A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

by Victor Davis Hanson

What men say, the speeches diplomats give, the reasons states go to war, all this “in word” (logos) is as likely to cloak rather than to elucidate what they will do “in deed” (ergon). Thucydides teaches us to embrace skepticism, expecting us to look to national self-interest, not publicized grievances, when wars of our own age inevitably break out.

This moral quandary also remains with us today, and it has been raised in connection with the controversial careers of William Tecumseh Sherman, Lord Kitchener, and Curtis LeMay, who all argued that battle is ultimately powered by civilians and thus only extinguished when they cannot or will not pledge their labor and capital to those on the battlefield.

Men did whatever they wished. They easily now dared to try what in the past they had done in private, inasmuch as they were seeing the rapid change that happened to those who were once well off suddenly dying while those formerly poor taking over their possessions. So the citizens felt it better to spend quickly and to live for pleasure, deeming both their bodies and their possessions as things of a day. Careful adherence to what was known as honor was popular with no one, inasmuch as it was doubtful whether anyone would be spared to attain it; instead it was generally felt that enjoying things in the here and now, and all that profited that, was both honorable and useful. Reverence of the gods or respect for man’s law there was neither to restrain anyone.

Both during and after the Peloponnesian War, Greeks agreed that something had gotten out of control and led to slaughters never before anticipated, not unlike the modern repulsion at World War I, which soon proved to be quite unlike the expected short and decisive campaigning a half century earlier during the Franco-Prussian War of

rarely do peace agreements last when the original conditions for hostilities have not ended.

Alcibiades’ end was a fitting metaphor for the entire Athenian experience of this awful three-decade war.

Once more, in the hours before Lysander’s attack he offered sound tactical advice to the generals, only to be refused on grounds that had everything to do with envy and distrust of this proven resource and little to do with the acuteness of his military thought. At this late date, the one single Athenian who perhaps could have saved or ruined Athens was told to leave. The competent generals ignored his wise counsel to instill discipline among their foraging crews and move immediately to a more defensible position, and thus they lost Aegospotami, their fleet, and the war itself. Alcibiades was murdered in Phrygia shortly after the surrender.

Because moderns put stock in value-laden ideas about the uniqueness of centuries—eighteenth-century America, nineteenth-century values, twentieth-century modernism—they have become accustomed to seeing fourth-century B.c. Athens as somehow decadent and a pale imitation of its grand fifth-century predecessor, which was decimated by a hideous war that ended in 404. Add that Socrates, embodiment of the fifth-century Athenian enlightenment, was executed in 399, and the picture of a sharp departure (or, rather, downturn) from the previous majestic hundred years is nearly complete.

War, then and now, is a destroyer of protocol, privilege, and tradition, and that is not altogether always a bad thing.

The great irony of the war was that the very requisites for victory—an enormous fleet, money for rowers’ pay, and officers deployed overseas for long periods of imperial service—were inimical to the historic assumptions of rural and isolated Sparta, which heretofore had had no monetary economy. Persia finally filled the void, gave Spartan generals untold amounts of gold, and made up losses in men and matériel almost immediately. As long as Greeks were killing Greeks, the satraps of the Persian Empire were happy to subsidize the carnage.

in the war’s aftermath, with the Persian subsidies gone, the implosion of the Spartan empire was directly attributable to its new financial responsibilities of administering a fleet and distant subject states that were so at odds with its old insular moral code. Money and manpower, not always just courage and class, quite literally won wars.

to win the war the Spartans had used Persia to destroy Athens—a strategy brilliant in the short term but calamitous in the conflict’s aftermath, when Spartan hoplites were stationed in Asia Minor to check the Persian resurgence in Ionia that they had ensured by earlier bringing the satraps into the war effort.

That the Athenian assembly exiled, executed, or fined almost every notable general it ordered on campaign did not make commanders more accountable as much as timid and prone to second-guessing. Thus, after any setback, whether in the Delium campaign or at Arginusae, they would most likely not come back to Athens, in fear of a trial. So the city did not often learn from its mistakes but almost always scared generals into being too cautious or reckless, their decisions based on anticipating what the voters back home might approve on any particular day.

human character is unchanging and thus its conduct in calamitous times is always predictable.