Do we need profound causes to explain the Peloponnesian War, or indeed anything else? Technically, no. It is quite possible to strip Thucydides’ work of all reference to his “real reason”, and still possess – for certain purposes, at least - an adequate causal explanation of the outbreak of hostilities in 432 BC. The sequence of actions leading up to and resulting from the crises at Epidamnus and Potidaea do explain, in a strictly mechanistic way, why Athens and Sparta went to war. Similarly, an Origins of the First World War could be written that was nothing more than a narrative of the Sarajevo assassination and the diplomatic chain of events that followed it from June 28 to August 4, 1914 – a chronicle of ambassadorial meetings, communiqués, and mobilization announcements. There would be nothing ‘wrong’ with such a treatment; its factual accuracy would be unimpeachable. And yet we would find it inadequate. Why?
Because we are not really interested in what caused the Great Wars – Peloponnesian and European – in a procedural sense. David Hackett Fischer’s observations on causality may help to explain why:
There are many different kinds of causal explanation, and they have different requirements and different uses. The specific kind of causal explanation a historian employs must be selected according to the nature of the effect to be explained and the nature of the object of the explanation ... most of the trouble historians get themselves into in causal explanation consists in asking one kind of causal question and seeking another kind of causal answer. [David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought. Harper, 1970, p. 186.]
The problem, then, with a processional account of 432 BC or 1914 is that it is answering a question (“what caused the war?”) that is really a footnote to a deeper inquiry – what made war possible, or likely, or inevitable in the first place? It is perfectly reasonable to argue that the First World War was ‘caused’ by Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s chauffeur failing to turn down the correct Sarajevo street on a sunny June day: the weakness of such an explanation is not that it is false, but that it tells us nothing useful. Had the Archduke’s entourage possessed better navigational skills, would general European war have been averted for a season, or a decade, or forever? Only by introducing the “real reason(s)” for the war can we hope to address that far more challenging question – not forgetting that the events of the July Crisis, the only real-life model we have, can provide valuable testimony. Specific and profound causes are complementary, then: the former are less inherently interesting, but they are vital inasmuch as they shed light on the latter.
Thucydides famously proposed a two-tier profound cause for the Peloponnesian War: the growth of Athenian power, and Sparta’s response motivated by fear. The History wishes to leave us in no doubt that this fear was authentic and justified. Thucydides goes to considerable lengths in his digressive Pentecontaetia to underline Athens’ military, diplomatic and economic expansion in the period leading up to the outbreak of war, and its unstated but evident determination to supplant Sparta as the principal city-state of Hellas. This point is made most explicitly in Thucydides’ preliminary remarks before the description of the 432 BC Allied Congress at Sparta, which bear repeating at length:
In these years the Athenians made their empire more and more strong ... the Spartans, though they saw what was happening, did little or nothing to prevent it, and for most of the time remained inactive, being traditionally slow to go to war ... finally the point was reached when Athenian strength attained a peak plain for all to see and the Athenians began to encroach upon Sparta’s allies. It was at this point that Sparta felt the position to be no longer tolerable and decided by starting the present war to employ all her energies in attacking and, if possible, destroying the power of Athens.
Sparta, then, waged a deliberate but reluctant and defensive war of pre-emption, knowing that its window of opportunity to act was shrinking and that if it maintained its customary policy of restraint then Athens’ comparative advantage would grow so large as to be unassailable. Like Wilhelmine Germany in 1914, Sparta believed (correctly, in Thucydides’ view) that it faced a grand strategic threat of envelopment; that Athens, having defeated the smaller members of the Peloponnesian League in detail, would eventually move on to the destruction or neutralization of Sparta entirely. It ought to be stressed that Thucydides drew no moral conclusions from this scenario, or from Sparta’s decision to prevent it. His political world is a brutal zero-sum game in which “the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept”. To introduce issues of right and wrong is a category error; Thucydides would have applauded Bismarck’s remark that the Austrians in 1866 were no more wrong in resisting Prussia’s actions than Prussia was in taking them. In that sense, then, the Peloponnesian War is part of a tragic, inevitable cycle in which one state’s star rises and another’s falls, the only unforeseeable factor being whether the failing power will defy or submit to its fate.
(To be continued)
Posted by Alan Allport at June 30, 2005 04:36 AM