This is part of a larger project I am working on. These are just raw reactions to the text as I read it. For the final discussion, check out my Substack.
Thucydides opens the History of the Peloponnesian War with a cursory examination of armed conflict in the Greek world up to his day. He contends that most conflicts were just brief border disputes by seminomadic peoples. Even the Trojan war, he argues, was limited in its scope, the epic poets’ opinions notwithstanding, because the Greek army besieging Troy had to spend manpower raiding for supplies and for farming near the landing beaches. This meant only a fraction of their force could pressure the Trojans. He similarly breezes past the Persian invasion of Greece pointing out that, for all the drama, the Greeks handily drove the Persians back once the Athenians destroyed the Persians at Salamis. Only then did the vaunted armies of the Peloponnese sortie out to attack the already retreating Persians. It is in these discussions that we already start to see Thucydides’ emphasis on economics and logistics in warfare.
These topics come up again as he pivots to discussing the immediate causes of the war between Athens and Sparta, the actual reason Sparta went to war with Athens, and both sides’ discussions about how to manage the conflict.
As the Persians fled Greece, Athens and Sparta led an ever-increasing alliance of Greek cities to liberate the Greek world from Persian conquest. Eventually, Sparta, an insular society afraid of outside ideas and with a large population of enslaved laborers at home, left the coalition and returned its armies to the Peloponnese. Athens continued, but over time, its allies preferred to pay money into the alliance rather than continue to contribute soldiers and ships to the anti-Persian cause. This made Athens very wealthy and allowed it to become more influential than Sparta had been.
The nominal causes of the final break between Athens and Sparta were disputes over Athenian and Peloponnesian-backed cities, namely Epidamnus, Corcyra, and Potidaea. However, Thucydides argues the bigger cause was Spartan concern that Athens was becoming too great of a rival for Sparta, the traditional superpower in the Greek world because of its highly trained army.
Sparta’s allies pressured it into declaring war, stating that if it did not lead them, they would find someone who would, leaving Sparta alone and isolated. Despite this, the Spartan king Archidamus pleaded with the Spartans not to decare war, highlighting Athenian logistical and economic resources. Massive walls that reached down to Athens’ harbor protected the city; it drew its food and power from its fleet and its island colonies. Sparta had no navy, it could not starve Athens out, it could not actually strike at Athens directly and could not attack Athenian colonies with any force that the Athenian navy could not quickly counter. The Spartans could declare war, Archidamus said, but it would be a war they would pass on to their children. The Spartans and Peloponnesian’s declared war anyway.
Thucydides discusses these same advantages and disadvantages when he examines the Athenian response to the declaration of war. The Athenian leader Pericles reviewed all of this with the citizens and offered one prescient, from Thucydides’ perspective, caveat: the Athenians should not try and expand their empire during the conflict. Pericles argued that they were in an advantageous position for the war ahead, so they must not get greedy and take risks. Do not take any actions that would destroy their solid economic and logistical base.
Thus, even as early as Book I we can see a few major themes emerging in the History of the Peloponnesian War: the primacy of economics and logistics in warfare, the importance of identifying strategic advantages and goals, and the danger of hoping the enemy makes a mistake as a strategy. It seems from Thucydides’ perspective, the war is Athens’ to lose, not the Peloponnesians’ to win.
If you’re interested in the final discussion of the book, check out my Substack.
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