Thucydides, Book I: Failed Visions of Strategic Restraint
As other panelists have correctly noted, Pericles approached the prospect of war with greater elan vital than did Archidamus. This is true. Pericles oratory typically radiated confidence in all things Athenian. But to stop there would be to shortchange the difficulty of Pericles’ real accomplishment. Stopping motions for unwise or humiliating concessions to Sparta was not difficult. It was highly unlikely the Athenians would have voted to re-accept ancient Spartan hegemony or abandon their new empire simply to avoid war. In Athenian eyes, the Spartans were oathbreakers for refusing arbitration as their treaty demanded and arrogant and insulting blusterers whose power in Hellas no longer matched their words.
No, what Pericles managed to persuade the Athenians to abandon their instinctive rush to a decisive battle of traditional phalanx warfare for a novel strategy of limited warfare in a long war that played to the very Athenian strengths that Archidamus most feared. As Pericles concluded:
…This, I think, is a tolerably fair account of the position of the Peloponnesians; that of Athens is free from the defects that I have criticized in them, and has other advantages of its own, which they can show nothing to equal. If they march against our country we will sail against theirs, and it will then be found that the desolation of the whole of Attica is not the same as that of even a fraction of Peloponnese; for they will not be able to supply the deficiency except by a battle, while we have plenty of land both on the islands and the continent. The rule of the sea is indeed a great matter. Consider for a moment. Suppose that we were islanders; can you conceive a more impregnable position? Well, this in future should, as far as possible, be our conception of our position. Dismissing all thought of our land and houses, we must vigilantly guard the sea and the city. No irritation that we may feel for the former must provoke us to a battle with the numerical superiority of the Peloponnesians. A victory would only be succeeded by another battle against the same superiority: a reverse involves the loss of our allies, the source of our strength, who will not remain quiet a day after we become unable to march against them. We must cry not over the loss of houses and land but of men’s lives; since houses and land do not gain men, but men them. And if I had thought that I could persuade you, I would have bid you go out and lay them waste with your own hands, and show the Peloponnesians that this at any rate will not make you submit.
I have many other reasons to hope for a favourable issue, if you can consent not to combine schemes of fresh conquest with the conduct of the war, and will abstain from wilfully involving yourselves in other dangers; indeed, I am more afraid of our own blunders than of the enemy’s devices.
Pericles, it must be said, offered at best an incomplete strategy of exhaustion—to stretch the economic resources of poorer Sparta and its political will to the breaking point from attrition and frustration. There was no method for Athens to “compel Sparta to do its will” in the vision of Pericles and bring the war to a favorable political conclusion; instead, it relied on Spartan leaders realizing the futility of the efforts and giving up the war. Pericles might have suggested investing Athenian resources in aiding another helot revolt to further increase pressure on Sparta but he did not. Overall, Pericles imposed an extremely conservative strategy of pursuing war with great restraint and calculated force; a plan designed to wisely husband Athenian resources and fighting capacity—but a politically unsatisfying one as it flouted Greek conceptions of heroism and honor. For this reason, among others including the untimely death of its author, the Athenian strategy failed.
It was however more of a strategy than what the Spartans could bring to bear.
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nati:
October 22nd, 2016 at 7:49 pm
War not always can be avoid. There are cases that you have no choise but to go to war.
I think the expanding Athenian empire was a real threat to Sphartan territory of influence, to the Peleponnece league existence and at the end, even the Sphartan polis security.
Am I wrong?
Else, if I am right, could Spartha avoid war? Was there other solution for her concerns? Was it a good idea for her to continue her policies of isulation and no involment?
Not even king Archidamus suggest to avoid war, only to postpone in order to preaper better.
zen:
October 23rd, 2016 at 5:37 am
An excellent question, nati.
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The Athenians were expansionists but in a curious way. After the Persian wars, the Spartans retired from active hostilities against Persia but the Athenians picked up the Pan-Hellenic banner of continuing the fight to liberate Hellas – i.e. their fellow Ionian Greeks in Asia minor and Aegean islands still under Persian rule. This was the origin of the Delian League – the Ionian Greeks initially really did want to join with Ionian Athens for self-protection against the Persians. The Spartans, being Dorian Greeks, were not much interested in the fate of their very distant cousins and even less interested in fighting far from home.
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The Delian league of equals morphed into the Athenian empire as member states began to opt to pay tribute to Athens rather than provide ships and men for military service as an ally and equal. Athens did not covet Peloponnesian territory nor did they seek to challenge Sparta’s dominance there but they were otherwise aggressively expanding across the Mediterranean world from the coast of the Black sea to Egypt to Italy and Spain.
With each colony and conquest, the power of Athens grew and it was this that Sparta could not tolerate, at least as Thucydides tells it. War could have been avoided with arbitration: even if the arbitrator had ruled against Athens on every point from the Megaran decree to Corcyra it would have been a face saving way for Athens to climb down. The Spartans did not want arbitration because that would have implied the two polities were equals. Spartan leaders wanted nothing less that a public knuckling under to Spartan demands or war, so they asked for impossible terms from Athens ( give up their empire)
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http://www.ancestraljourneys.org/images/Phoenician_colonies.png
nati:
October 23rd, 2016 at 7:29 am
That demands came when they already decided for war.
Maybe they could have gone for arbitration at erlier stages.
The problem is that they were very bad in diplomatic relations with Athens, even at their best point, in the persian wars, they were problematic.
The real diplomatic force in the Peleponnesian league were the Corinthians, and it happend to be that they were very eager for war.
Anyway, I think if something could be than it was earlier. At this point it was to late. History has it’s ways.
A. E. Clark:
October 23rd, 2016 at 4:19 pm
Thank you for this excellent essay.
That both Pericles’ and Archidamus’ counsels of strategic restraint were unavailing did indeed prove all-important for what followed.
It intrigues me that the two counsels failed in different ways. Archidamus’ proposal was at once voted down. Pericles’ was accepted, but his people could not stay the course.
Does this not illustrate that in order to succeed, the counselor must satisfy two constraints? His advice must be sufficiently persuasive to be accepted, but it must also be sufficiently in harmony with the “conceptions” (as you say) and culture and virtu’ of those who will carry it out that they will not screw it up in the implementation. . . . This second constraint, I suspect, is less obvious and more challenging. It calls to mind the effort of a playwright to make his lines “actor-proof.”
zen:
October 24th, 2016 at 4:44 pm
Much thanks A.E.
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I think that “harmony” as aspect is important for acceptance and continuity, except during revolutionary moments. Then it is a sharp clash to discredit and overthrow the old sense of “virtu” and replace it with another, revolutionary one.
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Some of this would happen in the Peloponnesian War when Critias and the Thirty overthrew the radical democracy….for a time.
T. Greer:
October 25th, 2016 at 2:06 pm
We will get to this in time, of course, but I’m not sure the Periclean strategy failed. The Athenians won the war–or at least, the won the first one. Sparta sued for peace. Her alliance with Corinth, Megara, etc. was broken. Thucydides stitches the two wars together into one narrative, which is fine, but there is nothing that connects the two that doesn’t also connect, say, the First World War and the Second. The Athenians won the first round following a largely Periclean strategy. The second round only started because the victors were unwilling to stick to Pericles’ famed sense of restraint.
zen:
October 25th, 2016 at 4:47 pm
” Thucydides stitches the two wars together into one narrative, which is fine, but there is nothing that connects the two that doesn’t also connect, say, the First World War and the Second.”
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whether the two ought to be connected in this way as Thucydides connected them is an excellent question. Of course, there’s much to argue that both world wars were, Nazi ideology aside, a continuation of the strategic question of whether there would be German hegemony over the Europe continent or not. Arguably, the clashes between Athens and Sparta separated by the truce were even more closely related than were the world wars