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Professor Donald Kagan: For the next couple of weeks we will be examining the coming and
the fighting of the Great Peloponnesian War. It's a subject
that had tremendous importance for the Greeks themselves
and it has been one of the things that has occupied people
interested in the ancient Greeks more than most thing,
partly because of its own extraordinary importance, but I think perhaps even more because of the
fact that it was described for us by a participant,
a contemporary Thucydides, the son of Olorus an Athenian,
who by common consent throughout the millennia has
been agreed upon as one of the great historians ever,
sort of the second one that we know of in all of history,
but also one who is much esteemed. I would argue that right now he's probably
esteemed more than he has ever been throughout the history of
the world, because he's had such a great influence on
thinking in the West and then in the world as well--around
the world as well. Ever since the twentieth century, he really
came into his own as events like the First and the Second
World War, to be followed then by the Cold War seemed
to observers of the time, to be much illuminated by studying Thucydides'
account of the Peloponnesian War. And as a consequence
his own way of thinking about history and about war,
and about international relations and about behavior of
human beings in the mass, and a whole variety of subjects
in the realm of politics and diplomacy and war.
So it's for those reasons, I think, that this story has
been so carefully looked at, compared to others in history.
You know that for almost three decades at the end of the
fifth century the Athenian Empire fought against the
Spartan alliance in this terrible war that changed the
Greek world and the civilization of the Greeks forever.
From the perspective of the fifth century Greeks,
the Peloponnesian War deserves to be thought of I think as a
world war. It just involves the Greeks themselves and that's not quite right.
That's one of the points Thucydides makes. It drew into it other peoples other than the
Greeks who were very important. The Persians were to play
a critical role and similarly the Macedonians,
and similarly peoples in Sicily and in Italy. So, it really
doesn't require much defense from the Greek point of view
to think of it as a kind of a world war. A critical turning
point in Greek history causing enormous destruction
of life and property, intensifying factional and
class hostility, dividing the Greek states internally--it was the cause of civil wars
throughout the Greek world, throughout its history and
subsequently, de-stabilizing the relationship of classes within cities and between the relationships
between cities ultimately. As we can see from hindsight,
making the capacity of the Greeks to resist an outside
threat much weaker and helping to bring about a situation in
which they finally did lose their independence and their
autonomy. So, from so many points of view the war may be seen as a tragic event,
the end of a period of confidence and hope, and I would want to stress that.
If you look at the fifty year stretch between the Persian War
and the Peloponnesian War, it is the great age of Greece
when so many of the things that we value in the experience of
the Greeks were created and carried forward, and a period in which one sees evidence of
all sorts of confidence in human capacities and the hope
of what will be in the future. All of that,
I think, suffered a considerable reversal because of
the Peloponnesian War, and began a darker time.
It was a war of unprecedented brutality in Greek
life, violating even the already rugged code that had previously
governed Greek fighting and breaking through that thin
veneer that separates civilization from savagery. It is actually to Thucydides that that way
of thinking about things is old. Certainly for me;
that's when I first understood what he's teaching us to such a
degree in his history, that there is just a very thin
veneer that covers over the brutal, the ***, the worst and *** that exists in human
beings even in society, but that society is what covers that
over and permits something resembling what we would
call civilization. But warfare tends to put a strain on that
limiting element which is what society gives you. Anger, frustration,
the desire for vengeance increases as the fighting drags
on, producing a progression of atrocities that included maiming and killing
captured opponents, throwing them into pits to die of thirst,
starvation and exposure, that's what happened in Sicily and
hurling them into the sea to drown, which became the practice
towards the end of the Peloponnesian War. It was a case of a band of marauders, murdering
innocent school children, entire cities were destroyed,
the men killed the women and children sold into slavery.
I don't say there were no atrocities before the
Peloponnesian War, but nothing like the concentration of them that developed,
and also I suspect a whole new range of them also came into
being. One reason being that in the past wars had been short, and one of the
messages I think Thucydides wants to give us is that the longer
a war persists, the more inevitable is the sinking below civilized
levels of warfare, if there is such a thing as civilized
level of warfare, to a much more horrible way of
fighting. As I said, although the war ended over 2,400 years ago it continues to
fascinate readers today. I was astonished;
I wrote a one-volume history of the Peloponnesian War and it
sold 50,000 copies of the damn thing. I'm truly amazed; so was my publisher.
But I think shouldn't have been amazed, because for maybe a
century now people have been studying Thucydides and the war,
or when they have not been studying them they've been
hearing about it; references that have been made
to it by distinguished people. General Marshall referred
to it in a famous quotation when he was Secretary of State and
people keep talking about it, and so the curiosity I think
rather than the familiarity--curiosity about what is this all about may account for this,
but it's also true that if you go to--Thucydides and the
Peloponnesian War are taught in all the military academies.
They are taught in all, or just about all, I never heard one that didn't, in all programs
of international relations anywhere.
That's one of the first books along with the Chinese Sage of
Warfare, Sun-tzu both of those seem to be typically read
everywhere and so on. I don't think that this is just
an affectation of look at us we read classical stuff;
I don't think that's what it's about. I think it is based on a conviction and supported
by arguments by scholars, not classicists,
that there is some continuing meaning, some continuing value,
something we can learn about all of these important topics by
reading Thucydides. So, I want to just comfort you for the burden I've laid on you in giving
you that book and all of this stuff to read. You're not wasting
your time; that's what I'm trying to tell you.
I'd like to turn first to the question of the origins of the
war, the causes of the war, the outbreak of the war,
however you want to look at that phenomenon, because Thucydides is very interested in that
subject and writes about it with a sophistication that
in my opinion, has not been superseded and
rarely matched in the years since that point. Thucydides' whole first book really is about
that subject, how and why did that war come about?
That's a subject I just think is immensely interesting and
important, because we should face the fact that the history
of civilized mankind is almost the history of warfare.
There's nothing more typical of human societies than that they
are organized to fight wars and do so. And I think by the twentieth-, twenty-first
century we ought to have come to the conclusion this is a bad
thing. Wars, certainly now, whatever positive functions
they might have had in the past, and they have been sometimes
glorified for various reasons, the price of them is just far
too high for us to think that's fine, let's keep doing that. So, the problem why
do wars happen and how can they be avoided strikes
me as important a question as there is, and Thucydides I think
gives us some food to chew on as we think about that.
Well, he examined the situation in the first book and
concluded with what he calls the truest cause, the truest explanation. I'll quote him now,
"The truest explanation, although it has been the least
often advanced I believe to have been the growth of the Athenians
to greatness which brought fear to the Lacedaemonians and forced
them to war." Scholars differ a bit on what that really means, but I side with what I
think are the majority of the scholars on this point,
which is to say he is really saying that this war became
inevitable at a certain point when the Athenian Empire,
that's the greatness of Athens reached such a point as to alarm
the Spartans enough to do what they did, which was to start a war to check the growth
of that Athenian power. Everything I've said is open
to criticism and disagreement, and just naturally
great big arguments about these things, but I'm giving
you my view which is not original or unique. Now, I think
it's important to realize that Thucydides does not think
that sort of an obvious explanation can be found by examining
the circumstances that took place when the war broke out in
431 B.C., and the proof of that is not merely that he
speaks about the truest explanation, which means he's rejecting
less true ones, which do focus on the events themselves,
what we might call the precipitating causes of the war.
He begins his account explaining how the war came back
to the end of the Persian Wars and the events that are
important, from his point of view, are the forming of the Delian League which
emerges as the Athenian Empire. That's one critical thing
he goes back to, and the other critical thing
he goes back to is the distrust that emerged
swiftly between Athens and Sparta which turned into a major
division in the Greek world and produced ultimately-- suspicion
obviously is something that makes it easier to bring
about fear, and so we get to that second element that
Thucydides talks about, the fear that the growth of Athenian
power and gender in the Spartans. What is so splendid in my
eyes about Thucydides understanding of why these
things happened and why it's superior to what is typically
taught in the graduate schools that study international
relations is he's talking about human emotions. He's talking about feelings; he's not talking
about structures that you need to be a professor
in order to understand. I think that that's one of the
powerful things. Thucydides is interested in
structures, the first one he ever looks at. He thinks it's a very important thing, but
when he comes down to explaining why nations go to war,
he looks at the feelings that the people involved have.
Well, we've talked already about some of the events that he
describes, taking them mainly from him. I'm talking about the beginning of the Delian
League, the conversion into an Athenian Empire,
the suspicion that aroused among the Spartans, but the fact that they worked things out until
the Thasian rebellion, where we see the Athenians
acting more aggressively with less justification than they
ever have before. But what I didn't tell you because I wanted to save it for this context
is that Thucydides mentions the fact that when the Thasians launched
their rebellion against Athens in 465, they went
first to the Spartans and asked them, if we rebel against the
Athenians will you invade Attica, and the ephors, the officials that conduct
foreign policy in the first instance in Sparta, said they would. Well, they didn't because
before they could do so the great earthquake occurred which
prevented them doing any such thing. It needs to be pointed out that this message--these
talks that went on between the Thasians and Spartans
were secret, and we have to believe that at this time,
the Athenians did not know about these conversations, because if
they had, there is no way they could have been persuaded
to send help, 4,000 hoplites into the Peloponnesus to help
the Spartans against the helots. So, I think we
need to accept Thucydides' assessment of that situation.
Well, we know it happened. The Athenians were sent away
because of the suspicion that the Spartans felt for them and
their way of government, and this produced a tremendous
anger in the Athenians and it also led to a revolution
internally in which the Cimonian regime was replaced by one led
by more radical democrats like Ephialtes and Pericles,
and also a diplomatic revolution in which the
Athenians withdrew from the Greek League under Spartan
leadership, and in which they made alliances first with Argos the great enemy
of Sparta and then with the Thessalians whom they hoped would
supply them with useful cavalry in case of a future war.
So, that's a terrific takeoff point for the first
quarrel of seriousness between the two sides which modern
historians call the First Peloponnesian War. One other thing that happened at the conclusion
of this previous period, that is to say,
with the withdrawal of the Athenians from the scene, the Spartans finally took care of the helots.
They never were able really to defeat them and get them down
from their fort up on Mount Ithome, but they finally made a deal with the people
up there saying, we will allow you to come down in safety and
go away someplace so long as you leave the Peloponnesus.
They undoubtedly expected that the helots would then be
scattered one here, one there, one other place, where else would they go? That's what would
have happened, had it not been that the Athenians,
who had lately acquired, we know not how, control of a town on the north shore of the
Corinthian Gulf called Naupactus. It has a very good harbor
and it is so located as to be wonderful as a naval
base for somebody who wished to be able to control
access to the Corinthian Gulf. The Athenians took it and
then turned it over to the helots who had fled
the Peloponnesus. That was not what the Spartans had in mind,
although there was nothing in the deal that prevented this from
being done. But it means that the Athenians had done another
bit of harm to the Spartans, putting their bitter enemies
in a position to cause trouble to them and to
their allies on the Corinthians Gulf. So, all of that suggests
that on the next day, so to speak, after all of these changes had taken place,
the world was very different and the prospects, I would have thought, for peace between Sparta
and her allies and Athens and her allies had been
badly reduced. There's no longer an association between the
two. The Athenians had allied themselves with Spartan
enemies; the Athenians had taken the halots and put
them in this terrific place. This is not a recipe for good
relations in the future--this is where the cliché
seems to me to be useful; people talk about a powder keg
which only needs a spark to set it off into a great explosion.
People use this about the outbreak of many wars.
Sometimes it is an apt thing, and sometimes it is not.
This time it is, as we shall see; it didn't take very much to produce an explosion
between Athens and Sparta after these events.
The spark was provided by a quarrel that took place between
two Spartan allies in the Peloponnesus, Megara and Corinth, neighbors on that isthmus
that leads into northern Greece and into Athens.
Since they are both members of the Spartan alliance,
the Spartans had choices to make about what has happening.
And the choice was soon forced upon them, because when it was
clear that the Corinthians were winning the argument,
winning the war I should say, that they were fighting against
Megara, the Megarians came to Sparta and asked for their help
in putting down this war and ending it. The Spartans said, "no we are not interested;
it is your business, not ours." Now, that is interesting.
We cannot really tell, because there is nothing written about it, what obligations the Spartans
had when two allies who are autonomous states, according to the theory, decide to fight each
other. It looks to me, because nobody complained
about it in terms of constitutional irregularity,
that the Spartans had every right to ignore what was going
on. We must assume, I suppose, that in the centuries or century
or so before, the Spartans must have ignored other
quarrels between allies and allowed them to fight it out or
settle it any way they want. The Spartans don't give a damn,
who wins between Corinth and Megara. And why should they get involved.
I think that hands-off attitude must have been encouraged by the
fact that they had just, probably were still recovering
from the earthquake and the helot rebellion that came after
it. They really didn't need more trouble. So, they let the thing go.
Now, the reason the Spartans could take such a
caviler attitude in the past was that they were the only great
power in the Greek world. But in 461 that was not true.
The losers, Megara, had a choice. They could, and did, go to Athens and say,
"won't you help us against Corinth? If you do, we will leave the Peloponnesian
league and join the Athenian side." Now, that is brought about,
as I say, by the new circumstances. This is one of those places where those of
us who remember the Cold War are immediately stuck by similarities.
There were troubles all over the world so long as it was
known that NATO was on one side and the Soviet Union and the
Warsaw pact was on the other. All kinds of places that
neither had any interest in would call when they were in a
war or some kind of a fight in their own places, Africa for instance, they would go to one
side or the other and say "help us, or we will seek
help from your enemy." That confronted each side with
a hard problem. I don't give a damn about what
happens in country X, you might say, but I do not want the Russians there and vice
versa. This is the kind of problem that one sees
in this situation. So, the Athenians were confronted by an extremely
tough decision. I want to try to communicate to
you my sense of how difficult the calls are in this situation.
Now, one natural reaction would be this, it seems to me.
Why in the world should we accept this defection from the
Peloponnesian league, because it is bound to anger
the Spartans and very likely bring us a war with the
Peloponnesians, which is a very hard thing to
face? What do we care about the quarrel between Megara and Corinth?
The opposite assumptions would be, no we don't care about who
wins the quarrel between Corinth and Megara, but we do care about having Megara on our
side, because if we control Megara, if the Megarians
are on our side--Megara is situated on the side of the
isthmus right next to Athens. More than that,
there is a mountain range that runs through Megara that makes
it very difficult for somebody to make his way through that
territory, if they are opposed by military force. In short, with the help of the
Megarians, the Athenenians could cut off access to Athens and
probably for the most part to central Greece to the
Spartans.Let me put it more sharply. The Athenians could feel invulnerable to a
Spartan attack, if they could control Megara.
Now, they would have to know that if they took this offer,
it might bring a war with Sparta. But there would have been plenty of Athenians,
who would have thought that is going to happen anyway.
The only question before us is, "do we want to have a war with
Sparta on these wonderfully positive conditions, or do we want to fight in the old way in which
we have no way to stop the Spartans from marching into our
territory and destroying our field" and in fact defeating
us, because the Athenians as yet had not built
walls, connecting Athens to the port of Piraeus.
So, the Spartans could cut off the Athenians from their port,
just by invading their territory. And as we know the Athenians do not produce
enough food to feed themselves. So, these would be the thoughts
that were going through the minds of the Athenians. Notice, the critical element in your decision,
it seems to me, is your prediction about what is likely in the future. If you think there
really is not danger of a war with Sparta, why bring
it on. But if you think there is a real danger of
a war with Sparta, why leave yourself vulnerable to the
Spartans. Whichever call you make, there are dangers
and uncertainties at the other end, which I simply
say, welcome to the real world. It is almost always
that way. And it is a beautiful lesson in how real those
hard decisions are. Well, the Athenian decision was
to take Megara into the Athenian alliance and to take the dangers
that went with that. And to make their task easier,
they built long walls connecting the city of Megara
with the port of Nicea on the Saronic Gulf, which is where Athens is located as well and
also to gain control of the town of Pegai, which is on
the--I guess I would say--the northern side of the isthmus
and to fortify and put forces between there. In other words,
to build a barrier to Spartan capacity to move into Attica.
That was the great gain that they made of it.
One of the great prices they paid; Thucydides says this in his own voice, this
he says was the beginning of Corinthian hatred for Athens.
It is a fact, if you look at Corinthian and Athenian relations in the past--we don't know
a lot about them, but what we know suggests that
they were not unfriendly. They did okay, no problems really between them, but from
now on you're going to have tremendous trouble with Corinth,
and this as you know from reading your Thucydides in the
textbook--Corinth will play a critical role in 431 in bringing
on the Peloponnesian War that is the Great War.
So, that was one of the prices the Athenians paid for this
decision. Now, if you apply Thucydides' judgment to
the great Peloponnesian War and apply it to this
situation, it seems to me to ring very, very true.
He said, you remember, that the growing power of the
Athenians caused fear among the Spartans and led them--forced
them to work. Well, there's no question that the Athenian power has grown. These alliances
that they have just made and this new geo-political advantage
they have gained through their alliance with Megara
suddenly make Athens much more formidable,
and there's no question that the Spartans become fearful
about that, and ultimately as we shall see, fearful enough to join in a war against the
Athenians. So, I agree with Thucydides, if you're talking
about the First Peloponnesian War, but that's not what
he's talking about. One great question that I would
like to confront when we get to the big war is "does it work?"
Does his evaluation work for the big war? I should warn you at once that most scholars
throughout the years have accepted Thucydides' explanation
and interpretation of the great Peloponnesian War, and I don't.
So be careful. He was there, he knows much more about it than I do, and
he's much smarter than I am. So, if I say he's wrong,
I better have a good case; that's all I can say.
We need not say very much about the war in detail.
Essentially, the Athenians took the initiative and in a general way when they
fought battles at sea they won, when they fought battles on
land they didn't. No great battles were fought for a couple of years; the fighting took place
in and around the eastern Peloponnesus for the most
part and nothing decisive happened. Then we get down towards
the year 457--I keep warning you that the dates
here are uncertain. These are sort of consensus
dates although we don't have certainty. The Athenians received an invitation from
a ruler in Egypt who wanted to launch a rebellion against the
Persian Empire, and he invited the Athenians to send a force
to help. The Athenians agreed to do it and according
to Thucydides they sent a fleet of two hundred ships for the
purpose. That's an enormous fleet up to this point.
The Athenians by now have a fleet that's bigger than that,
and they can afford to do it, but I want you to understand
this is a major undertaking. Now, why did they do it?
They do it because the opportunities in Egypt are
tremendous. Egypt is the greatest grain grower in the Mediterranean area and we know
the Athenians are always interested in sources of grain,
but Egypt is fantastically wealthy, because of its great
fertility. So, the Athenians if they can gain a share of that wealth will of course
profit from that. Finally, the Athenians are still officially
at war with Persia. So, it's perfectly reasonable
to try to strip the Persians of possibly their richest profits.
All of those things make their decision understandable. Now, on the other hand, you might ask the
question now you know you're engaged in a war with various
Peloponnesians and that although the Spartans haven't taken any
action yet, you can expect some from them, is this a great
time for you to tackle yet another war against the Persians?
Well, they thought so, and I think it's evidence of
the tremendous confidence that the Athenians had acquired by
this time, and as we shall see, it was over confidence. Of course, this whole
story fits beautifully into Greek feelings, Greek
ideas, Greek religion and mythology. This will be
a beautiful example, if Herodotus were writing the history
instead of a very, very--I want to say atheistic Thucydides.
I'm not sure he was an atheist but he was certainly very,
very skeptical. Herodotus would have been talking about hubris all over the place,
because that's the kind of a situation that we have.
Well, let's forget about that Athenian force in Egypt for
the time being and let's look at what the situation is in the
year 457. We have a wonderful piece of evidence, rare piece of evidence, actually
an inscription from that year which is a part
of a dedication, a funeral dedication, from a single Athenian
tribe in which they list the war dead from their tribe
by where they fought and died and they're proud of this.
I mean, of course, they're proud of the heroism of
their men, but they're proud I think also about the range of
places that they're fighting, unheard of, unexampled in all
of Greek history--Egypt, Phoenicia, Halias, which is a town in the northeastern Peloponnesus,
Aegina the great island that sits in the Saronic Gulf
opposite Athens, Aegina being a great traditional enemy of Athens and Megara,
of course, as you know. So, here they are fighting
battles in all of these places at the same time.
It's a kind of an ape man pounding on his chest to show
how great he was. A piece of arrogance, you might say, calling for vengeance by the
gods, but no vengeance came right away, instead another
victory. Aegina, the island of Aegina, was taken by the Athenians. Aegina had been
a great naval power. So, here was a naval power
taken away from the enemy and added to the Athenian side.
They now have without question, although they've had it really
before, command of the seas. Nobody can withstand them at
sea and they now have complete security from their northwestern
frontier because of the Megarian alliance and that's not all that
happened. Finally, moved, I would guess, in part by seeing all
of this happening and worrying desperately about the
growing power of Athens, Sparta took action.
I think they were moved specifically--the critical
element that was an opportunity presented to them by a small
region in central Greece called Doris. It's the root of the word Dorian.
This is theoretically the ancestral home of all Dorians.
So, they obviously had friendly relations with the Spartans.
The Dorians were having trouble with some of their neighbors,
one of the standard quarrels between neighbors in the Greek
city state world, and they asked the Spartans to
send a force up to help them. I'm not sure, if the Spartans would have done so in the
normal course of events, because it does mean that they have
to get up to central Greece. When you think about that,
given what the Athenians have done in Megara, they can't do it in the usual way by walking.
The only way they can get up there is by getting on boats and
sailing across the Corinthian Gulf, but if the Athenians or those helots who are
occupying Naupactus are aware of that, they could very
well be taken at sea and have their army destroyed as that
fleet is sunk. They have to sneak across if they're going
to go that way. I want you to understand how unlikely is that
undertaking in a normal situation, but what I think makes
it not so normal is something that Diodorus of Sicily
tells this, that Thucydides doesn't mention, which is
at that moment the Thebans, the leading city of Boeotia,
which had ambitions of its own, always wanting to gain complete
control of Boeotia and always having some Boeotian cities hold
out against them, they saw the opportunity to get
the Spartans to help them out. So, they told the Spartans
that if they would come and assist them in gaining control
of Boeotia, the Boeotians would join them in an attack on Athens, and so I think it
was that that made it possible for the Spartans to agree
and to act. They do so; they take an army much more
than they need to deal with the Dorian problem, they slap that down right away, and then what
do you know, they come marching down to the Athenian frontier
with Boeotia to a town or a place near a town called Tanagra.
The Spartans, of course, were able to sneak across the Gulf of Corinth. You may ask,
why were the Athenians and the helots so sleepy? It never occurred to them, is what I say,
that the Spartans would ever do a thing like that and so there
they were. A battle is then fought and we're talking
about large forces now. The Spartans send 11,000 men
and that's a very big--they don't have 11,000 of their own.
Spartans and their Peloponnesian allies go up
there, and now they are put together with Boeotian forces.
Boeotians are very good fighters. The Athenians send their army out to the frontier
to meet them, the greater part of the Athenian army.
This is a very big battle by Greek standards and the result
is almost a standoff. The Spartans technically win.
That means that they were able to command the field after the
fighting was over, put up a trophy, and collect their own dead. The Athenians
of course were required to come and ask them for permission
to collect their dead, so there wasn't any question if
you follow the rules of hoplite warfare at the time who won;
the Spartans won. But if we think of it from the standpoint of warfare and you ask about
what were the strategic consequences of the battle,
that's how today we would say who won that battle.
It was a standoff, and I guess you could say the
Athenians won because the purpose of the Spartans was to
defeat the Athenians and to compel them to abandon all the
things that they were doing and had done, and in this they failed, because they had
suffered heavy casualties in the fighting and were not in
a position to renew the battle and to force the Athenians back
or to crush the Athenians in fighting. The Spartans simply
marched back into the Peloponnesus; the Athenians
were in no condition to stop them. So that was that.
As one sees from what happens after that, it really looks more like a strategic victory
for the Athenians, because now A) they have not
been destroyed, they have not been defeated in
any useful way, they have not been stopped in
what they were doing and to prove it the Athenians take an
army northward when the Spartans have withdrawn into Boeotia,
defeat the Boeotian army at a place called Oenophyta,
and the next thing you know, establish democratic governments in all the Boeotian cities which
are friendly to Athens. I put it that way,
but again a Cold War analogy strikes me as helpful here.
In the same way as wherever the Soviet army was victorious,
whatever land they occupied, there was a Communist government set up whose function was to be
a tool of the Soviet Union. I don't claim that that's
exactly what it was in the fifth century; this is a much more simple and less sophisticated
world, but the general idea is the same.
The guys who run those towns, they are partisans of Athens.
Athens, in other words, is the dominant force in
Boeotia. Now, step back a moment, stand up there on the Acropolis in Athens
and look around, and you will see a situation that is so splendid,
it's the kind of a thing almost any nation would want as its
ideal situation. If you look to the north you're
safe; there can be no invasion through Boeotia for the reasons I've just
said. If you look to the northwest Megara, an ally
of yours, your forces are in there in part, but you
have that area blocked off. There is no way,
and of course now that you know that the Spartans can take boats
across the Corinthian Gulf you'll see to it that that never
happens again. The Spartans and their allies are bottled up in the Peloponnesus.
The sea is controlled completely by you. I've also neglected to mention that the Athenians
have just now concluded the building of long walls
connecting Athens with Piraeus. So, even if somehow,
hard to imagine as it is, the Spartans got into Attica
the Athenians need not fight them and need not give way to
them, because nobody knows how to take walled cities very well anymore and the
Spartans never learn how to do it. So, if you look at it
from that point of view, until somebody invents an
airplane, Athens is absolutely invulnerable and they still have 2,000 years
before anybody invents an airplane so this is an amazing
moment where you could readily think we are invulnerable,
we are safe, and we can do what we like with impunity. I think this is a very
important moment in Athenian and in Greek history.
I think then there were Athenians who never got over
remembering that's what we achieved, that's what we can achieve, and that's what
we must aim for in all future circumstances. We get into the
Peloponnesian War and there will come moments when it seems
possible that the Athenians can make a negotiated peace with the
Spartans that's okay in the war, and they turn it down,
I think Thucydides and others suggest that they're just out of
their minds. Maybe they are, but they have something they can focus on,
a memory of how it once was and how it might be again.
Well, the gods are not going to put up with this;
you and I know that. The Athenians suffer a terrible
reverse that begins to undermine their situation. In Egypt there is a terrible disaster;
they lose. The Persians defeat them; there's a great argument about how many ships
they lose but whatever it is they lose a lot. They lose
a strategically significant number. The disaster is so great
as to cause a whole rash of rebellions in the Delian
League or the Athenian Empire, or whatever you want to call
it, and the Athenians will be occupied with trying to put down
these rebellions for some time. By the way, the probable date
of this defeat is probably around 455, because it's in the
following year, and this date is a good date, 454-453 that the Athenians decide to move
the treasury of the league from Delos to Athens, up on the
Acropolis in the back room of the Parthenon which they will be building
very shortly. Another important point about that is up to
now all money put into the league treasury was being
used for supporting the navy and ostensibly for league
purposes, usually for league purposes, but as we know
the Athenians could also use it for their own purposes like
they did at Thasos, but still only for ships and
men. Now the Athenians institute a new policy, and I think whatever you think
about anything before this, when the Athenians do what I'm
about to describe, they surely have made this an
empire, no longer anything like a voluntary confederacy, because they take one
sixtieth of what is put into the treasury every year
as a donation to Athena, which is another way of saying
to Athens. They are now collecting a profit, a tax from the league members which
they, as we shall see--there will be an argument
about how this money is to be used. They will argue it's our money;
we can use it any way we want to. So, two things are going on in two different
directions and all the trouble that they have in the league,
it leads them however to change the character of the league in a
very significant way. Well, things are so difficult,
the problem of fighting the Spartans now is so serious that
the Athenians recall Cimon because they would like to make
peace with the Spartans and they know Cimon is just the man to do
it as no one else can. So, he comes back--well, I should back up a second. There was some
talk about Cimon coming back earlier but he certainly comes
back in 451, because his ten years of ostracism are over,
and it's now that he negotiates a five-years truce with the
Spartans, with the understanding that the purpose of the truce is to allow negotiation
to go forward to bring about a long term peace agreement between
the two. Cimon achieves that and to show you how ostracism
can work he is immediately elected general.
It's as though he had never gone away, and being Cimon he
immediately turns to an activity that's a continuation of what he
did before he left, namely, let's go fight Persians.
So, he takes a fleet and sails to Cyprus, part of which is in
Persian hands, fights a battle against the Persians, defeats the Persians, but has the
bad fortune to be killed. So, Cimon is now removed from
the scene in Athens. I think this is a significant thing, because it means that the only individual
politician, who had the kind of support, the kind of charisma,
the kind of backing that could challenge the new important
leader in Athens, Pericles, is gone. This helps explain why Pericles still at a
relatively young age is able to become a person of unprecedented
influence and power in the Athenian state. It's not that
he takes to himself new constitutional powers or gets
military guards or anything. Nothing changes except that he
can count on persuading the assembly to do what he wants
almost all the time, and there's nobody out there
for the moment, who looks like he can challenge him. We shall see that shortly that
he will meet an important challenge, but we'll come back
to that later on. But let's go on with the story
of the war. In 449, two years after the truce was negotiated,
we find Sparta attacking the city of Phocis, the polis of Phocis, again up in central Greece.
They must have--again, we don't know how it was that
they found their way up there, but they did find their way up
there, and they took back control of the Delphic Oracle
from the neighboring Phocians, who had--over the years they
had frequently tried to gain control of the Delphic Oracle
from the priest and it was on behalf of those priests that the
Spartans fought. They defeated the Phocians and
went home. Two years later in 447, the Athenians send an army up there.
The Athenians are allied to Phocis and they once again take
back the Delphic Oracle and give it over to the Phocians.
These are signals that the truce is not really working.
That the two sides are not finding a way to live together
peacefully for the future, and sure enough, in the year 446 a series of events occurs
that upsets the peace and the balance that the Greek world
had found temporarily. First of all,
there is an oligarchic rebellion throughout the cities
of Boeotia and, of course, they drive out the
pro-Athenian democratic regimes and suddenly Boeotia is a
hostile place, no longer a friendly place, one from which the Athenians can expect trouble.
There's a big argument in Athens as to what should we do.
Pericles says, let's not do anything, we really can't afford to engage in ground
campaigns against serious opponents. We tried it,
but we can't keep Boeotia, we'll just have to let the
Boeotians go. Against him was a general, an Athenian general--sometimes I'm astonished
by the names that crop up in Athenian history. You wouldn't
dare do it; you wouldn't invest names like this if you
were writing a novel, because people would laugh.
This guy's name is Tolmades; it comes from the Greek verb
tolmao which means to be bold, to be daring; that's what he is â€" bold and daring.
He marches an army into Boeotia to get the place back for the
Athenians. In other words, he defeated Pericles on this issue, because
he couldn't do that without getting the assembly's approval.
But the Athenians must have been mad too and said,
let's go beat those Boeotians up and force them back into our
control. Tolmades runs into a terrific defeat, suffers extremely heavy casualties
by anybody's standards and Boeotia is lost for good.
The battle, by the way, in which Tolmades is killed in
the Battle of Coronea. Athens is now driven from
central Greece and that glorious picture I painted for you has
been marred by a hostile force on the northern enemy.
But that isn't all that's happened. Seeing that the Athenians were troubled, were
weak, were vulnerable, and can be beaten,
suddenly all of the unhappy folks that were around took
advantage of the opportunity. On the island of Euboea to the
east of Attica, there is a rebellion. This is really deadly even from Pericles point
of view. He cannot permit rebellions in the empire
on islands; it threatens the control of the sea.
It's not just that he can't have Euboea be independent;
he cannot let rebels in your empire succeed because it
encourages other rebellions, and they've just been through
that. They've had to fight their way through a whole rash of rebellions after the
defeat in Egypt. So, Pericles personally
takes an army and sends it, takes it, I should say,
to Euboea and while he is gone with his army off in Euboea,
remember with Boeotia now hostile, there is a rebellion in
Megara. This alliance with Megara was always a very iffy thing. We should remember
two things about the past. One is that Megara and Athens
have been bitter enemies for centuries; so, the alliance was an unnatural one,
the product of momentary agreement. But there would certainly have always been
lots of Megarians, who were against it, and so seeing an opportunity
these guys would have moved. And the other thing is that the
Athenians were, of course, being distracted and
their forces were sent off someplace else. So, now Pericles realizes how dangerous this
is, because if Megara succeeds in the rebellion
which it does, now they have no protection from a Spartan
invasion which they need to expect and that is indeed what
happens. Pericles, having put down the Euboean
rebellion adequately, races back to Athens to meet
the Peloponnesian army when it invades, and then we have this extraordinary event
in the plains to the north of Attica. Spartans invade,
Pericles leads the Athenian army out to meet them.
This is the scenario for an Athenian defeat, because the numbers of the Peloponnesians
are likely to be greater and their reputation as a superior
fighting force has some merit. We've seen that it's not going
to be a walk over, we've seen that the Athenians are capable of putting up one hell of a fight,
but they can expect not to win, is the way I see it.
So, they are facing each other, and the battle is about to
happen, when all of a sudden a delegation comes out from the
Spartan army. Pericles goes out to meet them, they have a little conversation,
they all go back to their armies, the Spartans led by their King Pleistoanax
who was the guy who was confirmed with Pericles, and marched their
army back home to Sparta. They declare that they have
agreed upon a four-months truce for the purpose of negotiating a
permanent peace. What in the world is going on
here? Well, the Spartans receive the news in a complicated way. The first reaction
is fury against Pleistoanax. Why didn't you clobber
those Athenians when you had them finally sticking
their heads out there for battle? They finally take action
against him and against his advisor, a certain Clearidas and
send them off to exile, so angry are they at this lost
opportunity. But after all, if that's all there was to it, there was nothing
to stop them from marching into Attica again, and either
fighting against the Athenians, or at least doing terrible harm
to the farms and the houses of the Athenians out in the country,
which at the very least, would make the Athenians unhappy and might force them to come out and
fight. Why didn't they do that? But they didn't,
and I think that's evidence--well, it's evidence of two things. There was a very
special opportunity that Pleistoanax had lost, namely,
everything was falling apart on all fronts in Athens at the
moment when the battle was available. On the other hand that's now--they've been
put down. Euboea is quiet and the Athenians have adjusted
to everything else. Still what I said in the
first place is still true, they could come in and
force that fight if they want to. Why didn't they?
I think the answer is because Pericles had convinced
Pleistoanax of something that was essentially true and that
the Spartans when they had time to cool down could see that
there was some reason for doing this, and it was this. What happens if we fight?
Look we only fought each other a little while ago and what
happened then? Well, you beat us, but you didn't clobber us. You took a lot
of casualties, and you weren't able to exploit it.
That is even truer today than it was then, because if you
defeat us, what will we do? We'll run back to our walls,
we'll go through our gates, and you won't be able to lay a
pinky on us, and we don't have to fight you if we don't want to, because we own the fleet
that dominates the sea. We have the money from
our allies that pays for the fleet. As long as
we have control of the sea you can ravage our country all you
want to. We can get all the grain we need through imports.
So, what are you going to do then? You'll have taken casualties for nothing and
you still won't be able to compel us to do what you want.
I think that's the argument that Pericles must have given to
Pleistoanax. Pleistoanax's whole career suggests he was not a man eager for war and
he was glad to have that opportunity to avoid it. But remember,
the Spartans could have overdone that, and they didn't. I think it shows you that
this was an argument that had some reality and
had some appeal. So, that four-month truce was successful.
It led to the negotiation a peace between Athens on behalf
of its allies and Sparta on behalf of its allies,
the thirty-years peace which is concluded over the winter of 446
- 445. The arrangements of that peace are that Athens would give up all of
its holdings on the continent that is to say outside the Aegean
Sea, except Naupactus, which they would continue
to leave in the hands of the helots.
In tacit recognition, nobody formally did it,
but the point is they let the Athenian allies be included in
the Athenian decision that meant the Spartans granted,
recognized, the legitimacy of the Athenian Empire.
Then they had a few rules meant to prevent the outbreak of war
in the future, and like most of these peace treaties, who decide to try to prevent war
in the future, they basically looked back to how this war
started and try to prevent this war happening again.
For instance, this war came about because the
ally of one side changed sides to the other; that was forbidden under the new treaty.
Somebody must have thought, yeah right, but what if there's
a neutral state that wants to go from one side to the other,
and what if that state had a significant strategic importance, wouldn't that test the peace at
all or would it? They concluded it wouldn't, because they said
neutrals were free to join either side. So, in other words,
if a neutral joined one side, nobody could say okay that's a
cause for war because it wasn't. Finally, the most remarkable,
and I believe original, absolutely original idea of its
kind ever. I don't believe there's ever a time in history that we have a record of such
a thing being present. I'm talking about a clause in
the treaty, which provided that if in the future there were any
disagreements between the two signatories, any complaints that they had against one another,
these must be submitted to an arbitrator for a decision.
Remember, I'm not talking about a mediator who says, "let's talk it over boys."
I'm talking about an arbitrator who has the right and
responsibility to say, "you're right," "you're wrong,"
or some version of such a thing. If that clause had been adhered
to, it's only a matter of logic that says there could never be a
war between these two sides. It's an amazing idea,
and I'm going to claim with no proof--I'll be doing this again
and again for a while, I think this is Pericles' idea.
Because I mean everything that I'm going to point to that's so
unusual and unheard of before Pericles is involved with it,
and I think he just had that kind of mind, very inventive, ready to find new ways to
meet old problems. I think this was his notion
and I'm convinced it was his determination that
this would be the case that in the future there would not
be a settlement of differences by the threat of war,
but by arbitration that helps explain the very determined
position he will take in 431. This is very important.
I don't know how much the Spartans felt that way or knew
about what was going to happen, obviously they didn't,
but they bought it. That's the treaty; the two sides swear to it and for thirty years
they must adhere to these provisions. That is the thirty-years
peace and I think we need to evaluate it to get
at this argument I'm engaged with Thucydides that you're listening
in on. That is, there are peaces and there are peaces.
They're not all the same. I, for my own purposes, have come up with I think three categories
of peace and want to suggest which one this belongs in.
There is such a thing as a--people have spoken of the
First World War the--I'm sorry the Peace of Versailles was
often referred to by its critics as a Punic peace.
They're talking about the peace--they think they're
talking about the peace that concluded the second Punic War
with Hannibal, but no; they're talking about the third Punic War
in which the peace was the City of Carthage was destroyed.
The Carthaginians were driven away, those who were not killed.
The fields were plowed up and salt put in the furrows,
so they thought nobody could grow anything there again.
That's a Punic peace and there's something to be said for
a Punic peace. You'll never have a war again with that country, because it doesn't exist
anymore. That's one extreme. At the other extreme is where, I suppose,
the winning side can impose a harsh peace, but chooses to impose a gentle peace in the
hope that in the future they will have friendly relations with
the other side, and so they trust the other side, even though
it's not destroyed, to be good. There are such examples
of such things. They're usually a case where
the defeated side has been so weakened that it's highly
unlikely in the future that they will be a problem.
Then there's a kind of a--let me back up a step.
Then there's the kind of a peace that people say was
represented by the peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended
the Thirty Years War in Europe in which arrangements are
made--nobody has actually been defeated. There is no clear-cut winner; there are no
just plain losers. Everybody has fought so long and the cost
has been so great that they decided we can't hold out for victory.
We got to cut the best deal we can. Such a peace depends--it may work, it may
not, it depends upon circumstances in the future
that are very hard to predict. Then we come to what I
think is probably the worst kind of peace. One example of it is the peace that the Prussians
imposed upon the French in 1870, after the Franco-Prussian
War in which the big issue was they took Alsace-Lorraine
from the French and annexed it to Germany,
but at the same time they did not so harm France that France
could never again be a menace. But they could be sure that for
the foreseeable future, and who knows maybe forever,
the French would be angry and dissatisfied and determined to
recover Alsace-Lorraine, even if it meant war.
That was true, to a degree, although we need to be aware that the best
evidence we have is that by 1914 the French actually had pretty
well given up on Alsace-Lorraine, although people kept
talking as though that's why the French went to war,
but wasn't true. But also there, of course, there were Frenchmen
who did believe that way, but on balance it probably
wasn't so. I suppose the best example of that unsatisfactory peace though is the
peace that ended the First World War, the Peace of Versailles,
where the Germans were treated very harshly, in their own opinion, although much harsher
solutions were available that were rejected, but also
they lost a lot of territory and had a lot of restrictions
put upon them, but also there was no permanent harm that
guaranteed that Germany would not be able, when it recovered
from the war, to reverse that decision. That is the same
kind of thing, terrible situation in which the defeated power
is totally dissatisfied with the peace and is in a condition
down the road to be strong enough to break it. Now, where
does the thirty-years peace fit in here? The closest
analogy, in my opinion, is Westphalia.
I think that the two sides had both found this a very
unpleasant, uncomfortable war, producing dangers and risks
that neither had ever anticipated, and that the forces
who were in control at the time that the peace was made felt it
just wasn't worth having a fight to the finish for the gains that
could be made. So, this is the key thing. If that is true, then peace was possible.
Then the Peloponnesian War that follows is not inevitable.
Scholars argue still did Thucydides say it was
inevitable? I think he did; most scholars do. Some people think not,
but whatever he may have said that is certainly a view many a
scholar has taken. So I'm saying no, and the reason I'm saying that is--first of
all because of the facts I've just laid out before you,
but I think also this is important, so much depends not
only on objective conditions but on intention. This is one place where historians differ
typically from political scientists. Political scientists
like to have everything--what's the word I want?
Not having to do with human intention in any case.
They had to be automatic; they like to be systemic.
That's what they like. Nations are billiard balls.
You can't look inside them; they're not made up of people.
They're not even made up of factions or parties. The state does what it has to do because of
the place on the pool table where it is located. Historians
like to ask what were these guys interested in, what did they
want, what were they afraid of, who were they made
at? That's the way proper historians--it's true
that proper historians are harder and harder to
find. Too many sort of political scientists hidden
among the historians.
But a key question to whether this peace rather would last has
to do with, in my opinion, with these human questions.
How do the players really feel about it? Do they see it as this is the way that it's
going to be, we want it to be peaceful or are they just
accepting it because they can't avoid it? Well, I think
the evidence suggests that the people who made the treaty
certainly were persuaded that peace was better than war,
and they would like to bind their hands to some degree to
make it harder for a war to come out. Pericles, I think, will prove that by the
time we get a chance to examine his behavior in 431,
but I think it was the peace party, and there are parties in
Sparta as I've told you before, that group of people who
typically was conservative and reluctant to risk what they had
already for what they might gain in future warfare,
and I believe that they were the normal party in Sparta,
and this is all debatable, but I think that that's the
normal situation in Sparta. To break the peace you need
for that situation to be undone by something and events,
opportunities, fears, chances to succeed have to fall into place in a certain way to break
that. So, what I'm telling you is, from my point
of view, it's not at all clear that there needs to
be another war. Well, anybody who says that has the obligation
of examining why did the war break out? Why did the peace fail?
And that's what I will turn to next. I will examine the years between 445 and 431
in which the peace is tested to see whether it really had
any viability before it failed. We'll have a look at that
next time.