Horizon

Some Damn Fool Thing in the Balkans: Thoughts on the Origins of the Peloponnesian War

Inspired by Ben's quotes from Polybius, and in the absence of any original material, I'm going to do what any self-respecting broadcaster does during the summer: show reruns. Or at least retreads, anyway. Here is the beginning of a little squib I knocked together a couple of years ago on Thucydides' opinion of the Treaty of Versailles (yes, I did mean to say that). More on request.

“The Peloponnesian League affirms and Athens accepts the responsibility of Athens and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Peloponnesian League and its nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Athens and her allies ... “

Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, truncated as it is by the author’s death, does not record whether Lysander’s ultimatum to the defeated Athenians in 404 BC included a “War Guilt” clause along the lines of the Versailles Treaty’s notorious Article 231. Whether or not the Spartans demanded such an explicit admission of blame from their enemies is therefore unknown, though the ruthless Greek attitude to power suggests that any such acknowledgment would have been meaningless; Athens’ sin was to have lost the war, not to have started it. But Thucydides certainly considered war origins to be important, and he was dissatisfied with the conventional wisdom on the subject; in that sense his History has parallels with the publications of the German Foreign Office’s Kriegsschuldreferat, or War Guilt Section, in the aftermath of Versailles. In the German case, revision of the prevailing explanation for the war’s origins had immediate political implications; Article 231 was the logical keystone of all the punitive measures enacted against Germany in 1919, and its fracturing would compromise the stability of the entire, hated, Versailles system. Thucydides’ motives were doubtless more intimate. Unlike Weimar Republicans, post-war Athenians placed the blame for the catastrophe squarely on the shoulders of their own former leaders. Above all, they blamed Pericles, the leading democratic statesman in 432 BC, for his truculent refusal to negotiate with the Peloponnesians – his unwillingness to revoke the Megarian Decree, for example, a minor concession that could, it was argued, have forestalled war entirely. As one of Pericles’ devoted supporters, Thucydides perhaps saw himself honor-bound to defend his fallen captain from these charges. But one senses in Thucydides a deeper frustration with the orthodox historiography of the war than the mere settling of personal reputations can explain. Hence his stress in the Introduction to the History that the “real reason” for the conflict was not simply the accumulation of superficial grievances - Epidamnus, Potidaea, Megara – that the warring sides built up to justify their actions to their allies, but rather “the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta”. To Thucydides, this fundamental collision of forces made war not simply possible, but inevitable.

Thucydides’ insight into the difference between symptomatic and profound cause, possibly derived by analogy from the medical distinction between aitiai, or “apparent”, and prophasis, or “true” explanation for disease, has, in the words of one classicist, “long and justly been recognized as one of the great discoveries of the historian’s science.” [Meier, Christian, Athens: A Portrait of the City in its Golden Age. Metropolitan, 1998, p. 451.] When and why the author of the History came to this discovery is unclear, however. Some scholars have suggested that the “real reason” is a late inclusion to the text of Book One that Thucydides added because of his increasing unwillingness to accept that an event as momentous as the “greatest disturbance in the history of the Hellenes” could have been set into motion by an obscure row over colonial privileges. [See the discussion in George Cawkwell, Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War. Routledge, 1997, p. 20-22.] This fallacy of identity, that great events must necessarily have great causes – that the conventional explanation for the war is not merely inadequate, but unseemly – is advanced by Thucydides’ catalog of supernatural omens; “violent earthquakes”, “frequent eclipses of the sun” and “extensive droughts” all accompanied the fighting, he tells us, as did of course the great plague that killed Pericles. The skepticism he later demonstrates about the divine significance of that epidemic contrasts strangely with his uncritical treatment of portents in the Introduction. Thucycides may have been reacting emotionally as well as rationally to the problem of the war’s outbreak, then, but his conviction that there was more to the origins of the Peloponnesian War than the surface details would allow remains no less significant or mysterious. [In any case, we are just as susceptible to the fallacy of identity today. “The perfectly ordinary civil war in a remote and unimportant town on the fringes of the civilized world could hardly have led to a great war ex nihilo.” (Donald Kagan, The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. Cornell, 1969, p. 353.) Well, couldn’t it? Kagan goes on to make a persuasive case that the war did have deeper causes, but his initial claim surely need not be accepted prima facie.] As Josiah Ober points out, what is most intriguing about the History is that one “is forcefully reminded of how difficult it really is to grasp and to explain exactly what factors actually cause great historical events.” [Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule. Princeton, 1998, p. 77.]