Peloponnesian War

The Peloponnesian War is the name modern historians give to the war fought from 431 to 404 BCE between Athens and Sparta and their allies. The name comes from the Peloponnese, the large southern peninsula of Greece where Sparta and most of its allies lived, and so it reflects an Athenian point of view: for Athenians it was the war against the Peloponnesians.

It was not one continuous campaign but a series of wars, truces and rebellions. The fighting stretched from the Black Sea approaches to Sicily, and it involved almost every Greek community in some way. Battles were fought on land and at sea; cities were besieged, starved and sometimes destroyed; and civil wars broke out inside many cities as democrats and oligarchs took sides with Athens or Sparta.

The war matters for three reasons. It ended the period of Athenian power in which the Parthenon was built and tragedy and philosophy flourished. It shows how a rivalry between two great powers can drag in a whole region. And it produced one of the first works of critical history, Thucydides' account, which is still studied by historians, political scientists and military officers.

After the Greeks defeated the Persian invasions of 480–479 BCE, Athens organized a naval alliance of Aegean cities in 478 BCE, known today as the Delian League. Allies either supplied ships or paid a yearly contribution called phoros (tribute). Over the following decades Athens turned the alliance into an empire: it moved the treasury from Delos to Athens (traditionally dated 454 BCE), punished cities that tried to leave, planted Athenian settlers on allied land and used some of the money for its own building programme.

Sparta led a looser land alliance, the Peloponnesian League. Spartan citizens were full-time soldiers whose way of life rested on the labour of the helots, an enslaved population in Laconia and Messenia who greatly outnumbered them. Fear of a helot revolt made Sparta cautious about long wars far from home.

In 446/445 BCE the two blocs agreed the Thirty Years' Peace, which recognized each side's sphere. But Athens was a democracy with a large fleet and an income from tribute; Sparta was an oligarchic military society with the best infantry in Greece. Each side distrusted the other's ambitions.

Thucydides separates the immediate complaints from the deeper cause. The complaints came from quarrels involving Corinth, Sparta's powerful ally. In 433 BCE Athens made a defensive alliance with Corcyra (Corfu), which was at war with its mother-city Corinth, and Athenian ships took part in the sea battle of Sybota. In 432 BCE Athens besieged Potidaea, a city in the northern Aegean that belonged to its empire but had ties to Corinth, after it revolted. Around the same time Athens passed the Megarian Decree, which excluded the people of Megara from the harbours of the empire and the market of Athens.

At a congress in Sparta in 432 BCE, the Corinthians and others accused Athens of breaking the peace, and the Spartan assembly voted that the treaty had been broken. Athens, led by Pericles, refused Spartan demands to lift the Megarian Decree and to leave Potidaea, offering arbitration instead.

Thucydides' famous judgement is that “the truest cause, though least spoken of” was the growth of Athenian power and the fear this caused in Sparta, which made war inevitable (1.23). This sentence has shaped all later debate. Some historians accept it; others argue that particular decisions, such as the Corcyra alliance or the refusal to rescind the Megarian Decree, made the war happen when it did, and that it was not inevitable at all.

The war began in 431 BCE with a Theban attack on Plataea, an ally of Athens, and a Spartan invasion of Attica led by King Archidamus II, after whom this phase is named. Pericles' strategy was to avoid a land battle: the rural population moved inside the walls of Athens and the Long Walls connecting it to the port of Piraeus, while the fleet raided the Peloponnese and kept the grain supply and tribute flowing. Sparta invaded almost every year, destroying crops and farmhouses.

In 430 BCE an epidemic broke out in the overcrowded city. Thucydides, who caught it himself and survived, describes the symptoms and the collapse of social and religious norms in vivid detail. Pericles died of it in 429 BCE. Thucydides reports that at least 4,400 hoplites and 300 cavalrymen died (3.87), and he says the number of others who died could not be discovered. Modern estimates of the total death toll vary widely, often around a quarter to a third of the population, and the identity of the disease (typhus, typhoid fever, smallpox and others have been proposed) is still disputed.

After Pericles, more aggressive leaders such as Cleon came forward. The war saw brutal episodes: the Athenian debate in 427 BCE over whether to kill all adult men of rebellious Mytilene (a second vote cancelled the order just in time), the Spartan execution of the Plataean defenders after the city surrendered, and savage civil war on Corcyra, which Thucydides uses to show how war corrupts language and morality. In 425 BCE the Athenians trapped Spartan soldiers on the island of Sphacteria near Pylos and captured about 120 Spartiates among the prisoners, a shock to the Greek world. Sparta answered by sending Brasidas to the north, where he took Amphipolis in 424/423 BCE; Thucydides, the Athenian general responsible for that area, was exiled for failing to save it.

In 422 BCE both Cleon and Brasidas were killed in battle at Amphipolis. With the leading advocates of war gone, the two sides agreed the Peace of Nicias in 421 BCE, meant to last fifty years.

The peace was never fully carried out. Alcibiades, a brilliant and ambitious young Athenian, built an alliance with Argos against Sparta, but Sparta won the large land battle of Mantinea in 418 BCE. In 416 BCE Athens attacked Melos, an island that wanted to stay neutral. Thucydides presents a dramatized debate, the Melian Dialogue, in which the Athenian envoys argue that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. After the siege the Athenians killed the adult men and enslaved the women and children.

In 415 BCE Athens voted to send a great expedition to Sicily, officially to help its allies there against Syracuse, but many hoped to conquer the island. Thucydides lists 134 triremes and 5,100 hoplites in the first force (6.43). Just before sailing, the herms (sacred pillars) of the city were mutilated, and Alcibiades, one of the three commanders, was accused of mocking the Mysteries. Recalled for trial, he escaped and went over to Sparta, advising it to send help to Syracuse and to fortify a post in Attica.

The siege of Syracuse failed. The Spartan commander Gylippus organized the defence; Athenian reinforcements under Demosthenes arrived in 413 BCE but could not break through, and an eclipse of the moon delayed the retreat. The fleet was defeated inside the Great Harbour and the army was destroyed during its retreat overland. Nicias and Demosthenes were executed, and Thucydides reports about 7,000 prisoners, many of whom died in the stone quarries of Syracuse (7.87). It was the greatest disaster in Athenian history.

In 413 BCE Sparta occupied Decelea in Attica permanently. Farming around Athens became almost impossible, the overland supply route from Euboea was cut, and Thucydides says more than 20,000 slaves deserted, many of them skilled workers. Allies across the Aegean revolted. Most importantly, Sparta made agreements with the Persian satraps (governors) of Asia Minor: Persian money would pay Spartan crews, and in return Sparta acknowledged the King's claims to the Greek cities of Asia.

The strain produced a political crisis in Athens. In 411 BCE an oligarchic regime, the Four Hundred, took power; the fleet at Samos stayed loyal to democracy, and democracy was restored in 410 BCE. Recalled by the fleet, Alcibiades helped win victories such as Cyzicus (410 BCE), but after a defeat at Notium in 406 BCE he went into exile again.

The Athenians won a large naval battle at Arginusae in 406 BCE, but because survivors and the dead were not recovered in a storm, six generals were condemned and executed in an illegal collective trial. In 405 BCE the Spartan admiral Lysander, generously funded by the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger, captured almost the entire Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in the Hellespont. With its grain route cut, Athens was besieged and starved, and it surrendered in 404 BCE.

According to Xenophon, Corinth and Thebes wanted Athens destroyed and its people enslaved, but Sparta refused. The terms were still harsh: Athens had to pull down the Long Walls and the walls of Piraeus, give up all but twelve ships, recall its exiles and follow Sparta's lead in foreign policy. Xenophon says the walls were demolished to the music of flute-girls, as people believed it was the beginning of freedom for Greece.

In the short term Sparta installed a narrow oligarchy in Athens, the Thirty, who killed perhaps 1,500 citizens and resident foreigners according to later sources and drove many more into exile. Democratic exiles led by Thrasybulus restored democracy in 403 BCE, with an amnesty meant to stop revenge. The trial and execution of Socrates in 399 BCE took place in the shadow of these years; some of his associates, including Critias, a leader of the Thirty, and Alcibiades, had been bitterly resented.

In the long term, Spartan leadership proved short-lived. Sparta's former allies turned against it in the Corinthian War (395–387 BCE), Persia regained control of the Greek cities of Asia Minor in the King's Peace of 387/386 BCE, and Thebes broke Spartan power at Leuctra in 371 BCE. Many historians see the war as having weakened the city-states so much that Macedon under Philip II could dominate them a few decades later, though this is a broad interpretation rather than a simple chain of cause and effect.

The human costs were immense and fell heavily on non-combatants: the plague victims crowded into Athens, the people of Melos and Scione killed or enslaved, rural families whose farms were burned year after year, and the enslaved men who rowed or laboured for both sides. No reliable overall casualty figures exist.

Athenian writers of the time reacted to the war in many forms. Aristophanes' comedies, such as the Acharnians (425 BCE) and Lysistrata (411 BCE), mock war leaders and imagine peace; Euripides' Trojan Women (415 BCE), staged shortly after Melos, shows the suffering of captive women. Later Athenian orators remembered the war as a lesson against the rule of the Thirty and in praise of democracy's restoration.

For centuries the war was read mainly through Thucydides. Thomas Hobbes published an English translation in 1629, and Thucydides became a foundational author for the “realist” tradition in international relations. During the Cold War, many writers compared the United States, a maritime and commercial democracy, to Athens and the Soviet Union, a land power, to Sparta.

In recent years the phrase “Thucydides Trap”, popularized by the political scientist Graham Allison, has been used to describe the danger of war when a rising power challenges an established one, especially with regard to China and the United States. Chinese leaders and scholars have often rejected the idea that such a war is inevitable, and many classicists argue that the analogy oversimplifies both Thucydides and the ancient situation.

In Greece itself the war is remembered as a tragic civil war among Greeks rather than as a national story. Sparta and Athens have become symbols of two ideals, discipline and freedom, but ancient historians warn that both images are partly myths created by later admirers.

Thucydides, an Athenian who served as a general in 424 BCE and then lived twenty years in exile, began writing when the war broke out because he expected it to be the greatest war yet (1.1). His method statement (1.22) says that he checked eyewitness reports carefully, while the speeches were written as he thought each speaker would have needed to speak, keeping as close as possible to the general sense of what was actually said. Scholars therefore treat the speeches as interpretive compositions, not transcripts. His work breaks off in the middle of the events of 411 BCE, and its unfinished state has fuelled long debate about the order in which its parts were written (the so-called “composition question”).

Xenophon's Hellenica continues the story from 411 BCE, but it is less systematic and generally sympathetic to Sparta. Fragments of an anonymous historian found on papyrus at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, known as the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, give independent details for the 400s and 390s BCE. Diodorus Siculus (1st century BCE) and Plutarch's biographies of Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades and Lysander (around 100 CE) add material from lost historians, but must be used critically.

Inscriptions provide an essential check on the literary sources. The Athenian Tribute Lists record the one-sixtieth share of tribute given to Athena each year, and decrees such as the reassessment of 425 BCE show Athens greatly raising the tribute during the war. Comedy, tragedy and speeches in the law courts add social evidence, and archaeological work, for example on the mass burial found in the Kerameikos cemetery that has been linked to the plague, adds physical data.

Responsibility for the war is the oldest debate. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, in The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (1972), argued that Sparta and its allies were more to blame than Athens and that the Megarian Decree has been misunderstood as a trade embargo; his reading of the decree remains controversial. Donald Kagan, in a four-volume history completed in 1987 and summarized in a single volume in 2003, emphasized human choices and argued that the war was not inevitable. Others stress structural factors such as the incompatibility of Athenian imperialism with Greek ideals of autonomy.

A second debate concerns the Athenian empire itself: was it a tyranny hated by its subjects, as Thucydides' speakers often claim, or did many ordinary citizens of allied cities prefer Athenian protection and democracy to their own oligarchs? The frequent revolts after 413 BCE and the loyalty of some cities to the end give evidence for both views.

A third debate is about Thucydides as a historian. Admired since antiquity for accuracy, he has been read as a scientific historian, a tragic artist who shaped events into a moral story, and a political theorist. Scholars have noted his silences, for example his limited attention to Persian diplomacy and to economic matters, and his personal involvement in the Amphipolis campaign. Modern readings of the “Thucydides Trap” have prompted classicists to insist that his famous sentence about fear and power is a claim about one war, not a universal law.