughout the empire.
Megara had other options: indeed the ban seemed so pointless that Aristophanes made fun of it in his comedy Acharnians, produced a few years after Pericles’ death. But the Megarian decree was meant to deter, not starve. It was an economic embargo designed to discourage future defections by nonmilitary means. Predictably, this innovation alarmed the Spartans, who made its revocation one of their conditions for avoiding war. Less predictably—because the edict’s benefits seemed so much smaller than the risks of retaining it—Pericles refused.
His stubbornness was one of the sources of sourness in the Spartan assembly, but even after voting for war in 432, the Spartans were in no hurry to act. They sent three emissaries to Athens over the next year, each seeking compromise. Pericles, however, rejected every offer: “There is one principle, Athenians, which I hold to through everything, and that is the principle of no concession to the Peloponnesians.”
The Megarian decree might look like “a trifle,” but withdrawing it would be a slippery slope. “If you give way, you will instantly have to meet some greater demand.” That ruled out diplomacy, leaving war the only alternative: it mattered not whether the cause “be great or small.” Hadn’t Themistocles vanquished the Persians with fewer resources than Athens had now? “We must . . . resist our enemies in any way and in every way, and attempt to hand down our power to our posterity unimpaired.”35
In a reversal of the Athenians’ advice to the Spartans, it was Pericles now who no longer took time. On his orders, presumably, the last Spartan emissary was not even received in Athens, but told to be out of Attica by nightfall. He’s said to have remarked, as he crossed the border: “This day will be the beginning of great misfortunes to the Hellenes.”36
X.
Pericles “was no longer the same man he had been before,” Plutarch observed, “nor as tame and gentle and familiar as formerly with the populace, so as [ready] to yield to their pleasures and to comply with the desires of the multitude, as a steersman shifts with the winds.” Thucydides sensed similar rigidity: Pericles “opposed the Spartans in everything, and . . . ever urged the Athenians on to war.”37 But why the change?
Perhaps he simply got old: flexibility is harder to maintain as that happens. Perhaps, Pericles’ biographer has suggested, the accumulating crises of the late 430s intensified his emotions, reducing his willingness to compromise.38 Perhaps also, though, there’s an explanation in what it may mean to lead or, as Plutarch puts it, to “steer.”
One way is to find flows you can go with. Having determined your destination, you set sails, motivate rowers, adjust for winds and currents, avoid shoals and rocks, allow for surprises, and expend finite energy efficiently. You control some things, but align yourself with others. You balance, while never forgetting that the reason you’re balancing is to get from where you are to where you want to go. You’re a fox and a hedgehog at the same time—even on water. That was the younger Pericles steering Athens: a polymath with a purpose.
Over time, though, Pericles began trying to control flows: the winds, the currents, the rowers, the rocks, the people, their enemies, and even fortune, he came to believe, would follow his orders. He could rely, therefore, on intricate causal chains: if A, then not only B, but inexorably C, D, and E. Plans, however complex, would go as planned. The older Pericles still steered Athens; now, however, he was a hedgehog trying to herd foxes, a different and more difficult enterprise.
The distinction clarifies what Thucydides keeps trying to tell us: that fear inspired by the growth of Athenian power caused the Peloponnesian War. There are, after all, two kinds of growth. One proceeds gradually, allowing adjustments to environments as environments adjust to whatever’s new. Skillful growers can shape this process: cultivation, for them, is like navigation for Plutarch’s steersmen—the simultaneous management of separate things. But no farmer or gardener can claim to anticipate, much less to control, all that may happen between the planting of seeds and the harvesting of crops.
The other kind of growth defies environments. It’s inner-directed, and hence outwardly oblivious. It resists cultivation, setting its own direction, pace, and purpose. Anticipating no obstacles, it makes no compromises. Like an unchecked predator, an ineradicable weed, or a metastasizing cancer, it fails to see where it’s going until it’s too late. It sequentially consumes its surroundings, and ultimately itself.39
Pericles at first steered with flows—a strategy of persuasion. When not all were persuaded, though, he began steering against flows—a strategy of confrontation. Either way he challenged the status quo: Greece would not afterward be the same. But persuasion, pursued with patience, would have come closer to cultivation, and hence navigation, than the confrontations into which Pericles led the Athenians. That’s the difference, fundamental in strategy, between respecting constraints and denying their existence.
Maybe he saw no choice. Once persuasion had failed, confrontation might have seemed the only way to keep to his course. Why, though, did he have to do that? Why not deviate, as Lincoln would later do, to avoid swamps, deserts, and chasms? Like Lincoln, Pericles looked ahead to the ages. He even left them monuments and sent them messages. But he didn’t leave behind a functional state: it would take well over two millennia for democracy again to become a model with mass appeal. That’s not farsightedness in a steersman. It’s running your vessel onto rocks, with a long wait for rescuers to arrive.
XI.
The Spartans invaded Attica in the spring of 431 and the Athenians, as planned, evacuated their estates, crowding into the city to watch smoke again rise, on their horizons, in pursuit of their strategy. Their mood was not what it had been, however, when Themistocles ordered the evacuation of Athens half a century earlier. Then the victory at Salamis had come quickly. Now, no triumph was in sight. Pericles’ funeral oration consoled the city but did little to lift its morale, and in 430 the Spartans returned—along with an ally no one could have foreseen.
The nature of the plague that struck Athens that summer remains a mystery: there’s little doubt, though, that the “island” strategy amplified its effects. The Athenians had opened their city to the world, as Pericles boasted, but they also closed it off from its immediate surroundings. That made the long walls a mixing bowl in which bacteria from all over the empire found hosts from all over Attica—an unintended but deadly cosmopolitanism. Even the dogs and vultures that ate unburied corpses succumbed, Thucydides recalled, although he somehow survived. With their properties ravaged and now their bodies, the Athenians “began to find fault with Pericles, as the author of the war and the cause of all their misfortunes.”40
He refused at first to convene the assembly, but then confronted it. His only mistake, Pericles insisted, had been to underestimate the city’s resolve, for “the hand of Heaven must be borne with resignation, [and] that of the enemy with fortitude.” Refugees from beyond the walls should praise the navy that protected them and the empire that sustained them: “[Y]ou may think it a great privation to lose the use of your land and houses, [but] you should really regard them [as] . . . accessories that embellish a great fortune,” and hence, “of little moment.”
Admittedly—and “to speak somewhat plainly”—that fortune required “a tyranny.” To take the empire “perhaps was wrong, but to let it go is unsafe.” Its subjects hated their masters now and, given the choice, would welcome others. Hatred, however, was “the lot of all who have aspired to rule.” If incurred “for the highest objects,” it would be “short-lived,” for it was “the splendor of the present and the glory of the future [that] remains forever unforgotten.”41 And so Pericles again appealed to the ages to bail him out—as if he and his city could wait for ages for that to happen.
XII.
But Pericles died of the plague in 429, leaving Athens on the edge of a knife he’d sharpened. On one side was the democratic distinctiveness he hoped to make universal. On the other were the undistinctive brutalities that had hitherto run the world. In an age free from disease, fear, illogic, ambition, and deception, Pericles’ successors might have balanced these opposites. Thucydides would not have expected this, though, “as long as the nature of mankind remains the same.”42 The rest of his history traces the Athenians’ descent from an extraordinary to an ordinary culture. It’s nowhere better illustrated than in two episodes twelve years apart, both of which involved rowing.
In 428 the inhabitants of Lesbos, an island just off the coast of Asia Minor, repudiated their alliance with Athens and sought Sparta’s support. Fearing the example, the Athenians blockaded Mytilene, the principal port, and sent an army to wall off the city. The Spartans promised aid but—typically—failed to provide it, and the following summer the Mytilenians surrendered. Determined to deter any further defections, Cleon, now the most prominent Athenian, called for slaughtering the men while selling the women and children into slavery: “[I]f they were right in rebelling, you must be wrong in ruling.” The assembly agreed, and a trireme sailed for Mytilene bearing these orders.
But then the assembly developed second thoughts. The Athenian empire, Cleon’s rival Diodotus pointed out, was supposedly a “free community.” Of course it would revolt if oppressed. It made no sense “to put to death, however justly, those whom it is our interest to keep alive.” The assembly voted again and Diodotus narrowly prevailed. So a second trireme was sent to overtake the first and cancel the instructions it carried—but that would require vigorous rowing.
The first boat’s rowers, Thucydides writes, made no haste “upon so horrid an errand.” Those on the second, tasked with preventing a horror, had reason to hurry. Given special rations of wine and barley cakes, they ate while at oars and slept only when others replaced them. Having crossed the Aegean in record time, they reached Mytilene just as the Athenian occupiers were learning, from the slower first boat, what they were expected to do. Luckily they hadn’t yet done it, and no massacre took place. The danger, Thucydides understates, “had indeed been great.”43
Then, in 416, the Athenians sent an army to Melos, an island off the Peloponnesian peninsula that had long been a Spartan colony but remained neutral in the Peloponnesian War. The Melians should now submit to Athens, they were told, not because they were entitled to—only equals possessed rights—but because “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Shocked by this assertion (modern readers of Thucydides still tend to be), the Melians reminded the Athenians that they’d once had a reputation for fairness: if they were now repudiating it, that would be an example “for the world to meditate upon.” They’d run that risk, the Athenians replied. They sought only the best for the Melians by seeking to subdue them.
Melians: And how, pray, could it turn out to be as good for us to serve as for you to rule?
Athenians: Because you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you.
Was there, the Melians asked, no third way? What harm could there be in continued neutrality? As “masters of the sea,” the Athenians responded, they required obedience, not friendship, from all islands. The Spartans, known for delay, wouldn’t rush to rescue any of them.
Unwilling to relinquish their independence, placing faith in the hope that the world didn’t really work this way, the Melians refused to yield. So the Athenians brought reinforcements and in 415—with no Spartan help in sight—Melos surrendered. The Athenians this time had no second thoughts and sent no second triremes. Instead, Thucydides records, they “put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and settled the place themselves.”44
Spirits are indeed shadowy things, and Thucydides took them less seriously than did Herodotus. Still his history suggests that the spirit of Pericles shaped Athenian behavior toward both Mytilene and Melos. The younger man would have cheered the rowers racing across the Aegean fueled by wine and barley cakes: their energy in pursuit of a humane objective was what democratic universality was all about. But the older Pericles, fearing concessions, might well have applauded the inhumane mission to Melos. For as Thucydides grimly observes, war “brings most men’s character to a level with their fortunes.”45 The greatest of the Athenians was no exception.
XIII.
Why, though, did Pericles fear concessions? The war had been one of choice, not necessity. Even after voting for it the Spartans offered ways out, none of which he took. Instead Pericles convinced himself that he couldn’t concede a molehill—the Megarian decree—without a mountainous loss of credibility. But with the completion of the long walls a quarter century earlier, he’d conceded all of Attica, except for Athens and Piraeus, if a war with the Spartans ever broke out. What now made Megara worth that risk?
An explanation may lie in an American experience twenty-four centuries later. On January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced that the United States would henceforth rely on naval and air power to hold a “defensive perimeter” of offshore islands—Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines—in the western Pacific. With this decision, carefully considered at its highest levels, the Truman administration appeared to have conceded the rest of East Asia to the Soviet Union, the newly proclaimed People’s Republic of China, and their dependencies.46 These long walls were liquid, but they gave up more ground than Pericles could ever have imagined.
And yet, when the North Koreans invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950—Kim Il-sung and Stalin having read Acheson’s speech—President Truman decided within a day to send American troops, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, to defend that mainland position. MacArthur’s successes brought China into the Korean War, which ended in a stalemate only in 1953. More than thirty-six thousand Americans died fighting for a country their government had openly deemed insignificant five months before starting to send them there.47
“Island” strategies require steady nerves. You have to be able to watch smoke rise on horizons you once controlled without losing your own self-confidence, or shaking that of allies, or strengthening that of adversaries. Building walls and proclaiming perimeters can be rational choices, for it makes little sense to pursue lost causes with limited resources. But strategy isn’t always a rational enterprise.
Reassuring withdrawals, Clausewitz writes in On War, “are very rare.” More often armies and nations fail to distinguish orderly disengagements from abject capitulations—or foresight from fear.
There will be public concern and resentment at the fate of abandoned areas; the army will possibly lose confidence not only in its leaders but in itself, and never-ending, rear guard actions will only tend to confirm its fears. These consequences of retreat should not be underrated.48
That’s what worried Pericles about the Megarian decree. No one in normal times would have thought it a test of Athenian resolve, but the escalations of 432–31 had made it so. Truman saw South Korea similarly. In itself, it was nothing. But when the North Koreans attacked—something they could have done only with Stalin’s support—it became everything.
This, then, is how leaders dismantle walls they’ve built separating vital from peripheral interests. For the abstractions of strategy and the emotions of strategists can never be separated: they can only be balanced. The weight attached to each, however, will vary with circumstances. And the heat of emotions requires only an instant to melt abstractions drawn from years of cool reflection. Decades devoid of reflection may follow.
XIV.
Few historians would claim that Truman made the wrong choice in Korea; but Pericles’ biographers have always wondered about the Megarian decree.49 He had to tell the Athenians that their credibility was on the line: this would not otherwise have occurred to them. Truman didn’t have to do that with the Americans and their allies. They knew.
The distinction is important. It’s one thing for an enemy to test your resolve in a manner that all can see: you can then decide, in consultation with others, what to do, and you can usually determine when you’ve done it. It’s quite another thing to test your nation’s resolve against your own insecurities, for where do these stop? What prevents projecting anxieties onto indefinitely expanding screens? If the safety of Athens required retaining the Megarian decree, then why not suppressing the Mytilenians? Or killing the Melians? Or fighting a land war far from home against an enemy allied with the Spartan navy?
This last slope began slipping in the late 420s when Segesta and Selinus, two cities in western Sicily, revived an ancient quarrel. Syracuse, the largest city on the island, supported the Selinuntines, so the Segestans in 416–15 appealed to the Athenians, who’d earlier but vaguely promised protection. If Syracuse went unpunished, the Segestans insisted, it would take over all of Sicily, after which the Sicilians would join the Spartans and their allies, after which they’d together destroy the Athenian empire.50
The scenario echoed Epidamnus, Corcyra, and Corinth, but the logic seemed less plausible. Why would Syracuse, the only other democracy in the Mediterranean, align itself with the authoritarian Spartans? Even if it did, how could Athens defeat a city at least as large as itself on an island larger than the Peloponnese across eight hundred miles of ocean? Reputation wasn’t at stake: having just slaughtered the nearby Melians, the Athenians would hardly seem weak abandoning the distant Segestans. And if Athens did rescue those precariously perched sparrows, how many others would demand equivalent care?
The Athenian assembly had always responded more to emotions than to abstractions, while relying on leaders to cool it off. Now, though, few were left. It dismissed protests from Nicias, the city’s most experienced general, against being dragged into a war “with which we have nothing to do.” It welcomed seduction by Alcibiades, better known for his dazzling looks and Olympics prowess than for his prudence. Sicily’s defenders, this peacock claimed, were a rabble easily bribed. Their defeat would win Athens a western Mediterranean empire. Nor should anyone try to say where its expansion should stop, for “if we cease to rule others, we shall be in danger of being ruled ourselves.” That, however, had been Pericles’ defense of the Megarian decree.
Trapped now between the aura of Alcibiades and the ghost of Pericles, the desperate Nicias inflated his estimates of what the expedition would cost, but this only encouraged further enthusiasm. So the assembly sent him to Sicily in 415 with an immense armada—164 triremes and transport ships, 5,100 hoplites, 480 archers, 700 slingers, 30 horsemen—together with, as his co-commander, Alcibiades, who silkenly reminded everyone that “neither youth nor old age can do anything . . . without the other.”51
Once there, though, neither youth nor age helped. Nicias was lethargic and often ill. Alcibiades, recalled to Athens to stand trial for debauchery, defected instead to the Spartans. Knowing the difficulties of sailing with horses, the Athenians hadn’t brought enough: their adversaries had a surplus. The Sicilians fought bravely, more than matching Athenian reinforcements. Sensing opportunity, the Spartans for once acted quickly and imaginatively: they combined with the Corinthians to send a fleet of their own, which caught and sank that of the Athenians in the Syracusans’ great harbor.
Unlike Xerxes after Salamis, the Athenians now had no way home. With morale deteriorating and discipline crumbling, they lost a critical battle by inadvertently revealing their password. They ran short of food and resorted to drinking bloody water. They abandoned their dead on the battlefield, an unheard-of sacrilege. They had no choice, in the end, but to surrender, only to be imprisoned for months within the Syracuse quarries, bereft of shade or sustenance, surrounded by rotting corpses. “[N]o single suffering to be apprehended by men,” Thucydides laments, “was spared them.”52
Strategy requires a sense of the whole that reveals the significance of respective parts. The Athenians lost this in Sicily. Well over half of their empire’s military wound up there, but few returned. Meanwhile, as a modern historian has pointed out, “Spartans were camped thirteen miles from the walls of Athens, thousands of slaves were deserting from Attica, and tribute-paying allies from the Hellespont to the southern Aegean were on the verge of revolt.”53 The disproportions approach the inexplicable—but before leaving them there, it might be worth recalling Thucydides’ reminders about the future.
XV.
Two thousand three hundred and eighty-two years after the Athenian surrender on Sicily the United States had 543,000 troops committed to the defense of what Henry Kissinger would later call “a small peninsula on a major continent.”54 By 1969, two hundred Americans were being killed in Indochina each week: when South Vietnam surrendered in 1975, 58,213 Americans had died trying to save it.55 That made Vietnam the fourth costliest war the United States has fought, the first it clearly lost, and in its rationale the most difficult to explain.
No Korea-like blitzkrieg began the war: the North Vietnamese ran it as a slowly escalating insurgency, resorting to conventional operations only as the Americans were withdrawing. Nor was Vietnam a proxy war for a larger power. Hanoi determined its outbreak, conduct, and settlement, with the Soviet Union and China providing irregular and at times even reluctant support.56 Worried more about the possibility of war with each other during the late 1960s, both would soon seek alignment with Washington.57
Meanwhile, much was going on elsewhere. In 1969, the Soviet Union surpassed the United States in strategic missile capabilities. In 1968, it crushed the “Prague Spring,” the most promising effort so far to reform Marxism-Leninism from within. In 1967, Israel reshaped the Middle East by defeating its Arab rivals and occupying the West Bank. In 1966, France withdrew its military forces from NATO, East and West Germany began diplomatic contacts, and China launched the Great Cultural Revolution. In 1965, race riots and antiwar protests in the United States reached levels not seen since the Civil War. And throughout the 1960s, a self-proclaimed Soviet satellite survived ninety miles off the coast of Florida, despite having hosted nuclear-tipped missiles that could have started—and perhaps ended—World War III.
Why, then, did the Americans invest so much in Vietnam when, in comparison with the whole of their interests at the time, so little was at stake there? Thucydidean resemblances, I think, suggest an answer. Megara might look like a trifle, Pericles told the Athenians in 432 B.C.E., but if they yielded on that small matter “you will instantly have to meet some greater demand.” “Without the United States,” John F. Kennedy warned a Texas audience on the morning of November 22, 1963, “South Viet-Nam would collapse overnight,” and American alliances everywhere were equally vulnerable. There was no choice, Pericles insisted, but to “resist our enemies in any way and in every way.” For, as Kennedy added: “We are still the keystone in the arch of freedom.”58
However distant they may be in time and space, statements like these perch precariously across scale. For if credibility is always in doubt, then capabilities must become infinite or bluffs must become routine. Neither approach is sustainable: that’s why walls exist in the first place. They buffer what’s important from what’s not. When one’s own imprecisions pull walls down—as Pericles and Kennedy did when they dismissed the possibility of giving anything up—then fears become images, images become projections, and projections as they expand blur into indistinctiveness.
XVI.
Soon after Saigon fell, each officer assigned to the United States Naval War College for the 1975–76 academic year received a puzzling package in the mail. Inside was a thick paperback, with instructions to read it—all of it—before arrival in Newport. Most had served in Vietnam, some several times. All knew someone who’d been killed or wounded there. None wanted to talk about it, and there were as yet few histories to read. But we did now have Thucydides, and that was enough.
Although younger than all of my “students” and with no military experience, I’d been recruited to co-teach “Strategy and Policy” by Admiral Stansfield Turner, a man with flexible views on credentials but firm ones on the relevance of the classics to contemporary affairs.59 He was determined that we would cover Vietnam—we were, after all, a war college and he was its president—even if we had to get there by a 2,500-year detour. And so I began discussing, with my seminar, an ancient Greek previously known to me only as a stern piece of statuary.
In the spirit of Thucydides, we were soon reflecting on resemblances, at first in general terms—walls, armies, navies, ideologies, empires—and then more specifically on strategies: did the Athenians or the Spartans better adapt objectives to capabilities? And then analogies: did this tell us anything about the Cold War? And then democracies: did the one in Athens defeat itself? And then: what could the Athenians have been thinking when they sent an army to, of all places, Sicily? At which point there was silence, followed by a falling away of all constraints. Vietnam was not only up for discussion: it was for weeks all we talked about. We were doing post-traumatic stress therapy before it had a name. Thucydides trained us.
It took me decades to figure out why this worked. The answer at last came in another seminar, for newly arrived Yale freshmen, in the fall of 2008. These students were young enough to have been grandchildren of the officers I’d known at Newport. None had any experience of war. They did, however, have Tolstoy, for in the spirit of Admiral Turner, I’d required them to read every line of War and Peace. They not only did so, but began bringing it up even on days when I hadn’t assigned it. One day I asked what connection Prince Andrei, Natasha, and the bumbling Pierre could possibly have to their very different lives? There was, as at Newport, a moment of silence. Then three students simultaneously said the same thing: “They make us feel less lonely.”
Thucydides wouldn’t have put it in that way, but I suspect this is what he meant when he encouraged his readers to seek “knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” For without some sense of the past the future can be only loneliness: amnesia is a solitary affliction. But to know the past only in static terms—as moments frozen in time and space—would be almost as disabling, because we’re the progeny of progressions across time and space that shift from small scales to big ones and back again. We know these through narratives, whether historical or fictional or a combination of both. Thucydides and Tolstoy are, therefore, closer than you might think, and we’re fortunate to be able to attend their seminars whenever we like.