Thucydides
Thucydides is best known for his extensive history of the Peloponnesian War which took place between 431 - 404 BC.
“The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.”
— Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 1.22.4
Introduction
Thucydides set a very high bar in his introduction to The Peloponnesian War, the history of a long conflict in which he had a great deal of skin in the game.
Born in 460 BC, Thucydides was a citizen of Athens and close to thirty years old when the Peloponnesian War begin in 431 BC. Due to his family’s history and influence in Thrace, where Athens had established several colonies, Thucydides was sent to Thrace in 424 BC to protect the cities in the region from Spartan attack. When Thucydides failed to arrive at Amphipolis in time to save the city from Brasidas, the Spartan commander, this caused much alarm in Athens. Ultimately, Thucydides was blamed for the defeat and his punishment was twenty years of exile from Athens.
“I lived through the whole of it, being of an age to comprehend events, and giving my attention to them in order to know the exact truth about them. It was also my fate to be an exile from my country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis; and being present with both parties, and more especially with the Peloponnesians by reason of my exile, I had leisure to observe affairs more closely.”
— The Peloponnesian War, 5.26.5
Thucydides was not a man of few words, as the length of his history attests, but he was sparing when it came to inserting himself into the course of events. Other than brief references, his personal role in the war remains in the background and he does not dwell on his exile from Athens. During this period, exile was a severe penalty imposed on citizens. Those who were exiled were permitted to retain property but barred from living in their city. The severity of the punishment should not be underestimated. The dishonor of exile could be viewed as a fate worse than death, which is why Socrates rejected exile and opted for execution.
It is too much to expect Thucydides to be entirely objective when it came to his role in the fall of Amphipolis, but the reader gets the sense that the penalty he suffered was quite harsh given the vagaries of war. To his credit, Thucydides appears to retain his overall objectivity and, despite spending time with enemies of Athens, did not defect to Sparta like some others, such as the mercurial Athenian, Alcibiades, who later fell out of favor in Athens and defected first to Sparta and later to Persia.
I decided to read Thucydides after completing my reading of Herodotus which I wrote about last month. I found the experience of reading Thucydides very different than reading Herodotus because Thucydides is less focused on culture and anthropology. He offers far fewer digressions and anecdotes. Herodotus wrote about the Persian Wars from the perspective of a historian examining events that took place several decades earlier. He had access to individuals who lived through the Persian Wars but had no firsthand experience in that conflict. In contrast, Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War as an active participant who lived through the war and I found his depiction of battles far more comprehensive. While never boring, I did not find Thucydides to be quite as much of a “page turner” as Herodotus, and I would probably opt for Herodotus if I had to choose which historian to meet for a dinner conversation.
In this article, I will restrict myself a few sections of the book that particularly stood out during my first reading. I am planning to read the book a second time in the near future in order to reinforce what I have learned, hopefully as part of a Catherine Project course this fall. It is possible that I will write articles on each of the eight books in Thucydides when I read it for the second time, but for now I will focus on just a few topics that could help those who are deciding whether to read the book.
The Pentecontaetia
What leads a society to seek imperial power? Human ambition is an obvious factor. But in the case of Athens, one must also consider the qualities of the land in Attica. According to Thucydides, the poor soil of Attica made the region unattractive for conquest. As a result, Athens was a “safe retreat” from regional strife elsewhere and this promoted a growing population. But the poor soil made a swelling population unsustainable and this encouraged the Athenians to colonize Ionia on the other side of the Aegean Sea along the western coast of modern-day Turkey.
The defeat of Persia in 479 BC began a period of nearly half a century of Athenian imperialism which is described by Thucydides in a lengthy section of Book 1 referred to as The Pentecontaetia. This section is very useful because it bridges the gap between the end of the history documented by Herodotus and the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. In 479 BC, the Persians were dealt a final blow at Sestos, located on the north side of the Hellespont, the narrow passage linking the Aegean and Black Seas. The Spartans, along with their allies from the Peloponnesus, sailed home but the Athenians remained in the region with their Ionian allies and proceeded on a course of empire building. Athens also rebuilt its city walls despite objections from Sparta which had no walls.
In 478 BC, Athens formed a new alliance against Persia with a common treasury set up on the island of Delos, located in the Aegean Sea equidistant from Attica and Ionia. This inaugurated the alliance which came to be known as the Delian League. From the beginning, Athens was the dominant force in the alliance and other allies, many of which had limited naval capacity, paid tribute to Athens in exchange for protection. While the alliance began as a group of autonomous allies that made collective decisions, Athens eventually assume hegemonic powers and other members began to resemble subject states. The fact that allies chose to pay tribute rather than maintain military capabilities led directly to the Athenian capacity for empire.
“… The Athenians were not the old popular rulers they had been at first; and if they had more than their fair share of service, it was correspondingly easy for them to reduce any that tried to leave the confederacy. For this the allies had themselves to blame; the wish to get off service making most of them arrange to pay their share of the expense in money instead of in ships, and so to avoid having to leave their homes. Thus while Athens was increasing her navy with the funds they contributed, a revolt always found them without resources or experience for war.”
— The Peloponnesian War, 1.99.2-3
The Delian League began to resemble the Hotel California … allies who joined voluntarily at first and allowed their military capacity to degrade slowly found themselves subject to Athens and were not allowed to leave. Allies had transformed into subject states from which Athens could extract tribute.
As Athens grew dominant on the seas, Sparta remained a formidable land power and consolidated influence as the leading member of the Peloponnesian League. However, Spartan dominance did not include the type of tributary system that Athens put in place over many decades. Lacking a land force competitive with the Peloponnesians, Athens took further steps to fortify the city and built long walls between Athens and the port of Piraeus, such that any invasion of Attica would be unable to penetrate Athens itself. This led to conflicts recorded by Thucydides in The Pentecontaetia which I will not detail here, but eventually a peace treaty was agreed to in 446 BC which was supposed to remain in effect for thirty years.
By 432 BC, Athens and Sparta were on the brink of outright war. As debate raged within both cities, documented by Thucydides in a series of speeches, the realities of the chess board had solidified. Athens was a democracy at home, at least for a subset of the population, but it had become an empire abroad. Far from dismantling the Persian system, Athens had perfected the extraction of tribute from islands in the Aegean and far-flung colonies from Thrace to Ionia. Athens was convinced that it deserved its empire and used restraint with her subjects, and claimed that Sparta ceded her claims in Ionia by sailing home after the Persian Wars rather than remaining in the region. In 431 BC, Sparta voted to declare war against Athens.
“The Spartans voted that the treaty had been broken, and that war must be declared, not so much because they were persuaded by the arguments of the allies, as because they feared the growth of the power of the Athenians, seeing most of Hellas already subject to them.”
— The Peloponnesian War, 1.88.1
The Melian Dialogue
One of the most haunting episodes described by Thucydides is known as the Melian Dialogue which took place in 416 BC during the sixteenth summer of the Peloponnesian War. Melos is an island less than a hundred nautical miles south of Athens and was one of the few colonies established by Sparta. However, the Melians had attempted to maintain neutrality during the war, probably due to fear of the strong naval power of Athens and the limited ability of Sparta to be of assistance in the event of an attack. By 416 BC, the Athenians decided that Melian neutrality was no longer acceptable and send thirty ships and several thousand armed men to pressure the Melians into submission.
Through a series of dialogues, or speeches, Thucydides attempted to reconstruct the negotiations between Athens and Melos. But this was hardly a negotiation because Athens held all of the cards in terms of military superiority and the Athenians did not even pretend to base their demands on higher principles, noting that real negotiations only occur between equals in power and, in other cases, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
A Melian pledge of neutrality was not sufficient for Athens because of the message it might send. In the view of the colonies and other lands subject to Athens, the only reason for Athens to agree to Melian neutrality would be if Melos was perceived to be strong enough to resist. When the Melians appeal to the Athenians to consider how their actions might appear in the eyes of the gods, Athens dismissed the need to do so.
“When you speak in favor of the gods, we may as fairly hope for that as yourselves; neither our pretensions nor our conduct being in any way contrary to what men believed of the gods, or practice among themselves. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist forever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. Thus, as far as the gods are concerned, we have no fear and no reason to fear that we shall be at a disadvantage.”
— The Peloponnesian War, 5.105.1-3
The Melian plea for justice and fair dealings clearly fell on deaf ears. Might makes right, and the Athenians make the case that if the tables were turned, Melos would surely attempt to subjugate Athens in just the same way. The Athenians also cast doubt on the possibility that Sparta would have the desire or ability to come to the aid of Melos in a conflict. Melos is offered the opportunity to do the only prudent thing, that is, to subject themselves to Athens as a tribute-paying “ally.” In this manner, the Melians could continue to enjoy their country and avoid certain destruction.
But the Melians were not buying this argument.
“Our resolution, Athenians, is the same as it was at first. We will not in a moment deprive of freedom a city that has been inhabited these seven hundred years; but we put our trust in the fortune by which the gods have preserved it until now, and in the help often, that is, of the Spartans; and so we will try and save ourselves. Meanwhile, we invite you to allow us to be friends to you and foes to neither party, and to retire from our country after making such a treaty as shall seem fit to us both.”
— The Peloponnesian War, 5.112.2-3
Athens proceeded to construct a wall around the Melians and began a siege which lasted into the winter season, maintained by a small garrison left behind when the majority of the Athenian forces withdrew from the island. When Melos succeeded in making progress against the shrunken Athenian lines, reinforcements were sent from Athens and the Melian surrender soon followed. The Athenians proceeded to put to death all adult males. All of the women and children were sold into slavery and Athens sent five hundred colonists to repopulate Melos as a new territory.
The Athenians were correct in the short run. Melos had no ability to resist and perhaps the Athenian actions taken in response intimidated other subjugated territories. However, this type of behavior obviously did not inspire much loyalty. As the war dragged on, Athenian territories were quick to defect to the Spartans when the opportunity arose. Far from being loyal allies, Athens was running a tyrannical empire from which subjected people were eager to escape when presented with a viable opportunity.
Disaster in Sicily
The voluntary opening of a new front in a war is not a step to be taken lightly when the enemy is far from being defeated. This is the decision that faced Athens in the winter of 415 BC when a vigorous debate took place regarding whether Athens should expand the war to Sicily.
Nicias was a wealthy Athenian politician and general who warned against such an expedition at a time when there were enemies to be fought closer to home, despite a fragile treaty that was then in place with Sparta. Nicias was against the idea of “grasping at another empire before we have secured the one we have already.” Given the distance between Athens and Sicily, Nicias believed that it was unlikely that the Sicilians could be permanently subjugated. At the time, many of the younger men were agitating for the expedition and Nicias urged older men to use their hard fought wisdom to resist a rash action that could lead to disaster.
Alcibiades was one of the hawkish young aristocrats and he represented the other side of the debate. The essence of his argument was that Sicily was not a great power but a “rabble” that could not be united into a coherent defensive force. As a result, Athens would have few problems defeating what amounted to a mob of competing interests. Furthermore, he used the pretext of coming to the aid of allies in Sicily that have called for help, despite the fact that the Sicilians never came to the aid of Athens in war. This one-sided “alliance” did not bother Alcibiades who sought glory in war and conquest. He was in favor of preemptive war, arguing that “men do not rest content with parrying the attacks of a superior, but often strike the first blow to prevent the attack being made.”
The supposed glory of war is a powerful lure and the arguments of Alcibiades won over his fellow citizens as “everyone fell in love with the enterprise” and “the few that did not like it feared to appear unpatriotic by holding up their hands against it, and so kept quiet.”
Thucydides devotes a great deal of time to detailing the Sicilian expedition which I will not attempt to describe in this article. Ultimately, the expedition ended in total disaster in 413 BC at Syracuse when Athens lost all of the naval and land forces it had sent. Nicias, who had accepted a command despite his objections, was one of the generals “butchered” by the Sicilians when his forces surrendered. His surviving army was held in deplorable conditions in quarries outside Syracuse for eight months before being sold as slaves.
Athens was shocked by this turn of events and while the war continued for another nine years, the aura of invisibility was gone. Overconfidence and hubris led the Athenians to voluntarily open a new front in the war which cost them dearly in terms of resources and soldiers.
Conclusion
The defeat of the forces in Sicily emboldened enemies of Athens in the subsequent years. Although the history documented by Thucydides ends abruptly in 411 BC, we know from other sources that Athens was finally defeated in 404 BC with a total Spartan military victory in the Hellespont which led to a final blockade of Athens. Sparta considered the option of totally destroying Athens but settled for confiscating the remnants of the Athenian fleet and ordering the demolition of the city’s walls.
As I mentioned in the introduction, Thucydides documents all of the twists and turns of the war in much detail and this would be impossible to summarize in a single article. Books have been written analyzing Thucydides and the implications of his history. In this brief article, I have merely scratched the surface, but I think certain lessons can be drawn from this limited coverage.
Human nature does not change much, if at all, over thousands of years of history. As I read Thucydides, I could easily draw parallels between the attitudes and decisions made by men who lived 2,500 years ago and people living in much more recent times. The causes of war have hardly changed and the attitudes that lead to war never change. After a major war, the generation with direct experience in the horrors is normally loath to enter into any new voluntary conflicts, but as time fades memories and a new generation assumes power, the supposed glory of war begins to attract men out to make names for themselves.
When people think about democracy in Ancient Greece, many picture a group of small city-states that offered a voice to all people. Of course, those who have even scratched the surface know that the majority of people were disenfranchised in these societies which were run by the elites with the power to vote. This does not diminish the importance of studying democratic institutions of the period, but we should not romanticize what these societies were actually like. Athens had democratic institutions at home but ran a tyranny abroad. Sparta, which I have barely discussed in this article, was a highly communal and militarized society with very little individual liberty. These societies are hardly ideal models in the modern era.
Finally, it is worth pointing out that Ancient Greek society, and its gods, seemed to subscribe to a “might makes right” philosophy that seems abhorrent today. The Melian Dialogue and its aftermath might shock people today, but such genocides were not at all uncommon in the ancient world. Prior to the firm establishment of Christianity under the Roman Empire, the idea of the weak having universal human rights was a radical concept. The idea that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” was very much a mainstream concept.
I would encourage curious readers to study Thucydides. Those who decide to do so should consider buying the Landmark edition which has extensive footnotes, maps, and supplementary information that proved to be essential. Attempting to read Thucydides without any context or maps would be an exercise in frustration, but the efforts of Robert B. Strassler and the others who contributed to the Landmark made the process very enjoyable.
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