This is part of a larger series I am working on.
Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is a nuanced and rich examination of the famed conflict between Athens and Sparta, and, despite its age, it still has much to teach a modern audience.
The book tackles three main themes: that war had evolved into a more complicated method than what preceded it; that while morality should be a concern in war, this is realistically impossible; and that there should always be clearheaded reflection on strategic capabilities, influenced as little as possible by popular impulses.
Thucydides explained in his introduction that he documented the war’s events so well in preparation for writing his book because he believed “that [the Peloponnesian War] was going to be a great war and more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place in the past.” He argued that the scale, and therefore nature, of war had changed. Previous Hellenic conflicts had been short tribal contests between neighbors. These were the types of fights the Spartans built their entire society around winning. However, with the Grecco-Persian War, things had begun to change.
Persia’s army was not qualitatively as skilled as the Spartans, for example, but it was extremely large. It did not matter how competent Leonidas and the Three Hundred were at Thermopylae, the Persians had the bigger battalions. However, what the Greeks discovered by accident was that large armies needed copious amounts of supplies. When the Athenians defeated the Persian fleet at Salamis, they suddenly had the ability to interdict the Persian supply line anywhere they wanted. They could even try and capture the Bosphorus and cutoff the Persian line of retreat, trapping them in Europe where they had limited resources. The Persian army quickly fled back into Asia.
As Athens led the liberation of the Hellenic world, she got experience in logistically intensive expeditionary operations that combined naval and land units. She also got ever more experience in the strategic level of war, not just thinking about how to win battles but how to conduct campaigns, organize operations to those ends, and martial supplies for the operations.
Money and logistics were increasingly important to warfare in the Aegean by the time the Peloponnesian war broke out. Athens maintained its imperial status through its navy. Those ships needed to be built, the shipwrights paid, and sailors not recruited from too many of the shipyards least you lose the ability to make new ships. This was all far more expensive and complicated than the Spartan focus on making high quality armor and practicing drill maneuvers on a regular basis. The Spartans endeavored to live frugally in order to prepare themselves for the rigors of campaigning, but with a professional navy, Athenian ships could encircle a Spartan-held-island and make sure they had no supplies. You can survive on limited food. You cannot survive on no food.
By the 430’s, war was more complicated than ever before in the Hellenic world, and the Athenians were the masters of the new methods. A tactical capacity to dominate on the battlefield did not matter if the other side could beat you through logistics before you even got there or could prevent the battle from ever taking place at all.
A more modern example would be the Pacific Theatre in the Second World War. Japan paid little attention to its merchant marine fleet. The United States was a master of logistics in that same period. While the most important Japanese-held islands often had to be reduced by force, because of its superior shipbuilding and logistical capacity, the United States was able to minimize the number of islands the Japanese could realistically supply and bypass the rest.
Thucydides also highlighted the changing moral and ideological nature of warfare. He felt that the Peloponnesian War had a fratricidal aspect to the conflict, first highlighted by the civil war in Corcyra, as Greek fought against Greek. The war took on a meta narrative of oligarchy versus democracy as both sides sought allies they could use as fifth columns in neutral or combatant cities. As he points out, though, this often had more to do with local grudges than it did with high-minded political discourse over the appropriate organization of government.
In many ways, Thucydides laments the growing brutality of the war. He seems to yearn for moral righteousness that would soften the edges of the conflict. However, he comes around repeatedly to the idea that a leader has the conflict they have, not the one they might want. This realpolitik is best exemplified in two dialogues over what to do about two cities whose names sound similar but that ended up with two vastly different fates.
The city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos had rebelled against Athenian hegemony. The Athenians sent a fleet to punish the island and crushed the rebellion. The navy then wrote back to Athens asking what they should do about the Mytilene themselves. The Athenians debated the issue in the Forum and, eventually, they decided that they would spare the Mytilene death. It sounds like a moral decision, but the argument was grounded on the idea that if Athens punished rebels too harshly, it would encourage more rebellions and make those rebellions fight harder, last longer, and cost more money to put down. The Athenians would welcome cities that had been part of the existing hegemony back into the empire with all speed as a function of practical policy.
Mytilene had quite a different fate than Melos. Melos was a small neutral island in the southwestern Aegean. It had stayed out of much of the war, but the Athenians eventually sailed to Melos and informed the Melians the time had come to pick a side. They argued that they were a small insignificant island and so Athens should allow them to remain neutral. Athens countered that Melos’ unimportance was precisely why it could not remain neutral. Its willingness to stand up to Athens by not committing to either side could inspire rebellion. If it would not stand with Athens, the assumption would be that it stood against Athens.
The destruction and enslavement of the Melians might seem like it contradicted the Mytilene example from years earlier or be an example of the wars increasing brutality, both of which are valid points. However, it is important that Melos was neutral and Mytilene was already in the Athenian empire. The realpolitik goal with Mytilene was to reincorporate it and its resources as quickly as possible with minimal cost. With Melos, the island was seen as a source of inspiration for independence and neutrality by the subjects already a part of Athen’s empire, whether the Melians wanted their island to be or not. As far as the Athenians were concerned, Melos’ “nonpartisanship” was partisan because it hurt the Athenian side.
It speaks to the Athenian intellectual capacity for self-critique that Thucydides explored these issues in detail. The Athenian decision may not be morally palatable to a modern reader, but Thucydides’ belabored exploration of the topic suggests it was not in his day either. The debate over the role of morality in armed conflict is timeless, and the fate of Melos rings down through the ages like that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The focus on what we would today call realpolitik also comes up in Thucydides’ discussion of strategic thought and military theory. He argues for clearheaded reflection on strategic capabilities, influenced as little as possible by popular impulses, and a thoughtful alignment between ends and means.
The first example of this is in his discussion over the Peloponnesian approach to the war right from the start. Corinth was upset with peripheral actions by the Athenians and goaded Sparta into the war. The Spartan king Archidamus warned his own people against the conflict in forceful language. “War is not so much a matter of armaments,” he told the Spartans, “as of the money which makes armaments effective.” Sparta did not have the material resources to make war on Athens. Athens drew her wealth from her island subjects. Sparta had no navy to attack those islands, so she could not cripple Athen’s economy. Sparta’s economy was intentionally weak, designed to promote equality amongst its people and cohesion in land battles. She could not even afford to build a navy if she wanted too.
If Sparta attacked Athens by land, it would be useless because Athens had built walls around her city and down to her harbor. The Peloponnesians could raid Attica to their hearts’ content, but they could not actually hinder Athens’ economy. Athens could simply ride out the attacks. They could declare war, Archidamus cautioned his people, but it would be a war passed onto their children. “The practical measures that we take are always based on the assumption that our enemies are not unintelligent,” said Archidamus, “and it is right and proper for us to put our hopes in the reliability of our own precautions rather than in the possibility of our opponents’ mistakes.”
The Athenian leader, Pericles, specifically cautioned his people to avoid making the types of mistakes Archidamus was talking about. After the Peloponnesian declaration of war, the people of Athens were concerned. Sparta especially had a fearsome reputation for tactical prowess on the battlefield. However, rallying his city, Pericles pointed out that the Athenians had no intention of fighting the Spartans on land if they could avoid it. Like Achidamus, Pericles highlighted that Athens’ power was in its navy and the mobility the fleet provided. Even if the Peloponnesians could find the money to build ships; it would take time to construct them and the sailors would be untrained. With Athen’s navy already built, it could quickly swarm any attempt at Peloponnesian naval concentration. They could also isolate Peloponnesian positions that military action exposed.
Indeed, for more than a decade the plan worked. Sparta and her allies would invade Attica, within site of Athen’s walls, and accomplish nothing. Meanwhile, the Athenian fleet ranged across the Aegean and Adriatic isolating and capturing Peloponnesian strongholds like Pyrus and Cythera, which enabled Athens to fund and support dissident groups in the Spartan countryside. However, Athenian success went to their head. Archidamus had told his people not to hope for Athenian mistakes. Pericles had implored the Athenians not to get greedy and try to expand their empire, just wear the Spartans down and negotiate peace. The Athenians did not listen.
In 415 BC, the Athenians launched what may have been the largest expeditionary force in the history of the Hellenic world. Their objective was the capture of Sicily, which had multiple Greek colonies on it. The Athenians believed that capturing Sicily would provide them the resources they needed to no longer simply hold the Peloponnesians off but to destroy them.
The expedition was an unmitigated disaster. The Athenians had a poor understanding of Sicily’s geographic size, social composition, or political state. They did not receive support from locals and were not greeted as liberators. They also had nowhere near enough troops to capture the island, much less hold it, nor did they have the appropriate composition of forces, sailing from Athens with no cavalry. Finally, they committed their fleet to a fight in the close confines of the harbor of Syracuse. Athenian skills at sea counted for nothing when they engaged in an environment where the enemy could simply focus on bashing their heads in. Despite all the blood and treasure the Athenians poured into Sicily, the Sicilians destroyed the entire Athenian expeditionary force.
The disaster in Sicily set in motion a chain of events that led to Athens’ destruction. Persia, smelling blood, entered the conflict and financed a Peloponnesian fleet, and the Spartans eventually captured Athens.
While one hopes for a different fate than Athens, the Athenian fiasco in Sicily is reminiscent of the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003. There, like the Athenians 2,400 years earlier, the U.S., overly confident, invaded a country with a dubious strategic understanding of the situation on the ground, qualitatively and quantitatively lacked appropriate resources, and had minuscule support from the local population. While the U.S. never suffered a disaster on par with the Athenian losses at Syracuse, the invasion has continued to have a lasting impact on the American empire.
Like any good Greek tragedy, The History of the Peloponnesian War is a tale about hubris and the importance of controlling it. The Peloponnesians believed they could ignore the changes in the military and economic environments of the Greek world and continue to stick to outmoded methods of warfare that focused on raw tactical power. When they proved the Peloponnesians wrong, the Athenians’ hubris overwhelmed them, and they embarked on a foolish expedition that collapsed their empire.
Thucydides book is, as much as anything else, about controlling your hubris. He advocates for a clearheaded and fact-based approach to foreign policy and military theory. His insights remain valuable, even as warfare has moved on from triremes and hoplites. Any modern leader that thinks they have nothing to learn from a 2,400-year-old Athenian might have a touch of hubris themselves.
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