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THEATRES OF WAR
by DANIEL MENDELSOHN
Why the battles over ancient Athens still rage.
Issue of 2004-01-12
Posted 2004-01-05
The early spring of 431 B.C. witnessed, at Athens, the outbreak of a great war, the commencement of a great book, and the première of a great play.

The war was the culmination of fifty years of simmering tensions between two superpowers: Athens, a direct democracy, and Sparta, a militaristic oligarchy. It was, naturally, advertised as a war of liberation (each side claimed to be freeing some injured third party), but it was really a struggle for total domination of the Greek world. It began relatively small—a diplomatic crisis involving Corinth, a Spartan ally; some low-level combat in a town near Athens—but metastasized into a conflict that lasted nearly three decades, involved numerous states, and resulted, finally, in the defeat of Athens and the abolition of its democratic institutions. Because Sparta and its allies dominated the southern peninsula known as the Peloponnese—and because the men who wrote the histories of the conflict were usually Athenians—the war came to be called the Peloponnesian. As the Yale historian Donald Kagan dryly points out in “The Peloponnesian War” (Viking; $29.95), his brisk, if tendentious, new account, the Spartans probably thought of the conflict as the Athenian War; but then there were no Spartan historians to call it that.

The great book was the work of an affluent young Athenian who began taking notes “at the very outbreak” of hostilities, on the hunch that this would be “a great war and more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place in the past.” About the life of the historian we know relatively little, apart from the crucial fact that he himself commanded troops in the war—something you might guess anyway from the soldierly lack of sentimentality that characterizes his book, which would in time come to be prized for its insistence on letting the reader “see the past clearly.” This soldier-historian gave no official title to his work; it is usually referred to as, simply, the History. He was called Thucydides.

The great play was by an Athenian citizen in his mid-fifties who had been writing for the theatre since the age of thirty. Like the war, the play involved some small-scale violence in Corinth that eventually made its way to Athens; as with the war, it would be some time before people appreciated its magnitude. (When the play was entered in the annual springtime dramatic competition at Athens that year, it took third prize.) The playwright’s name was Euripides. The play was called “Medea.”

Thucydides’ History is the only extant eyewitness account of the first twenty years of a war that was unlike anything anyone had ever seen—“the greatest disturbance,” as he put it, “in the history of the Hellenes, affecting also a large part of the non-Hellenic world, and indeed, I might almost say, the whole of mankind.” The war lasted so long that the author didn’t live to finish his manuscript; it ends in midsentence during a description of the aftermath of a naval battle in 411. (We do know, from references in his text, that he lived to see Athens’ ultimate surrender, in 404.) But such was his achievement that others who wrote about the war—for instance Xenophon, whose Hellenica covers the final decade of fighting—began where Thucydides left off.

Until the Peloponnesian War, warfare among the various Greek city-states had for centuries been a regular, predictable affair—part of the rhythmic cycle of seasons. You planted your crops, went away to do battle with this or that enemy, and (you hoped) were home for the harvest. The entire war, usually a matter of some disputed bit of borderland, would be decided in a single battle fought on a single day.

The war that began in the spring of 431 represented what Kagan rightly calls “a fundamental departure” from this tradition, not only in its scope, duration, and complexity but also in savagery and bitterness. After the Corinthian diplomatic crisis, ties between Athens and Sparta disintegrated. Hostilities began, one night early in 431, with a sneak attack on a small Athenian protectorate called Plataea. This sordid violation of the norms of Greek warfare set the tone for what was to come. As the conflict spread across many fronts, from the Hellespont to Sicily to the coast of Asia Minor, it began to seem frustratingly unwinnable. The result, Kagan emphasizes, was a cycle of cruelty and reprisal that ended in a “collapse in the habits, institutions, beliefs, and restraints that are the foundations of civilized life”: schoolboys slaughtered in their classrooms by mercenaries, civilians murdered and enslaved en masse, supplicants dragged from (or burned at) altars, the war dead left to rot on the battlefield. In the end, the great standard-bearer of Greek civilization itself, Athens, collapsed. Bankrupt and imploding with civil strife after nearly three decades of fighting, it was finally defeated by an alliance of Sparta and Persia, the traditional enemy of the Greeks.

It was impossible to foresee any of this in the spring of 431. Athens was at its peak. Its empire of tribute-paying “allies” stretched across the Mediterranean, disciplined by a massive and well-trained navy. Its special national character—raucously democratic yet with an aristocratic esteem for high culture—was reflected in its leader, Pericles, who had populist appeal despite being a nobleman of what Kagan calls “the bluest blood.” It was Pericles who advised his countrymen, during the first few years of the war, to follow an unusual and, to many Athenians, foolishly passive defensive strategy: to remain within the city’s walls (including the so-called Long Walls that connected Athens to its port, Piraeus, four miles away) when the Spartans came to burn their crops, and to put their faith in their supremacy at sea. This plan took realistic account of Sparta’s vast superiority on land and of the fragility of the Spartan Alliance: the Athenians would simply ship in their grain, while harrying the coastal cities of the Peloponnese until the Spartan Alliance disintegrated.

Kagan, the author of the standard four-volume scholarly study of the war, relates all this with crisp authority in his new, popularizing account. He is particularly shrewd about the economic and material realities behind certain kinds of political rhetoric. Where others might see in Pericles’ policy an admirable Apollonian restraint, Kagan sees the calculations of a politician who knew he had only enough drachmas in the bank “to maintain his strategy for three years . . . but not for a fourth”—let alone a twenty-seventh.

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