Some thoughts on The Geostrategy of the Peloponnesian War Part 5:
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== 1) Literature Review (in Youtube description) ==
- Luginbill's "Thucydides on War and National Character" is *the* go-to book when it comes to the concept of "National Character" in Thucydides, though it gets philosophical at times re: Greek epistemology and the idea of rationality/irrationality in NC is not as clear-cut as I portrayed it in the video. Otherwise I think it's quite readable and an important companion book to Thucydides, because you get a better sense of the biases and underlying themes that T was trying to get at in his history.
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- Only a miniscule portion of Lazenby and Rusch's books (like 1 chapter each) have much to do with this video, but they are important in thinking about how the Spartan Army developed during and after the Peloponnesian War and how this affected strategy. Lazenby, in particular, reminds us that the nature & impact of Spartan demographic decline is usually exaggerated prior to the Ionian War - and that the real acceleration only began AFTER Sparta began mobilizing the helots (combined with Athenian raiding) and the small farmers really began to fall off.
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- Special mention to Mitchell's "Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire" for better structuring my thoughts re: Sparta's grand strategy. M came up with the distinction that hegemonies come from either A) powerful economic bases; or B) masterful use of strategic tools to manage competition, usually in the form of "sequencing" fights so that said hegemon is able to commit most of its force to each contest and thus, on a macro-scale, punch above its weight. Sparta is a clear example of B.
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- Thorley's "Athenian Democracy" is a basic introduction to the institutions of Athenian democracy and how they evolved throughout the 5thC BC. It's not especially deep analysis but it's enough for this video. Also note that some of the facts that T asserts are actually contested elsewhere - like the assertion that state-sponsored colonists in a cleruchy got enough land to automatically advance up to zeugitai class. Everybody admits that cleruchs got land, just not whether they got that much land.
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- Walling's article attempts to contrast Athenian 'over-responsibility' at Syracuse with Spartan 'under-responsibility' re: Brasidas. In all honesty it's not a particularly strong article, because it automatically assumes that the Sicilian Expedition was bad and that Athens could only have been misled by popular enthusiasm into going there. The discussion of Brasidas is important, BUT it neglects the fact that the loose treatment of Brasidas was NOT the norm in Sparta. At Mantinea, in the Ionian War etc., Sparta demanded just as much over-responsiblity from its generals.
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== 2) Thoughts on Creation of the Video ==
- Given the nature of the topic, this video was by necessity much more speculative than the others, especially re: the political dynamics within Athenian Democracy, and the idea that Sparta's "abject failure" as a hegemon (can't remember who termed it) was a result of externalizing its internal political struggles.
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- As with abstract topics, there wasn't much to do graphically - which was why I thought this would have been a good topic to conclude on, since I would be able to re-use a lot of the assets I created over the past 2 months. It was rather fun trying to figure out how to represent something graphically. The key problem here was compressing the data to make it Youtube-understandable. One thing I really wanted to avoid was the data dumps like the ones I did on the Machiavelli and Grand Strategy of Japan videos.
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- The real problem was in scriptwriting, as is always the case when it's about an abstract topic and you're doing 100% analysis instead of being structured by historical chronology. The original idea was perhaps to trace the internal political history of the Peloponnesian War, but this wouldn't have contributed anything new to the discussion since it would just be "pro-war faction won/lost the election" kind of narration. I then had the idea to trace the rise of "pro-war" lobby groups within Athenian and Spartan politics, but after re-reading the literature on the rise of ex-helots and especially mothakes (Spartans w/o citizenship), I thought that arguing that the non-citizens drove Sparta into perpetual War missed the larger point of Sparta externalizing its internal conflict. "Over-mobilization" was always going to be discussed b/c that's what everybody loves to dunk on Athens for.
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- Recording took 3 hours, which was about as good as can be expected (I think Peloponnesian War 3 took 4 hours for a video that's 10 minutes shorter). The problem with compressing as much data as possible into as few sentences as possible, is that sometimes the words don't "read" right. I definitely thought I had more of a problem regarding this in this video, compared with the previous ones. The paragraphs were also a bit longer too.
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== 3) Thoughts on the Video ==
- We really should revise our view of Pericles. Thanks to Thucydides, usually he's seen as this venerable statesman who had moderate goals for Athens, and it was his successors who radicalized things. In Pelop War 2, we've already talked about how P's foreign policy was probably (and justifiably) NOT moderate. In this video, we see how P's internal reforms (shout-out to Ephialtes who I totally cut out of the video) were also immoderate and laid the way for radicalization under Cleon etc. For a historian that traced "underlying reasons" for the Athens-Sparta debate, T certainly didn't seem to trace "underlying reasons" for Athenian radicalization - perhaps he just thought the people were just naturally that bad/stupid. In any case, I think P's self-interested destruction of Athenian checks and balances (of course you can argue that conservatives such as Cimon abused the Areopagus to engage in minority rule) should be a pretty big black mark against his reputation.
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- Originally in the video, I included an observation that Athenian 'over-responsibility' should be contrasted with Roman leniency towards its generals. There's a very interesting book by Rosenstein (Imperatores Victi, of which I have not yet read), wondering why the Roman Republic never criminally punished its generals for failure, like most other Classical states tended to do (in fact, a failed Roman general could still be elected to consul and other such high positions). In essence, R argues that because the Roman Republic was a fine balance between aristocratic families, the system preferred not to risk the disruption that punishing an aristocratic general could cause. So instead, the Romans focused on 2 things instead: 1) victory being the result of favor by the Gods; and 2) victory being a collective result derived from a disciplined body of soldiers.
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