THOUGHTS - Some thoughts on The Geostrategy of the Peloponnesian War Part 3 (15/12/2019)

Some thoughts on The Geostrategy of the Peloponnesian War Part 3:

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== 1) Literature Review (in Youtube description) ==

- You can see the difference in the quality of the literature when it comes to the Archidamian War. In order of analytical complexity:

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- Hanson (a bit too uncritically imho) accepts Thucydides' viewpoint that Athens' strategy was perverted by Cleon and that Athens' actions after Sphacteria were mainly hubris;

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- Lazenby and Henderson accept that Cleon's actions were justified in light of Athens' victory at Sphacteria;

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- Kagan furthermore argues that Cleon was right to reject the peace with Sparta because of Athens' winning hand. He also accepts that Brasidas' gains were useless to Sparta beyond getting out of the war.

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== 2) More Thoughts on Cleon's Strategy ==

 

- Re-reading Cleon's notorious "Democracy Cannot Win an Empire" speech vs Mytilene, I was struck by his emphasis on maintaining reputation - if Athens was revealed to be soft on punishment, then what was there for fear from revolt?

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- In a sense, this emphasis on 'reputation' is the mirror-image of Archidamus' implied argument that Sparta's hegemony rested on its military reputation. So why is Cleon's strategy so much less well-regarded than A's?

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- The brutality of Cleon's strategy of course plays a factor: Athens' massacre of non-combatants outside of battle vs. Sparta's massacre of combatants in battle.

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- Cleon's strategy also seemed to lack a 'master plan': Archidamus proposed a clear strategy of what his plan was and what it was supposed to do. If C ever said something similar, Thucydides failed to record it. The result is that C's actions seem unstructured, random, prone to 'winging it'.

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- While most historians accept that Thucydides was biased against Cleon, they still adopt T's viewpoint when assessing him. T didn't smear C with lies, BUT he did downplay C's strengths as well as the similarities between C's strategy and that of Pericles or even Archidamus. The reason is not just to repay C's exile of T, BUT also because T wanted to emphasize his views re: the political decisionmaking of democracy in general.

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- In my video, I argue that Cleon's strategy was NOT that much of an outlier from Athens' previous strategy. He succeeded where Pericles was stalled, because he A) recognized Demosthenes' operational advantage and B) pushed his advantage where Pericles might have held back. A) is luck; B) is (more) skill.

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== 3) Thoughts on the Video ==

 

- A note about the campaign map since this video has 3 of them - they are simplifications/estimations of actual history. I estimate the sequence of events based on the literature, plan out the route using Google Maps and more guesstimation, and finally clean the map up so it's not just a mass of squiggly arrows.

- The major guesstimation was that a lot of the Ancient Greek locations were somewhere near their modern Greek counterparts. There are some well-known exceptions of course (modern Corinth was rebuilt a fair ways away from ancient Corinth), but generally when the map says e.g. "Stratos" and has a couple of archaeological sites around it, I assume that's where Stratus was. This also goes for the Greek roads, which in the video correspond to major highways.

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