Chapter One
Fear
Why Sparta Fought Athens (480-431)
Our Peloponnesian War
The Peloponnesian War is now 2,436 years in the past. Yet Athens and
Sparta are still on our minds and will not go away. Their permanence
seems odd. After all, ancient Greek warring parties were mere
city-states, most of them smaller in population and size than
Dayton, Ohio, or Trenton, New Jersey. Mainland Greece itself is no
larger than Alabama, and in antiquity was bordered by empires like
the Persian, which encompassed nearly one million square miles with
perhaps 70 million subjects. Napoleon’s army alone had more men
under arms by 1800 than the entire male population of all the Greek
city-states combined. In our own age, more people died in Rwanda or
Cambodia in a few days than were lost in twenty-seven years of civil
war in fifth-century b.c. Greece.
Nor were Greeks themselves especially lethal warriors, at least by
later historical standards. Rudimentary wood and iron of the
preindustrial age, not gunpowder and steel, were their shared
weapons of destruction. Even the soldiers themselves who fought the
war were not much more than five foot five and 130 pounds. They were
often unimpressive middle-aged men who would appear as mere children
next to contemporary towering two-hundred-pound GIs.
Yet for ancient folk so few, small, and distant, their struggle
during the Peloponnesian War seems not so old even in this new
millennium. During the weeks after September 11, 2001, for example,
Americans suddenly worried about the wartime outbreak of disease in
their cities. In October and November 2001, five died and some
twenty-four others were infected from the apparently deliberate
introduction of anthrax spores by unknown terrorists. During the
spring of 2003 a mysterious infectious respiratory ailment in China
threatened to spread worldwide, given the ubiquity of low-cost
transcontinental airfare. The panic that ensued in Washington and
Peking during a time of global tension evoked ancient wartime
plagues, such as the mysterious scourge that wiped out thousands at
Athens between 430 and 426. Similarly, at about the same time,
Sicily, Melos, and Mycalessus were all cited in contemporary media,
as millennia later the world once again watched military armadas
head out to faraway places, saw democracy imposed by force, and read
of schoolchildren killed by terrorist bands.
But even before September 11 the Peloponnesian War was not really
ancient history. Scholarly books regularly appeared with titles like
War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the
Peloponnesian War, or Hegemonic Rivalry: From Thucydides to the
Nuclear Age. Thucydides had long been assigned reading at the U.S.
Army War College. And an array of statesmen such as Woodrow Wilson,
Georges Clemenceau, and Eleuthérios Venizélos either taught or wrote
about Greek history, in which the use of Thucydides’ war loomed
large. More recently, controversial thinkers known as
neoconservatives (“the new conservatives”) were for a time
influential in American strategic thinking, and the text that they
purportedly consulted frequently was once more Thucydides’.
What is it about this particular ancient clash that causes it to be
called to mind during our present wars? Why were the conflict’s
supposed lessons both astutely and clumsily applied to most of our
own struggles of the last century? Russia-or was it really Hitler’s
Germany?-supposedly resembled oligarchic Sparta in its efforts to
destroy a democratic, seafaring America. Did not the Cold War, after
all, similarly divide up the world into two armed leagues, led by
superpowers who had united for a time against the common enemy only
later to face off for decades of bipolar hostilities? Was the
Sicilian expedition a precursor to Gallipoli, Vietnam, or any
proposed great democratic or imperial crusade abroad? Or does the
disaster at Syracuse show, as Thucydides oddly concluded, what
happens when folks at home do not support the troops abroad? Because
Thucydides first framed the important issues that haunt us still, we
naturally return to his original and seemingly unimpeachable
conclusions.
The Sorrows of War
Why exactly is this rather obscure ancient war between minuscule
Athens and Sparta still so alive, and used and abused in ways that
other ancient conflicts, such as the Persian Wars (490, 480-79) and
Alexander the Great’s conquests (334-323), are not? Many intriguing
reasons come to mind.
First, it was a brutal and very long struggle. King Xerxes and his
enormous Persian military were routed from Greece in about two
years. Alexander destroyed the later Persian Empire in a third of
the time it took Sparta to defeat Athens. Lasting twenty-seven
years, or almost a third of the fabled fifth century of classical
Greece, the Peloponnesian War, like the Second Punic War, the Thirty
Years War, or the Hundred Years War, was a mess that eerily crossed
generations. Those born after the first years of the war often
fought and died in the fighting before it was over.
So the catastrophe devoured entire families across generations. The
carnage reminds us of imperial Britain tottering after the First
World War, the end of empire, aristocracy, and unquestioned
patriotism all inextricably tied to trenches that gobbled up the
British elite. The Peloponnesian War spared few Greeks, regardless
of wealth or family connections. The “great houses” of Athens, or so
the postbellum lament went, were almost wiped out.
Take the most famous branch of the exalted Alcmaeonid family.
Pericles, the spiritual and political leader of Athens, died of the
plague at Athens in 429 in only the third season of the war. His
sister, also in her sixties, had perished a year before from the
same epidemic, along with his sons Paralus and Xanthippus. Neither
of those young men reached thirty.
Later, a much younger bastard son, Pericles the Younger, was elected
an Athenian general. He was in part responsible for the great sea
victory at Arginusae, some twenty-three years after his father’s
death. Yet the younger Pericles was subsequently executed by an
Athenian jury in an infamous scapegoating frenzy during the battle’s
aftermath. And Pericles’ nephew, the thirty-two-year-old bright and
upcoming Hippocrates, fell at the forefront of the battle of Delium
(424). Thirty years’ worth of plague, political intrigue, general
hysteria, and enemy spears more or less wiped out the family of the
most powerful man at Athens.
The war also started at the high-water mark of Greece’s great Golden
Age (479-404). Yet the attendant calamity ended for good such great
promise that started with the defeat of the Persians (479). The
capitulation of Athens (404) and the end of the fifth-century Golden
Age remain symbolically interconnected events to this day. They are
also loosely associated as well with the near-contemporaneous trial
and execution of Socrates (399), the last and greatest casualty of a
once wonderful world seemingly gone mad in a few decades.
Contemporaries, among them the comic poet Aristophanes, believed
that with the end of the Peloponnesian War, Attic tragedy as
emblemized by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had lost its
splendor.
Indeed, players in and observers of the war were the greats of
Hellenic civilization-Alcibiades, Aristophanes, Euripides, Pericles,
Socrates, Sophocles, Thucydides, and others-many of whom flourished,
were discredited, or perished because of their involvement in the
fighting. Much of the greatest classical literature, such as
Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Plato’s
Symposium, and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, either deals with issues
of the war or employs the conflict as dramatic landscape, leaving
with us the depressing possibility that war, not peace, prompted the
greatest explosion in the Greek creative genius, a frenzied outburst
before a weary collapse. Most Greeks saw the bloody struggle through
the eyes of Athens, whose writers enjoyed a near monopoly on
reporting, praising, and condemning the war-shocked that in just
three decades the entire dream of a cultural renaissance was brought
to an end. So north of the Isthmus of Corinth the fight was soon
known universally as the “Peloponnesian War,” the conflict against
those awful supermen who inhabited the southern peninsula of
Greece-not, as the parochial Peloponnesians saw it, as a Spartan-led
struggle against imperialists in an “Athenian War.”
The Peloponnesian War pitted against each other two Greek states
that were antithetical in nearly every respect. Athens had 300
warships, a population of over 300,000 residents, a fortified port,
a vast countryside, some 200 tribute-paying subject states abroad,
and plenty of coined money. Sparta was landlocked. About 160 miles
to the south, it relied on an army of only 10,000 infantrymen-less
than half of them full citizens-to enforce rule over 250,000
inferiors and serfs, and a hegemony of neighboring communities,
without any tradition of either seapower or cosmopolitan culture.
Rightly or wrongly, the fighting was assumed to be a final
arbitrator of the contrasting values of each. Which would prove to
be the more viable ideology: cultural and political liberalism or a
tough, insular conservatism? Does an open society reap military
advantages from its liberality or succumb to a license unknown in a
regimented and militaristic oligarchy? And who is the most
resourceful in an asymmetrical war when both sides either cannot or
will not face each other in conventional battle: the ships of a
“whale” like imperial Athens or the ponderous armies of the
“elephant” Sparta?
Thucydides
Then there is the matter of Thucydides himself. Greece’s preeminent
historian was not merely an analytical and systematic writer of a
great extant military history of Sparta and Athens. He was also a
brilliant philosopher who tried to impart to the often obscure
events of the war a value that transcended his age. In his own
boast, his narrative would prove to be “a possession for all time,”
far more important than the actual war itself.
Precisely because of this didactic nature of Thucydides’ lengthy
narrative-predicated on the belief that human nature is unchanging
across time and space and thus predictable-the conflict of Athens
and Sparta is supposed to serve as a lesson for what can happen to
any people in any war in any age. A central theme is the use and
abuse of power, and how it lurks behind men’s professions of
idealism and purported ideology. What men say, the speeches
diplomats give, the reasons states go to war, all this “in word”
(logos) is as likely to cloak rather than to elucidate what they
will do “in deed” (ergon). Thucydides teaches us to embrace
skepticism, expecting us to look to national self-interest, not
publicized grievances, when wars of our own age inevitably break
out.
Still, Thucydides was not an abstract theorist but a chief player in
the war he wrote about. He nearly died of the plague and was cooped
up in the city with tens of thousands of other Athenians who sought
refuge there from the invading Peloponnesians. He fought and lost to
the cagey Spartan commander Brasidas as an Athenian general in the
struggle over the northern allied city of Amphipolis. For that
setback he was unfairly exiled in his late thirties by an angry
people back home (423), whose leaders are later prominent in his own
history. Like Caesar’s and Napoleon’s, Thucydides’ writing is
inextricably mixed up with his past life as a man of action-and he
too sometimes refers to himself in the third person as a character
in his own history.
In response to that injustice of expulsion, the historian traversed
the Greek world for twenty-some years of the war as an embedded
reporter of sorts. Thucydides was eager to hear from veterans the
Peloponnesian and Boeotian sides of the story as well, and his
subsequent balanced treatment is riveting. The history is also full
of bizarre examples of how ingenious Greeks diverted their singular
energy and talent to find horrific ways of killing and maiming one
another, from crafting a fire cannon to torch trapped soldiers to
throwing overboard thousands of captured rowers.
Yet for all his personal autopsy and firsthand graphic detail,
Thucydides can also be hard to read for a modern audience: a
difficult vocabulary, strange-sounding names and places, often
tedious listings of invasions and expeditions-and long, sometimes
contorted speeches whose odd grammar and syntax seem almost
impossible for even his contemporary audiences to have understood.
While it is fashionable lately to suggest that Thucydides was our
first “postmodern” historian whose preconceived theories required
that he invent “facts” in the interest of constructing
“objectivity,” he is much too complex a mind for such a simple sham.
Modern readers are instead more struck by Thucydides’ attempts at
objectivity, by how this historian went to great lengths to
interview combatants, consult written treaties, and look at records
on stone. Thucydides was an observer who at various times expressed
admiration for the democratic imperialist Pericles. But he also
clearly liked the Spartan firebrand Brasidas (whose more brilliant
career ended his own). He waxed eloquently over the Athenian
right-wing coup of 411 and its eccentric godhead Antiphon-even as he
praised the wartime resiliency of democracies. And though a
commander of sailors, Thucydides was nevertheless still more
enamored with infantrymen. Because his history is a classic of
literature and philosophy, the war is known to us in a manner not
true of subsequent larger and far more bloody conflicts.
Athens as America
Contemporary America is often now seen through the lens of ancient
Athens, both as a center of culture and as an unpredictable imperial
power that can arbitrarily impose democracy on friends and enemies
alike. Thomas Paine long ago spelled this natural affinity out:
“What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude.” Like
ancient Athenians, present-day Americans are often said to believe
that “they can be opposed in nothing,” and abroad can “equally
achieve what was easy and what was hard.” Although Americans offer
the world a radically egalitarian popular culture and, more
recently, in a very Athenian mood, have sought to remove oligarchs
and impose democracy-in Grenada, Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan, and
Iraq-enemies, allies, and neutrals alike are not so impressed. They
understandably fear American power and intentions while our
successive governments, in the manner of confident and proud
Athenians, assure them of our morality and selflessness. Military
power and idealism about bringing perceived civilization to others
are a prescription for frequent conflict in any age-and no ancient
state made war more often than did fifth-century imperial Athens.
So great were the dividends of envy, fear, and legitimate grievance
against the ancient world’s first democracy that the victorious
Peloponnesians who oversaw the destruction of the Long Walls of
Athens-the fortifications to the sea symbolic of the power of the
poor and their desire to spread democracy throughout the Aegean-did
so to music and applause. Again, most Greeks concluded that, as
Xenophon wrote, Athens’ defeat “marked the beginning of freedom for
Greece”-without a clue that the victorious Sparta would move
immediately to create its own overseas empire in the vacuum.
Blinkered idealists in America who believe that the world wishes to
join our democratic culture might reflect that at the outbreak of
the Peloponnesian War, “the general good intentions of people leaned
clearly in favor of the Spartans” and that “the majority of Greeks
were deeply hostile toward the Athenians.”
(Continues…)
Random House
Copyright © 2005
Victor Hanson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4000-6095-8
Excerpted from A War Like No Other
by Victor Hanson
Copyright © 2005 by Victor Hanson.
Excerpted by permission.
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