Peloponnesian War - 431-404 BC
The Peloponnesian War was prolonged to an immense length, and, long as it was, it was short without parallel for the misfortunes that it brought upon Hellas. For twenty-seven years, from 431 to 404 BC, the Hellenic world was consumed by a conflict of unprecedented scale and ferocity. The Peloponnesian War, pitting the maritime empire of Athens against the landed confederacy of Sparta, was more than a simple struggle for military supremacy. It was a tectonic clash of ideologies, a brutal contest between two irreconcilable ways of life that shattered the golden age of Greece and left its political and moral fabric permanently scarred.
Never had so many cities been taken and laid desolate, here by the barbarians, here by the parties contending (the old inhabitants being sometimes removed to make room for others); never was there so much banishing and blood-shedding, now on the field of battle, now in the strife of faction. Old stories of occurrences handed down by tradition, but scantily confirmed by experience, suddenly ceased to be incredible; there were earthquakes of unparalleled extent and violence; eclipses of the sun occurred with a frequency unrecorded in previous history; there were great droughts in sundry places and consequent famines, and that most calamitous and awfully fatal visitation, the plague. All this came upon them with the war. Chronicled with profound insight by the Athenian general Thucydides, who intended his work to be "a possession for all time," the war serves as a timeless case study in the dynamics of power, the corrosive nature of fear, and the tragic consequences when reason is supplanted by passion.
The roots of the conflict lay in the aftermath of the Persian Wars (490-479 BC), a period that had cemented a fragile Panhellenic unity against a common enemy. By the brilliant part which the Athenians under Themistocles had played against the Persians, the influence of Athens had greatly increased throughout Greece; and this was further strengthened by the fact that the war against Persia, which still continued, was chiefly conducted by sea, where Athens was much more powerful than Sparta. From this date then begins the period of the leadership or hegemony of Athens in Greece, which continued to the close of the Peloponnesian war, 404 BC.
Athens now exerted her influence to form a confederacy including the Greek islands and maritime towns as well as Athens herself, the object of which was to provide for the continuance of the war by the payment into a common treasury at Delos of a fixed sum of money, and by furnishing ships for the same purpose. In this confederacy Athens of course had the lead, and gradually was able to render tributary many of the islands and smaller maritime states. Taking leadership of this Delian League, an alliance of Aegean city-states initially formed to continue the fight against Persia, Athens gradually and ruthlessly converted it into an empire. Tribute money intended for collective defense was diverted to fund the magnificent building projects of Pericles, including the Parthenon. Rebellious allies were subdued with brutal force, their autonomy stripped away.
In 469 BC the victories won by the Athenians over the Persians was crowned by the double victory of Cimon, the son of Miltiades, over the fleet and army of the Persians on the river Eurymedon, in the south of Asia Minor; and this victory was followed by the Peace of Cimon, which secured the freedom and independence of all Greek towns and islands. Shortly after followed the brilliant administration of Pericles, during which Athens reached the height of her political grandeur, while at the same time she flourished in trade, in arts, in science and in literature.
To Sparta and its Peloponnesian League, a conservative coalition based on land power and oligarchic principles, the rise of Athens was an existential threat. Athens represented the new: dynamic, democratic, commercial, and expansionist. Sparta embodied the old: rigid, oligarchic, agrarian, and insular. The position of Athens, however, soon raised up a number of enemies. Sparta regarded her prosperity with jealousy; and the arrogance of Athens had produced a pretty general feeling of indignation and hatred. Two hostile confederacies were formed in Greece. At the head of one of these confederacies was the city of Athens, which was joined by all the Ionian states of Greece, and more or less supported by the democratic party in every state. At the head of the other confederacy stood Sparta, which was similarly joined by all the Dorian states, and supported by the aristocratic party everywhere. Thucydides identified the truest cause of the war not in the specific grievances that sparked it, but in the deeper, structural reality: "the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta." At last in 431 war was declared by Sparta on the complaint of Corinth that Athens had furnished assistance to the island of Corcyra in its war against the mother city; and on that of Megara, that the Megarean ships and merchandise were excluded from all the ports and markets of Attica.
The war itself unfolded in three distinct acts. The first decade, the Archidamian War (431-421 BC), named after the Spartan king who launched the annual invasions of Attica, saw a stark contrast in military approaches. The Spartan strategy was simple: ravage the farmland around Athens and provoke a hoplite battle, the kind of close-quarters fighting at which their superior infantry excelled. The Athenian strategy, masterminded by Pericles, was one of brilliant, patient defiance. He ordered the entire rural population within the Long Walls, a fortified corridor connecting Athens to its port of Piraeus.
In the first part of the Peloponnesian War the Spartans had considerable successes, while a great calamity befell the Athenians, who had collected all the inhabitants of the country districts of Attica within the walls of the city; and in consequence a pestilence broke out which carried off thousands of the inhabitants, and among them Pericles himself. This strategy, however, carried a horrific cost. In the crowded, unsanitary conditions of the city, a devastating plague broke out in 430 BC, killing perhaps a third of the population, including Pericles himself. His death robbed Athens of its most sober and strategic leader, opening the door to a new generation of demagogues, like the ambitious and ruthless Cleon, who favored a more aggressive and less principled prosecution of the war.
From this blow, however, the city soon recovered, and in 425 the early successes of the Spartans in Attica were compensated by the capture of Pylos in Messenia by the Athenian general Demosthenes, who at the same time succeeded in shutting up 400 Spartans in the small island of Sphacteria, opposite Pylos, where they were ultimately starved to surrender. The person to whom the surrender was made was the demagogue Cleon, who, in consequence of his military successes, obtained the command of an army which was sent to operate against the Spartan general Brasidas in Thrace. But in 422 he was defeated by Brasidas before the town of Amphipolis, and himself slain, after which the opposite party in Athens got the upper hand, and concluded the peace with Sparta known as the Peace of Nicias (421 BC).
The war’s character began to mutate, revealing a deepening brutality that Thucydides documented with clinical precision. The civil war on the island of Corcyra (modern Corfu) became a microcosm of this descent. What began as a political dispute between democratic and oligarchic factions spiraled into a savage slaughter, with Athenians and Spartans intervening as proxies. Thucydides described how the conflict dissolved the bonds of society: "Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them." Reckless audacity became courageous loyalty, and prudent hesitation was deemed cowardice. This breakdown of language and morality was a symptom of the stasis (factional strife) that the wider war was fostering throughout Greece.
The effect of the Peace of Nicias was to divide the Spartans and the Corinthians, who had hitherto been allies. The latter united themselves with Argos, Elis and some of the Arcadian towns to wrest from Sparta the hegemony of the Peloponnesus. In this design they were supported by Alcibiades, a nephew of Pericles, a man of handsome figure and great personal accomplishments. The war which was now waged between Sparta and Corinth with her allies resulted, however, in favor of the former, whose arms were victorious at the battle of Mantinea in 418.
A fragile peace was a hollow truce that settled nothing. The second act of the war was defined by the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily (415-413 BC), a catastrophic overreach born of imperial hubris. Soon after this the Athenians resumed hostilities, fitting out in 415 BC a magnificent army and fleet, under the command of Alcibiades, Nicias and Lamachus, for the reduction of the Dorian city of Syracuse in Sicily. This undertaking, which renewed the race hatred between Sparta and Athens, was a complete failure. Alcibiades was accused in his absence of several offenses against religion and the constitution, and deprived of his command. Thirsting for revenge, he betook himself to Sparta, and exhorted the city to renew the war with Athens. Persuaded by the charismatic Alcibiades, Athens launched a massive armada to conquer the powerful city-state of Syracuse, ostensibly to secure resources and prevent it from aiding the Peloponnesians. The venture was a monumental miscalculation.
The recall of Alcibiades to stand trial for sacrilege (which led him to defect to Sparta), strategic blunders on the ground, and the eventual arrival of Spartan reinforcements under Gylippus sealed the fate of the Athenian force. By his advice one Spartan army was despatched to Attica, where it took up such a position as prevented the Athenians from obtaining supplies from Euboea, while another was sent under Gylippus to assist their kindred in Sicily.
These steps were ruinous to Athens. Lamachus fell in the siege of Syracuse, and the Athenian fleet was totally destroyed. The reinforcements sent out under Nicias and Demosthenes were defeated (413 BC) by the combined Spartan and Syracusan armies. The entire expeditionary army and fleet were utterly destroyed. It was, as Thucydides wrote, "a total destruction—army, fleet, everything was lost, and out of many, only few returned." All the Athenians who escaped death were made captives and compelled to work as slaves in the quarries of Sicily, although it may be mentioned as an interesting fact that many of these captives obtained their liberty by being able to recite fragments of Euripides. This defeat crippled Athenian power and morale irrevocably.
The final phase, the Decelean or Ionian War (413-404 BC), saw Sparta, now advised by Alcibiades (who had once again switched sides) and funded by a newly assertive Persia, take the fight to the Aegean. After this disaster many of the allies of Athens joined the Spartans, who now pressed on the war with greater energy. By establishing a permanent fort at Decelea in Attica, they crippled Athenian agriculture and triggered a mass slave desertion.
More critically, they began to challenge Athens at sea, promising Persian gold and support to Athens’s restive allies, who now began to revolt in earnest. The Athenians recalled Alcibiades, who returned in 407, and was received by his fellow-citizens with enthusiasm as their expected deliverer. Despite a remarkable recovery and a string of naval victories under Alcibiades (now back in the Athenian fold), the political instability in Athens proved fatal. A few months later he was again an exile, having been deprived of the command because one of his subordinates had lost a naval battle fought off Ephesus in his absence. The democracy was briefly overthrown in an oligarchic coup in 411 BC, and though it was restored, the civic unity of the Periclean age was gone. During the rest of the war the Athenians had only one success, the naval victory won off the islands of Arginusae over the Spartan Callicratidas in 406.
The final blow came at the Battle of Aegospotami in 405 BC, where the Spartan admiral Lysander launched a surprise attack and captured almost the entire Athenian fleet. In the following year (405) the Spartans made themselves masters of the whole of the Athenian fleet except nine vessels, while the majority of the crews were on shore at Aegospotamos on the Hellespont. With its navy gone and its grain supply from the Black Sea severed, Athens was besieged and starved into submission in 404 BC. The Spartans now easily subdued the islands and states that still maintained their allegiance to the Athenians, and laid siege to Athens itself. In 404 B.C. the war was terminated by the Athenians' surrender. The Long Walls were torn down to the sound of flutes, the empire was dissolved, and a brutal pro-Spartan oligarchy was installed. Sparta immediately imposed upon Athens an aristocratic form of government, placing the supreme power in the hands of the Thirty Tyrants. Only a year later, however, (403), Thrasybulus was able to overthrow this hated rule and reestablished the democracy.
The aftermath of the Peloponnesian War was not a triumphant new order but a void. The fall of Athens resulted in Sparta's leadership or hegemony in Greece, which lasted till the battle of Leuctra, 371 BC. The Spartans now abused their power and speedily roused the hatred and jealousy of the other states. The Greek states which had up to this time been, and still continued to be, leaders, had now lost almost entirely their manliness and independent spirit, and no longer maintained the hereditary war against Persia, but each sought the aid of that power for its own purpose. The Spartans did indeed send an expedition into Asia Minor, but it came to nothing; and the states of Greece, the Spartans included, at last, in 387, agreed to the disgraceful Peace of Antalcidas, by which the whole of the west coast of Asia Minor was ceded to the Persians, and the Greek colonies there thus deprived of the independence that had been secured to them by the Peace of Cimon.
An act of violence committed by a Spartan general in Thebes in 380 in the end led to the complete downfall of that city. The aristocratic party in Thebes, when the Spartan army happened to be in the neighborhood, prevailed upon the general to give his assistance in overthrowing their opponents and establishing an aristocratic government. A number of the less prominent members of the defeated party, among them Pelopidas, made their escape to Athens, where they got the support and assistance of the democratic party there. They soon returned in disguise to their own city, surprised and murdered the leaders of the aristocratic party, expelled the Spartan garrison, and again set up a democratic government.
These circumstances give a good idea of the fury of party strife which was then general in the Greek cities. The immediate result of this counter-revolution. The intellectual self-confidence of fifth-century Athens was replaced by a cynicism and disillusionment palpable in the philosophies of the following century. The true victor was not Sparta, nor any Greek polis, but the semi-Hellenized kingdom of Macedon to the north. Under Philip II, who had learned the art of war as a hostage in Thebes, and his son Alexander the Great, the political energy of Greece would be harnessed for a new, imperial project.
In the end, the Peloponnesian War stands as a profound tragedy. It was a conflict that no one truly won, but from which all of Hellas ultimately lost. Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. Thucydides’s history endures because it transcends its ancient context. It is a stark exploration of how fear and honor drive nations to war, how necessity can be invoked to justify atrocity, and how the very virtues of a society—Athenian daring and Spartan discipline—can, when pushed to their extremes, become the instruments of its downfall. The war serves as an eternal reminder of the fragility of civilization in the face of unchecked ambition, and the terrible price paid when a world turns its weapons upon itself.
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