Thucydides wrote of causality in strictly human terms, the operation of eternal motives like fear, honor, and ambition. Since 1914 we have become accustomed to more abstract explanations for conflict, conceived as flaws in the structural apparatus of societies, economies, and polities – the familiar ‘–ism’s’ of nation, empire, the military, and so on. I propose that such non-volitional factors also played a role, however incalculable, in the outbreak of war in 432 BC.
One obvious example is the indiscipline of the Peloponnesian League’s diplomatic system. Unlike its Delian counterpart, tightly controlled from Athens, the Spartan-led alliance was a loose partnership of at least quasi-independent city-states that were able to pursue autonomous foreign policies. This is why Corinth was able to accept the Epidmanian democrats’ appeal for patronage without reference to Sparta, a decision that triggered the dispute with Corcyra and the subsequent intervention of the Athenians. Pericles and the other leading Attican statesmen were, as it transpired, wrong to assume that a war with Corinth could be kept localized; but given the apparent indifference of Sparta to the behavior of its ally, it is not difficult to see why they might have been led to that erroneous belief. Sparta in effect presented Corinth with a ‘blank check’ to act on its own initiative against Corcyra, similar to the hazy blanket assurances of support given by Berlin to Vienna at the beginning of the July Crisis in 1914. Had Sparta enjoyed greater restraint on Corinthian decision-making, the adventure in Epidmanus would either have been avoided entirely or would have come labeled with the clear imprimatur of the Peloponnesian League, perhaps dissuading Athens from fooling with such a political tinderbox. The vacuum of authority within the League allowed for dangerous independence of thought and an all-too-vague level of commitment on the part of its members.
Vagary also characterizes the details of the Thirty Years’ Truce. It is striking that neither side in the Peloponnesian conflict could confidently define when exactly the war had begun, because the terms of the Truce were open to such dispute that the decisive moment of contravention was a matter of opinion rather than settled fact. This had important consequences in the debate at Athens in 433 BC whether or not to intercede in the Epidamnian dispute, for both Corycra and Corinth were able to lay out plausible cases that the law was on their side; the ambiguity prevented the Athenians from making a decision based on clear statute. The arbitration process embedded in the Truce, the mechanism by which future conflict between the powers was to be pre-empted and negotiated away before war could break out, proved to be similarly inadequate to its task, for all parties attached such partisan pre-conditions to the talks that no common ground could be established. A redrafted truce might not have guaranteed peace, but it would have made the relevant points of international law more explicit and so forestalled the kind of contradictory interpretations that encouraged both Athens and Sparta to believe that they were in the right.
Hellenic decision-making was as much spiritual as legalistic, which is why the augury of the Oracle at Delphi – “that if [the Spartans] fought with all their might, victory would be theirs” – needs to be given serious consideration. Any student of the First World War will immediately recognize this divine injunction as his old friend The Cult of the Offensive, robed in mystical trappings but unmistakably the same ideological mischief-maker. The belief that only precipitate and decisive action could render victory possible – whether intoned by Apollo or the lesser gods of the Ecole Militaire a couple of millennia later – impressed the political class to make a swift decision for war before the initiative was lost to the opponent; presumably this burden must have weighed heavily on the minds of the Peloponnesian delegates as they assembled for the Allied Congress at Sparta. If the Peloponnesian case does not provide a full-blown War by Timetable, it does suggest that a theologically endorsed push for mobilization may have pressured the Spartans into battle sooner rather than later.
At this point, it may be appropriate to review the issue of war guilt. Agency - or to use its blunter but more pertinent synonym, blame – is the unspoken agenda behind any investigation of war origins: whodunit? Given the absence of any obvious villain in the story and the weighting of non-volitional causes like the broken Spartan alliance system and the deceptively worded armistice, would it be fair for a Peloponnesian Lloyd-George to plead that “the nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war” [David Lloyd-George, War Memoirs. Odhams Press, 1938, Vol. I, p. 38] – mysteriously, unstoppably, beyond the will of statesmen? It may be that no single power sought war in 432 BC; even if the Spartans ultimately adopted a liberation motif in the final days, this was after a series of provocations that arguably added up to a casus belli in their own right. But if there was no evil genius behind the collapse of the Thirty Years’ Truce, that does not necessarily acquit the Hellenes of all culpability. The concept of criminal negligence ought to be considered too.
The Athenians and the Spartans may not have wanted a war, at least at the beginning of the Epidamnian crisis; but did they do enough to avoid one? One notices in the History an insidious fatalism creeping into the deliberations on both sides, a sense that kismet ought not to be defied and that to energetically pursue peace is somehow to fight against nature and necessity. When siding with Corcyra, the Athenians console themselves with the truism that “war with the Peloponnese was bound to come”; when voting in favor of the hawkish Sthenelaidas, the Spartans complain that their hand has been forced by Attican aggression. There is an abdication of responsibility in the face of what James Joll would call in relation to 1914 “the unspoken assumptions” of the age – the palliative that war is certain to happen anyway, and so all accountability for what is to follow is somehow soaked up by a sweep of the deterministic sponge. In that sense, all the Hellenes were equally responsible for turning their belief about the inevitability of conflict into a self-fulfilling prophecy. War came because they believed it would come, and they learned to welcome it. What Joll said about Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg and London could be equally extracted from the pages of Thucydides:
“When the decision to go to war was taken, governments were able to fight the war because their subjects accepted the necessity for it. To most people war appeared, or was presented, as an inescapable necessity if they were to preserve their country and their homes from foreign invasion; and they did not question what they had heard for generations about the glories and superior qualities of their own nation” [James Joll, The Origins of the First World War. Longman, 1992, p. 229]. Posted by Alan Allport at July 25, 2005 05:01 AM