But is this an accurate account, and are Thucydides’ keystone convictions – that Athenian power was on the rise in the 430s, and that Sparta went to war as a necessary response goaded by fear – sustained by the internal evidence of his own narrative? [Although Thucydides’ History is the best single account of the Peloponnesian Wars, there are of course other partial sources, eg. the reconstructed Athenian Tribute Lists (see Kagan, 380-381). My interest here, however, is not to test Thucydides’ veracity against other material, but to see whether his “real reason” for the origins of the war makes sense in its own terms - ie. within the context of the History itself.] In the remainder of this essay, I am going to lay out a case that the History supports neither contention adequately. But I also want to explore some other causes, involving human agency as well as institutional structure, that may have contributed in one degree or other to the outbreak of war in 432 BC; and (continuing a theme already started) to illustrate these where appropriate with comparisons to the July Crisis of 1914. This is not because I have any superficial analogy in mind between the vastly disparate events of 5th Century BC Hellas and early 20th Century Europe, but because the outbreak of the First World War has been without a doubt the most intricately scrutinized event of the last one hundred years – perhaps the greatest historiographical challenge ever; and it has provoked a good deal of thinking about the causality of conflict that bears useful application in other contexts. Unlike Thucydides – or A.J.P. Taylor - I do not have any single unified theory of war origins in mind; rather, as I will try to show below, I suspect that the real “real reason” is a messy amalgam of the usual suspects, including large doses of miscalculation, misperception and misunderstanding on both sides. As to the question of war guilt, I will touch on that in the conclusion.
Let me deal with Sparta’s role first. The one thing that can be immediately said about the Spartan road to war is that it is remarkably inconsistent. The Spartans sit idly by as one of their principal allies, Corinth, drifts into open battle with Athens. They then make an unambiguous pledge to the defense of Potidaea , which they fail to make good on when Athens continues its punitive policy. In the debate preceding the outbreak of war Thucydides describes the Spartan mood as unusually hawkish, and yet their king calls for restraint, the vote to commence hostilities is only safely won by a procedural dodge, and the Spartans require yet another assembly - this time of the whole Peloponnesian League – before they will fully commit themselves. And then there is the bizarre sequence of contradictory ultimatums delivered to the Athenians: at one point suggesting that a few token compromises such as the repeal of the Megarian decree will be enough to ensure peace, at another that nothing short of the dismantling of the Delian League will suffice. Sparta’s collective personality before the war is schizophrenic and confusing.
Much of this may have been ephemeral or calculated to mislead, of course. The Spartans were famously irresolute, as their Corinthian allies were fond of reminding them, and it may be that the apparent vacillation in their ranks was a necessary but transient step towards a commitment to war that was, under the circumstances, inevitable. The mutually exclusive demands made of the Athenians may have been token gestures intended to play for time or embarrass members of the Attican elite such as Pericles rather than serious negotiating terms. But I would like to suggest that there is a theme in the Spartan debates that Thucydides, fixated as he is on the motive of fear, does not pay sufficient attention to; and this may help to explain some of the inconsistencies in Spartan behavior.
The delegates from Corinth make two speeches to the Spartan assembly in the run up to war, and the tone of each is markedly dissimilar. In the first speech, the Corinthians chastise and threaten. Sparta’s hesitancy in the face of Athenian aggression has put itself and the whole of the Peloponnesian League in jeopardy, and this is a reflection of a backward political structure and an obsolete Weltanschauung: the address ends with a not-very disguised threat to abandon the alliance completely. The second speech, at the Allied Congress, is quite different. Where before the focus was on Sparta’s institutional and cultural liabilities and the narrow concerns of self-defense, now all attention is fixed on the “dictator state” Athens and the “hope of liberation” for those Hellenes “suffering from aggression” or already choking beneath the Attican yoke. Even a racial theme is introduced within the wider context of Greek bondage: “Let there be no delay in coming to the help of Potidaea. They are Dorians and are being besieged by Ionians ... let there be no delay in claiming liberty for all the rest.” The speech ends with a ringing challenge: “Let us liberate the Hellenes who are now enslaved!” Carping criticism has been replaced by crusader zeal.
What I would suggest this transformation of oratory represents is a real shift in the Spartan rationale for war, from the restricted deterrence of further Athenian aggression into a far more emotionally intense rallying call for the emancipation of all Greece. The Spartans ultimately challenged Athens not out of fear, as Thucydides suggests, but because they had become intoxicated with their own rhetoric of liberation. Such an idea, after all, played on one of the cardinal tropes of Spartan mythology, that the city was the natural protector of the Greeks and the ultimate bastion of Hellenic freedom: to invoke the spirit of Thermopylae must have swelled the Spartan breast just as reliably as the cries of nach Paris and poor little Belgium would inspire similar patriotic furies 2,300 years later. It is always possible, admittedly, that the adoption of this ideological language in the last stages of the crisis was a propaganda ruse, a veneer of respectability to mask a more calculated decision for war. In the absence of a Spartan Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht, we cannot analyze in depth the hidden workings of the Peloponnesian mind.
But if this adoption of liberation rhetoric was insincere, it is difficult to explain the peculiar chronology of the final Spartan ultimatums to Athens. No sooner have their delegates delivered an apparently moderate set of terms - requesting only the abandonment of the siege of Potidaea, the freedom of Aegina and the relaxation of the Megarian embargo – than, before a response has even been formulated, a follow-up communiqué orders that Athens “give the Hellenes their freedom”. This does not seem to represent rational brinksmanship. Why did the Spartans not wait for the Athenian reply before sending this replacement petition? If they suspected (rightly) that Athens would reject the first ultimatum under Periclean influence, why did they not score some diplomatic points by appearing to be the more reasonable party, instead of introducing sweeping additional demands so soon? If they feared that Athens would accept the first ultimatum, why send it at all – why not just demand Hellenic freedom from the beginning, knowing that the Athenians would have no choice but to reject such a radical proposal? The point is that the simplest way to resolve the inconsistency in the Spartan ultimatums is to assume that they had genuinely changed their minds. What had started as a cool exercise in diplomacy had been supplanted by an emotionally charged resolve to unshackle Greece. The Spartans ramped up their demands because they no longer cared about the Megarian decree. They now wanted war, but an aggressive war of liberation, not a limited pre-emptive campaign. Enlightened self-interest was out; the zealotry of the freedom fighter, in [Kagan (p. 323) notes that the structure of the Spartan polity was such that it was “difficult to restrain outbursts of passion and to follow a sober, cautious policy in time of crisis.”]
(To be continued)
Posted by Alan Allport at July 23, 2005 05:45 AM