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

by Victor Davis Hanson

What is striking about the casus belli for the Sicilian expedition was that Syracuse, while Doric and Sicilian, was not oligarchic. Well before the war even broke out, an anonymous conservative observer remarked that anytime Athens did not support democracy abroad, it fared poorly, given its natural affinities for popular governments. The Syracusans may not have been as radically democratic as Athens, but their constitution was liberal in the ancient sense. A sovereign Syracusan popular assembly ensured free give-and-take between the poor and the well-off, meaning that the Sicilian expedition was at the outset a betrayal of professed Athenian values of promoting Panhellenic democratic culture. To the conservative Thucydides the anomaly was not merely that Athens had forsaken its ideological agenda of protecting democracies from reactionaries, but that for the first time in the Greek experience two large maritime democracies were at war. They would bring into the fray all the military assets that such imaginative and resourceful societies characteristically possessed. And these advantages—ships, money, manpower, and popular leadership—were many and not to be lightly dismissed.