Was the Athenian Empire that the Spartans had elected to destroy the rising hegemon suggested in the History? Certainly, all of the main actors in Thucydides’ drama appear to believe so. King Archidamus describes the Athenians as “extremely well equipped ... very wealthy, both as individuals and as a state, with ships and cavalry and hoplites, with a population bigger than that of any other place in Hellas”; the Corinthian delegates at the Allied Assembly frankly admit that “Athens is so much stronger than any single state in our alliance”; Pericles notes that, at least so far as naval power is concerned, “no power on Earth” can challenge Athens. And it is quite true that in the raw arithmetic of material strength – talents, triremes, the strategic location of maritime bases, and the control of vital sea lanes – Athens’ sinews of war were formidable indeed in 432 BC. The Peloponnesians were right to be cautious. But Innenpolitik cannot be ignored in these calculations, and the brittleness of the Delian League’s political order gravely compromised Athens’ putative supremacy. Indeed, I would argue that, pace Thucydides, the instability of the Hellenic world on the eve of the Peloponnesian War was being caused not by Athenian strength but by Athenian weakness; and that it was the Athenians rather than the Spartans who were above all acting out of fear in the diplomatic maneuvers leading up to the outbreak of war.
Thucydides himself would, of course, ultimately ascribe the blame for the collapse of Athens’ war effort to the “quarreling” and “personal intrigues” of the city’s democratic system; but the weakness he had in mind was strictly a metropolitan vice, and in any case its conditions did not exist in 432 BC when “power was really in the hands of the first citizen”, Pericles. But what the History only alludes to obliquely is the siege mentality on the imperial periphery. Athens’ power ultimately resided in its empire, and by the mid-Fifth Century the Delian League was being held together at the point of a spear; the tribute system bought its leading city-state fiscal liquidity, but at the price of the permanent estrangement of the membership. The threat of revolt was the principal security concern of the authorities in Attica, and this was not an idle worry. The latter stages of the Pentecontaetia, far from just being a catalog of unbroken success, is as much a depressing sequence of rebellions against the power of Athens: Euboea, Megara, Byzantium, Samos – the last of which was only suppressed after a brutal and expensive year-long war that permanently rattled confidence in the whole imperial system. In brief, the Athenian Empire shared rather too much in common with its moribund Austro-Hungarian successor; longer on centrifugal than centripetal forces, more fearful of its own side than that of the enemy. If Pericles had been introduced to a good patriot of the Delian League, he might well have responded, like Franz II: “yes, but is he a patriot for me?”
It is within this context of imperial insecurity that Athens’ behavior in the period immediately preceding the war must be understood. The original decision to accept alliance with Corcyra – the catalyst for the sequence of events that brought on the conflict – might have been interpreted in Corinth and Sparta as provocative self-aggrandizement, but it was more likely from Athens’ vantage point to be a necessary, and indeed desperate, defensive gambit. If Corcyra’s fleet were to be surrendered to the Corinthians, then Athens feared that its naval advantage would be fatally narrowed; even if the Peloponnesians did not seize upon such a reduction in maritime strength to attack Attica outright, perhaps it was feared that a kind of Tirpitzian Risikoflotte strategy – the mere threat of a naval assault – would be used to marginalize the Athenians in future Hellenic politics. Presumably, if Athens had been a truly rising power in the 430s, it would have rejected Corcyra’s overtures in favor of continued adherence to the 30 Years’ Truce. For even if the Athenians felt that war was unavoidable, it was better from their point of view to put off the inevitable day as long as possible in order to maximize their comparative lead over the Peloponnesians; to hasten conflict was to fight at an unnecessary disadvantage. Given how unlikely it was that a war between Athens and Corinth could be localized - though, by restricting their fleet’s rules of engagement at the battle of Sybota, the Athenians were certainly willing to try – the commitment to Corcyra can only be construed as an act of political desperation by a state that knew its ascendancy was fragile. Athens went to war with Corinth in the same spirit that Austria fought Serbia in 1914, not to realize fresh victories but to prevent the total eclipse of its power.
For how else can the follow-up to the Epidamnian dispute, the ultimatum to Potidaea, be explained other than as a gesture of fear? It is scarcely the mark of a vigorous and confident empire that its first major act after the announcement of hostilities should be the peremptory disarmament of one of its own satellites. Athens - rightly, it seems - had little faith in the reliability of its tribute-paying subordinates once the military power of Attica was distracted by foreign wars. Egged on by the Macedonian king Perdiccas, the Chalcidians and Bottiaeans promptly joined Potidaea in defying Athens in 432 BC, and Thrace became a theater of conflict even before the main actors in the drama had come to blows. Had the Athenians a more sanguine view of their prospects on the imperial fringe, they might have taken a less confrontational approach to the Potidaean problem and so opened up the possibility of arbitrated resolution. Instead, like so many tottering states that would follow them throughout history, they insisted that only a ‘firm hand’ would provide the necessary smack of discipline, and so precipitated the very crisis they wished to avoid – a crisis conceived in uncertainty and panic.
(To be continued)
Posted by Alan Allport at July 24, 2005 07:13 AM