SCRIPT - The Strategy of the Peloponnesian War (01/07/2017)

The Strategy of the Peloponnesian War

From 431 to 404BC, Athens, Sparta and their respective allies fought a 27-year-long war spanning much of Classical Greece and its colonies. This video will assess the strategies pursued by both sides of the Second Peloponnesian War, and how they affected the course of the conflict.

 

Athens and Sparta

Since the defeat of the 2^nd Persian invasion in 479, Athens and Sparta were on a collision course. Sparta had been the dominant Greek power, but the foundations of its military might were built upon a shrinking population of citizen-soldiers, increasingly conscious of their numerical inferiority compared with their tributary subjects and helot slaves.

Athens, on the hand, was fast rising. It was already the largest city in Greece, one of the wealthiest, and certainly one of the more cultured. Under Athenian leadership, the Delian League, once an anti-Persian defense pact, had become an informal empire with colonies and subjects across the Aegean. The city was also active in democracy-promotion, encouraging the poor in other cities to revolt against their masters in the name of freedom.

Athens was thus hardly popular across Greece outside of its empire, and many looked to Sparta for leadership against this threat. This led to one of Thucydides’ most famous observations.

The Thucydides Trap

Thucydides offers ‘surface motives’ and ‘real reasons’ for explaining why Sparta declared war on Athens in 431. On the surface, Sparta was responding to Athenian provocations against other city states: the latter’s embargo against Megara, its siege of its ex-ally Potidaea, and its war on Corinth on behalf of Corcyra. These victims of Athenian aggression appealed to Sparta for help, and the city-state readily obliged.

However, Thucydides posits that the ‘real reason’ for the war was that Sparta ‘feared the growth of the power of the Athenians’: with each passing year, Athens would gain more resources to influence allies, stir up democrats, and extend its cultural and political reach. The Athenian-Corcyran alliance linked the Greek world’s first and second-largest navies together, and Corinth was already threatening to defect towards Athens if Sparta did not act. Sparta, therefore, decided on pre-emptive action before its hegemony over Greece passed over to Athens – and thus fell into what scholars have dubbed the ‘Thucydides Trap’.

The irony is that since the 440s, Athenian power was on the decline: it had lost influence over Central Greece after defeat in the First Peloponnesian War, its attempts to invade the Persian Empire had failed, and it suppressed the revolts of its subjects only with difficulty.

In any case, in 432, Sparta issued demands to Athens, demanding a halt to the city’s aggression as well as the dismantling of the Delian League. These were rejected, and along with Thebes’ attack on the Athenian ally of Plataea in 431, most of Classical Greece descended into war.

Archidamian Phase I

The Peloponnesian War pitted two radically different types of state against each other: Athens directed a coalition of maritime, commercial and democratic states, while Sparta’s Peloponnesian League consisted of continental, agricultural and oligarchic cities. Even the way the two camps were structured was different: Athens paradoxically exercised dictatorial control over the Delian League, while Sparta pursued a more consensual approach with its allies.

A key similarity, however, was that both cities had evolved past the tradition of the farmer-soldier, campaigning for only a few weeks before returning to his crops. Sparta, through its helots, and Athens, through grain shipments, were freed from this burden; their armies were thus, theoretically, able to campaign anywhere and anytime.

Initially, both sides tried to win through their own strengths. King Archidamus of Sparta understood that Athens’ maritime empire was only vulnerable if Sparta took to the seas: he therefore proposed a strategy where Sparta, over time, would find allies to fund the construction of a 500-ship fleet able to challenge Athenian maritime dominance.

But such a strategy would take time, and in the meantime Sparta risked losing prestige through inaction. There was, therefore, little else for Archidamus to do but lead annual invasions of Athens from 431-425 and hope that the Athenians would suicidally fight the feared Spartan phalanx before the latter exhausted local supplies and had to retreat.

Unfortunately for the Spartans, Athens refused to cooperate, having other ideas of how to win the war. For Athens’ leader Pericles, stalemate was the same thing as victory: time was on the city’s side, and as long as Sparta didn’t win in the short-run, the dynamism of Athenian society would bury its enemies in the long-run. Athens would therefore refuse any sort of battle or risky land operations, focusing instead on coastal raids launched by its unchallenged navy.

Unlike Archidamus, Pericles’ strategy did not propose a method, even in the abstract, on how to beat Sparta on land. The city might have fallen into a reverse ‘Thucydides Trap’, being so confident of its long-term success that it entirely surrendered the initiative to Sparta. As it turned out, Athens was not as secure as Pericles might have thought: while it had a reserve of 6,000 talents, this was only enough to fund the 300-ship Athenian navy for around 2 years, and by the third year Athens had to demand special tribute from its subjects.

Pericles’ strategy also required evacuating rural refugees into Athens in the face of Spartan invasion, which led to overcrowding and poor hygiene. Plague broke out from 430-427, causing the death of a third of Athens’ population, including Pericles himself. Athens, however, remained capable of fighting and raiding around enemy territory.

In such a way, the opening moves of the Peloponnesian War resulted in stalemate. Sparta could not challenge Athens at sea, while Athens would not fight Sparta on land. Raiding, invasions, and plague were not enough to decide the outcome of the war. The next few years would see both sides try out new approaches under new leaders, in an attempt to break the deadlock.

Archidamian Phase II

Sparta understood that the Athenian empire was the key to Athens’ capability for war: without the tribute, ships and soldiers that the Delian League provided, the city would ultimately fall before the Peloponnesian coalition. Many Athenian subjects also wished to be freed of the imperial yoke, but while Athenian maritime dominance existed there was little that Sparta could do to help them, as demonstrated by Lesbos’ failed revolt in 428.

Still, Sparta stirred up trouble whenever it could. A major success occurred in 427 when the Peloponnesians successfully incited Corcyra’s wealthy aristocrats to revolt against the democracy, causing a destructive civil war that lasted until 425 and effectively knocked the island out of the war.

Sparta also moved against the parts of the Athenian empire it could reach. In 424, Brasidas struck out against Athens’ northern subjects in Thrace. Presenting himself as a liberator for those oppressed by Athens, Brasidas successfully incited most of these cities to revolt. While he was eventually killed outside the city of Amphipolis in 422, the region was effectively detached from Athenian control.

For Athens, Pericles’ death allowed new thinking in the democracy that he once presided over. Men such as Demosthenes now proposed a more permanent occupation of enemy territory instead of mere raiding. While still not a strategy to defeat Sparta, the subsequent capture of ports coerced a few minor settlements to peace out against Athens.

Most important, however, were the successes that resulted from the fortification of the Athenian base at Pylos on the tip of the Peloponnese. Perhaps attempting to overthrow the entire foundation of Spartan power, Athenian generals turned the base into a sanctuary for escaped helots, something which troubled Sparta far beyond its actual physical impact. Their attempts to recapture Pylos resulted in the further trapping and surrender of 300 Spartans on the island of Sphacteria in 425, which given Sparta’s demographic weakness was a huge blow to that city. While Athens refused Sparta’s offers for status quo peace, with demagogues such as Cleon arguing for gains in Central Greece, their threats to execute the captives were enough to halt the hitherto-annual Spartan invasions of Athens.

New thinking not always so effective, however. Athens attempted to score another knockout blow against another powerful enemy through an attack against Thebes. This time, however, the Athenian army was destroyed at Delium in 424, causing a sudden downturn in Athenian fortunes compounded by Brasidas’ aforementioned strike against the city’s Thracian subjects.

Shaken by their respective defeats, Athens and Sparta agreed to the Peace of Nicias in 421. Both sides would return captured prisoners and cities, and enter into an alliance with each other than would hopefully secure the peace for generations to come.

The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition

The Peace of Nicias solved none of the issues underlying the Peloponnesian War, and from the start its provisions were immediately violated. Athens refused to return Pylos while Sparta did the same with Athens’ former northern subjects. The allies of Sparta were not consulted and quickly soured on their former leader.

Despite the peace, Athens remained interested in the defeat of Sparta. An Athenian strategy to defeat Sparta finally appeared when Alcibiades constructed a new alliance between Sparta’s former allies – Argos, Elis and Mantinea – which he hoped would result in a large enough army that could overwhelm Sparta once and for all. Such a coalition had potential and presaged what Thebes was to do against Sparta in the 360s, but Athens was slow to exploit this and the coalition dissolved after Sparta defeated it at 1^st Mantinea in 418.

A similar motive to secure for itself a powerful ally might have been the driving force behind Athens’ infamous Sicilian Expedition of 415-413. Alcibiades argued that Syracuse might be inclined to help fellow Peloponnesians should it be given a free hand in Sicily; conversely, adding Sicilian resources to Athens would have enhanced the city’s power immeasurably. In any case, the benefits hardly justified the risks – the city would have been better-off following Nicias’ suggestion to secure Athens’ former subjects in Thrace first, rather than sending 200 ships and 20 thousand soldiers to conquer a city 800 km away, a tall order even in the best of times.

And it was not the best of times. Of the three commanders, Lamachus was killed, Alcibiades defected to Sparta upon hearing of his recall to Athens, and Nicias moved too slowly to ensure Syracuse’s fall. In response to Syracusan calls for aid, Sparta re-declared war in 414 and trapped the Athenians on Sicily. Both the Athenian navy and the expeditionary force – representing more than half of Athens’ strength – were eventually annihilated, dealing a devastating blow to Athenian prestige, shattering its naval dominance and providing a golden opportunity for tis enemies to strike.

The Ionian Phase

Various actors quickly took advantage of Athenian weakness after the Sicilian disaster. Sparta reinvaded Athens in 413, but this time, imitating Athenian attempts at Pylos, they set up a permanent fort at Decelea and turned it into a haven for runaway slaves. Over time over 20 thousand Athenian slaves escaped to Decelea, representing a constant drain on Athenian resources.

Furthermore, Archidamus’ strategy for Sparta could finally be put into action in 412, when Persia agreed to fund the creation of a strong Spartan fleet. Amassing more than 100 ships, Sparta then sailed around the Aegean, inciting Athenian subjects to revolt, including key allies such as Chios, Lesbos and Euboea. Sparta was helped by the civil turmoil within Athens that broke out in response to Sicily, with oligarchs and democrats struggling for power and enlisting Spartan help to do so. By 407 barely anything of the former Athenian Empire was left but the island of Samos. These subject revolts greatly impacted the ability of Athens to fight, with Athenian fleets starved of funds and regularly needing to break off campaigning in order to plunder and obtain tribute.

In order to complete its victory, however, Sparta needed to control the Hellespont, which would sever Athens’ grain lifelines and force the city to starve or surrender. An initial attempt at doing that ended in disaster as Alcibiades, who had defected back to the Athenians, destroyed the Spartan fleet at Cyzicus in 411. It was Sparta, however, that possessed the superior financial resources now, and its response was simply to build another fleet while Athens tried to recover its lost territories. This fleet was again annihilated by Athens at Arginusae in 406, prompting the Spartans to temporarily sue for peace, but a third Spartan fleet under Lysander finally destroyed the Athenians at Aegospotami at 405.

Without a fleet, Athens had only an unwinnable siege to wait for, and it surrendered in 404, agreeing to dismantle its empire, demolish its walls, limit its fleet and establish and oligarchy. Thus Sparta had, after 27 years of on-and-off-warfare, achieved victory in the Peloponnesian War.

Conclusion

Sparta clearly had the better war effort in the Peloponnesian War, possessing a clear understanding of how to beat Athens and achieve victory, something that the other side never really had. Executing Archidamus’ strategy, however, was much more difficult, and only with Athens’ self-inflicted Sicilian disaster and the arrival of Persian gold did Sparta really possess the resources and confidence to challenge Athens at sea. The confidence of the Athenians in the financial and cultural superiority of their state caused them to be lethargic in prosecuting the war, with the result that they conceded the initiative to the Spartans.

Arguably, however, the ultimate winner from the war was Thebes, who saw the defeat of its strongest rival without expending any of the blood and treasure Sparta had to in order to achieve victory. Within a few decades of the war’s end Thebes would fight Sparta for dominance, causing even more disruption in Greece until its tentative union under Macedon.