Francis M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus
Chapter 1
[[3]]
CHAPTER I
THE CAUSES OF THE WAR
Thucydides prefaces the introductory Book of his history with the
statement that he has recorded the grounds of quarrel between Athens and the
Peloponnesians, `in order that no one may ever have to ask from what origin so
great a war arose among the Hellenes.' (note 1) Plainly he thought that his
account, which follows, of the disputes and negotiations on the eve of the
outbreak ought to satisfy posterity. He has told us all the ascertained truth
which seemed to him relevant. But somehow we are not satisfied. We do not
feel, after reading the first Book, that Thucydides has told us all that we
want to know, or all that he knew and, if he had considered it relevant, might
have told. So attempts have again and again been made to go behind his story.
We are still troubled by the question which he thought no one would ever have
to ask.
Our impression, as we review this preliminary narrative, sums itself into a
sense of contradiction. The ostensible protagonists in the Peloponnesian War
were Sparta and Athens--Athens as represented by Pericles. On the other hand,
neither Pericles nor Sparta is provided with any sufficient motive for
engaging, just then, in hostilities. Accordingly we find in the modern
histories, which are necessarily based on Thucydides, conflicting statements of
the type: `Sparta, or Corinth, forced the war upon Athens,' and then again:
`Pericles saw that war was inevitable and chose this moment for forcing it upon
Sparta.' So uncertain are we on the questions: who wanted this war, and why
they wanted it.
[1: i. 23. 5.]
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Why, then, did Athens and Sparta fight? This very question seems to
have puzzled contemporaries; for various accounts were already current when
Thucydides wrote, and it was partly his object to correct vulgar opinion and
readjust the perspective to his own view. Modern historians do little more
than traverse the same ground in his footsteps and follow him to the same
conclusion.
Besides Thucydides' own opinion, which we reserve for the present, three main
views can be distinguished. These are: (1) that the war was promoted by
Pericles from personal motives; (2) that it was a racial war--Ionian against
Dorian; (3) that it was a conflict of political ideals--Democracy against
Oligarchy. (note 1) The first of these is only a superficial account of the
immediate cause. The other two are more reflective, pointing to causes of a
wider and deeper sort, and touching the whole character and significance of the
struggle. We will briefly discuss them in order.
(1) That Pericles had personal grounds for thrusting the war on Sparta, seems
to have been the vulgar belief--the belief which Thucydides desired, above all,
to refute. Pericles, said the gossips, was avenging the theft of three loose
women (note 2); he was afraid of sharing the fate of Pheidias, and so stirred
up a general conflagration; (note 3) he wished to avoid rendering account of
public moneys; (note 4) he acted from an ambitious desire to humble the pride
of the Peloponnesians. (note 5) These and similar current scandals have found
their way, through Ephorus and others, into Plutarch and Diodorus. Among the
moderns, Beloch (note 6) inclines to revert to a view of this type. Pericles,
finding his position at home shaken, was anxious to turn attention elsewhere.
But it has been sufficiently replied that, though this motive might explain his
socialistic
[1. `The inevitable struggle between these rival
powers widened into a conflict of race between Ionians and Dorians, and a party
warfare between democracy and oligarchy.'--Companion to Greek Studies,
Cambridge, 1905, p. 69. When a war is described as `inevitable', we may be
almost certain that its causes are not known. [2. Arist. Ach. 524.
[3.
Arist. Pax, 603.
[4. Diod. xiii. 38.
[5. Plut. malig. Herod. 6.
[6. Griech. Gesch. i. 515.]
[[5]]
measures in home politics, the war was certain to be unpopular with a
great part of the citizens, and could not, as conducted by Pericles, have any
dazzling results at first. (note 1)If there is any truth in this
view, there must have been something in Pericles' situation more threatening
and more difficult to meet than malicious prosecutions of his personal friends;
or he could not have been driven to an expedient so desperate and (must we not
add?) so unscrupulous. We will pass on, bearing in mind that contemporary
Athens, as this scandal shows, believed that Pericles made the war, and was
hard put to it to divine his reasons.
(2) Was it, then, a racial conflict of Ionian against Dorian? Thucydides, at
any rate, nowhere suggests that racial antipathy was a main element. In fact,
two nations do not go to war on such grounds; though, of course, when war has
broken out, there will always be people wicked enough to inflame the prejudice
and pride of blood. The Corinthians will call upon Sparta to help the
Potidaeans `who are Dorians besieged by Ionians'. (note 2) Brasidas will tell
his troops that they are Dorians about to meet Ionians whom they have beaten
again and again. (note 3) Especially will language of this kind be heard in
Sicily, because there the diplomatic game of Athens is to stir up Ionian racial
feeling against Syracuse, and to cover designs of conquest with the fine
pretext of `succoring our kinsmen of Leontini'. (note 4) Hermocrates brushes
aside these plausible excuses. Let no one say, he urges, that, though the
Dorians among us may be enemies to the Athenians, the Chalcidians are safe
because they are Ionians and kinsmen to Athens. The Athenians do not attack us
because we are divided into two races, of which one is their enemy, the other
their friend. (note 5) Precisely; and the same holds of Athens and Sparta at
home. We must find some more tangible motive for war than a difference of
race.
(3) The third view is that the struggle was political. `The war became in time
a conflict of political principles: community of feeling and interest joined
democrats on the one
[1. Delbrück, cit. Busolt, iii. 2.
819.
[2. Thuc. 1. 124.
[3. Thuc. 5. 9.
[4. Thuc. 6. 76 ff.
[5.
Thuc. 4. 61.]
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side against oligarchs on the other.' (note 1) But though it may be true
that the war became so in time, this will not account for the outbreak.
The point is complicated, because `oligarch' and `democrat' meant very
different things in different states, and at different times in the same state.
We must recur to this difficulty later; here it is enough to observe that
Sparta did not fight Athens because Athens was silly enough to have a
democratic constitution. No one would maintain that. Nor had the Athenians any
objection to the Spartan system of government--at Sparta.It will
hardly be believed, either, that each state fought to give Greece in general
the blessings of a constitution like its own. Of course, we shall find one of
them posing as a benefactor. `The sympathies of mankind were largely on the
side of the Spartans, who proclaimed themselves the liberators of Hellas'.
(note 2) The words were sure to find willing ears among the oppressed subjects
of Athenian `tyranny'. But why, when Mytilene sent to Sparta immediately
before the war (note 3) and offered to revolt, did Sparta refuse her aid?
The similar pretensions of Athens in earlier days had not been more
substantial. To the minor states `freedom' meant autonomy. The Athenian allies,
until they revolted, were allowed considerable latitude in self-government. An
oligarchy of landowners was tolerated at Samos, till the revolt of 440.
Mytilene had a moderate oligarchy, till the revolt of 428. But then these very
facts show that Athens did not care enough for the abstract principle of
democracy to fight for the recognition of it in other states. Neither she nor
Sparta was so philanthropic. `Each of the two supreme states', says Aristotle,
(note 4) `set up in the other cities governments on the model of its
own--democracies in the one case and oligarchies in the other. In so doing they
considered their own interests,
[1. Whibley, Political Parties at
Athens, p. 33. Mr. Whibley, of course, only gives this as one factor in the
situation, which it certainly was, after the war had broken out.
[2. Thuc.
ii. 8. 4.
[3. Thuc. iii. 2; the offer was probably made after the revolt of
Potidaea.
[4. Ar. Pol. vi. (iv.) 11.1296 a 32.]
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not those of the cities ... The result has been that the cities have
lost even the desire for equality, and are accustomed either to seek empire or
to bow to superior force.' It was not, in fact, a question of the ideal form
of government. The Athenian Demos did not set up democracies in the spirit in
which Plato instituted an aristocracy in Utopia; they supported the
corresponding class in the allied states, because they had common interests and
a class-sympathy of poor against rich. Similarly the Spartan oligarchy
maintained the corresponding class in neighboring states, but only inside
the Peloponnese.. They were not conscious of a disinterested mission to
the rest of Hellas.The struggle between democracy and oligarchy,
where it existed, was in the main not a warfare between nations and cities, but
an internal duel between two parties in one city. Each wanted to rule in its
own way; each was prepared at any moment to invoke the aid of the national
enemy. But neither at Athens nor at Sparta was there any such struggle going
on at the beginning of the war. It was natural for the contrasts of Ionian and
Dorian, democrat and oligarch, to be much in the air, because the nominal head
of the Peloponnesian league happened to be Dorian and oligarchical, while
Athens was Ionian and democratic. Argos was democratic and Dorian; and she was
sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other. But did she join Athens in 461
because she was democratic, and Sparta in the present war because she was
Dorian?
Neither the racial contrast nor the political provides either party with a
definite and sufficient motive for embarking, just at this moment, on a
conflict. We must look elsewhere.
Most of the modern histories come back to Thucydides' one explicit statement of
his own view, and there rest content. `The most genuine pretext, though it
appeared least in what was said, I consider to have been the growing power of
the Athenians which alarmed the Lacedaemonians and forced them
into war.' (note 1) Thucydides holds (1) that the Spartans
[1.
Thuc. i. 23. 6; repeated in i. 88, and explained 88-118.2; alluded to by the
Corcyreans in i. 33.]
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were afraid of Athens' growing power, and (2) that the war was
forced on Sparta.We shall recur later to the explanation
which Thucydides gives of this alarm. It is sufficient here to note that the
Spartans were reluctant to fight; the impulse did not come from them. This we
believe to be true. Sparta was not an imperial or conquering state. The
purpose of her elaborate and rigid military system was often misunderstood;
even Aristotle speaks of it as designed for conquest. But its existence is
otherwise explained by a glance at the economic and social conditions. The
soil of Lacedaemon was owned by a few, very large proprietors. (note 1) Hence,
while the country could have maintained fifteen hundred horse and thirty
thousand hoplites, the total number fell to a thousand, and Sparta could not
survive a single blow. Her fall at Leuctra was due to the paucity of her
citizen population. The laws were framed to encourage the increase of the
privileged class; and this tendency, combined with the growth of large estates,
was bound to produce a very large number of poor. (note 2) Only the small and
decreasing body of the rich enjoyed full citizenship. The Spartiates, says
Isocrates, (note 3) enslaved the souls of the common people no less than those
of their servants. They appropriated, he goes on, not only the best of the
land, but also more of it than was similarly occupied elsewhere in Greece,
leaving so little for the mass of the people, and that little so poor, that
these could scarcely keep alive with grinding toil. The common folk were split
up in tiny `cities', less important than villages in Attica. Deprived of all a
freeman should have, they were yet compelled to serve as attendants in war.
Worst of all, the Ephors could execute them untried, in any numbers. Their
condition was lower than that of slaves in other parts of Greece. The Ephors,
we are told, on taking office regularly declared war on the Helots, so that to
massacre them at any moment might be legal.
[1. Ar. Pol. ii. 9
furnishes this and the following particulars.
[2. Cf. Thuc. i. 141. The
Peloponnesians are aÈtourgo[[currency]] and have no wealth.
[3.
Panath. 270. Isocrates' statements are, of course, rhetorical; but these seem
to be true.]
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The danger of such a situation--the constant menace of revolt--did not
escape the observation of Aristotle, (note 1) who further remarks that the
Spartans plainly had not discovered the best method of governing a subject
population. To meet this danger, and not for purposes of conquest, their
military system was designed and maintained. Thucydides saw this. In 424, he
says, the Spartans favoured Brasidas' expedition, because, now that the
Athenians were infesting the Peloponnese, they wanted to send some Helots out
of the way and so prevent a rising for which the occupation of Pylos gave an
opportunity. `Most of the Lacedaemonian institutions were specially
designed to secure the against this danger.' (note 2)
This sagacious observation had escaped most of Thucydides' contemporaries. They
could not understand why a great military power should not be aggressive, and
they put it down to the notorious `slowness' of the Spartan character. `Of all
the Hellenes', so the Corinthians expostulate, `you alone keep quiet.' `Justice
with you seems to consist in not injuring others and only defending yourselves
from being injured.' (note 3) Elsewhere, (note 4) Thucydides himself falls into
the same strain. In 411, he says, if the Peloponnesians had been more
energetic, the whole Athenian empire might have fallen into their hands; but
the two peoples were of very different tempers, the one quick and adventurous,
the other timorous and slow. The Spartans, he remarks again, were never
disposed to make war except when compelled. (note 5)
This reluctance is easy to explain. Situated in an out-of- the-way corner of
the peninsula, locked in by mountains and almost harbourless coasts, prohibited
by law from commerce and industry, the Spartans never voluntarily and
spontaneously attempted conquest outside the Peloponnese. They did not want an
empire over-seas, and when they got one, could not hold it. Their ideal was a
`life of virtue', to be lived by a small class at the expense of a majority
held down by ruthless repression and treacherous massacre.
For
[1. Pol. ii. 9.
[2. Thuc. iv. 80.
[3. Thuc. i. 68.
[4. Thuc. viii. 96.
[5. Thuc. i. 118.]
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fear of the Helots, it was necessary to maintain a ring of `oligarchies'
on their land frontier. That was all their ambition. Living on a powder-mine,
they had everything to fear, and nothing positive to gain, from hostilities
with Athens. The moment war broke out their coasts were defenceless. The
Athenians--as Demosthenes had the wit to see--had only to land a force on some
remote point, like Pylos, easily defensible and capable of being provisioned
from the sea, and the Spartans were powerless. What could they do when the
oppressed serfs flocked into such a centre of revolt? Yet this obvious peril
faced them from the fiizt moment of war with the mistress of the seas.
Naturally, they were reluctant, and `not of a temper to make war except when
compelled'. Thucydides is right when he says they were forced into the
war.But who forced them? Pericles, and the Athenian democracy?
The term `democracy' has fatally misleading associations, and it is not easy
always to remember that the language used by contemporaries about political
parties is vitiated by a constant source of error. The old names, Whig and
Tory, oligarch and democrat, which stand for the aims of parties in one
generation go on being used in the next, when the lines of cleavage have really
shifted and parties are divided on quite other issues. A democrat was a
revolutionary under Peisistratus, a radical under Cleisthenes, and in the time
of Pericles a conservative.
In order to understand the position of Pericles it is necessary to glance back
over the period occupied by this change. The history of Athens exhibits a
series of upheavals from below, which end in the full realization of democracy.
The power of the great landed families, who ruled Athens down to the Persian
wars, had been broken by Cleisthenes, though representatives of the two chief
houses, the Alcmaeonidae and the Philaidae, continue to play the leading parts
for some time to come. Themistocles, half an alien by birth, had broken into
the charmed circle and created a party of his own, which the aristocrats
combined to oppose. His invention of Athenian sea power and his creation of the
Piraeus were strokes of fresh
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and innovating genius. The policy they stood for was justified at
Salamis and adopted in the next generation.After the Persian
wars men's minds were at first filled with the Eastern peril. The Philaidae,
headed by Cimon, took up the anti-Persian ideal--war to the death with the
barbarian. The ideal was identified with pan-Hellenism and friendship for
Athens' yokefellow, Sparta. The men of Marathon, the victory of the aristocrat
Miltiades, rallied round Miltiades' son. The men of Salamis, the democratic
victory won by the upstart Themistocles, supported the leader of the opposite
house. The upheaval in this generation was led by Pericles and Ephialtes.
Family tradition associated the Alcmaeonid Pericles with the seafaring
population of `the shore'. But the sea power of Athens comes to mean something
different from what it meant to the generation who had seen the Persian wars.
The Eastern peril fades, to vanish at Eurymedon. The Delian league loses its
raison d'être and passes from an `alliance' into an `empire'. To
Pericles empire meant glory (timÆ), the first of the `three most powerful
motives--glory, fear, profit', which the Athenians allege as compelling them to
retain the position they had won. (note 1) In his speeches Pericles is always
dwelling on the glory of Athens' rule. A genuine imperialist, he honestly
believed that the School of Hellas was a benevolent and beneficent institution,
and did his best to make it so. `No subject complains of being ruled by such a
mistress, no enemy of being injured by so glorious an antagonist.' (note 2)
Thucydides, the son of Melesias, kept up the opposition on the antiquated
lines, and attacked Pericles for using the allies' treasure for other ends than
war with Persia. Thucydides was behind the times; he was ostracized, and left
Pericles in undisputed supremacy.
Meanwhile, with the achievement of complete democracy, the constitutional
struggle was over. The people had gained all they wanted. They did not desire
complete equality of all classes. As the oligarchic writer (note 3) puts it,
they did not
[1. Ípo (tr>vn) t<<n megÄstvn
nikhydeg.ntew, tim[[infinity]]w ka< ddeg.ouw ka< >>fel[[currency]]aw,
Thuc. i. 76.
[2. Pseudo-Xen..de rep. Ath. i. 3.
[3. Thuc. ii.
41.]
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want the offices on which the safety of the state depended; they knew it
was better for men of substance to hold them. They only want, he sneers, the
offices which carry wages. It is less unfair to say that they were content
with their stronghold, the law courts. As for the oligarchs, they were no
longer a party. The oligarchs from conviction were a hopeless minority who
could only intrigue in secret and try to influence elections.The
reign of Pericles follows. What was there left for Athens to do? From
Pericles' point of view, nothing. He is accused of being no great statesman,
only a great politician; he had no `original constructive idea'. We dispute
this. He had an original idea, which has too rarely made its appearance in the
history of mankind. The idea was that, instead of spending the treasure of the
league on materials for a very improbable war with Persia, it was better to
spend it on enduring monuments of perfect art, and that to make a beautiful
thing is a worthier occupation than killing other people. An additional
advantage gained by this use of the Fund was that he could thus provide
employment for a large working population. Those who laboured in the building
of those great memorials of Athens' glory had as good a claim, he said, to be
supported from the treasury as men engaged on foreign service. Workers in all
materials, in marble and bronze, ivory and gold, ebony and cypress; carpenters,
masons, brassfounders, marblecutters, dyers, goldsmitbs, painters, engravers,
turners; merchants and sailors who brought the material by sea and by land,
wheelwrights, waggoners, carriers, ropemakers, leathercutters, roadmakers,
miners-- every art had a whole army of labourers at work and plenty was
universally diffused. The whole city, almost, was drawing his wages. (note 1)
A thoroughly idyllic picture. It is true that the allies, who paid the bill,
were becoming restive, and the second of the three imperial motives--fear--was
beginning to be felt at Athens. Naxos bad been the first to revolt, and `the
first to be enslaved contrary to the terms of alliance'. (note 2)
Samos
[1. Plut. Per. xii.
[2. Thuc. i. 98.]
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and Byzantium had called for stern repression. But the allies bad
weakened thcmselves by letting tlieir navies go and contributing money instead
of ships. Scattered on islands they had no common place of meeting, now that
the congress of the league had fallen into disuse. (note 1) Pericles' policy
towards them--`to keap them in hand'--a phrase several times attributed to him
and probably often on his lips.What reason had Pericles for
making war with Sparta? That is just the question which puzzled
contemporaries; hence the scandals which we mentioned and dismissed. When
historians cannot discover a motive, they say that he saw that war was
`inevitable' and hastened the moment. But war meant danger to the stability of
the Athenian empire--the one cloud on his horizon. So long as there was peace,
the allies could be `kept in hand'; but with the outbreak of hostilities, the
Athenian fleet would have other work to do. The chances of revolt would be
enormously increased. When the cry for autonomy had once been raised, Sparta
would come forward as the liberator of Hellas. The first duty of Athens was to
maintain unimpaired the empire which was her glory. Then why plunge her into a
war which was the one thing that could make the danger of losing that empire
imminent? And what would become of the noble ideal of Athens as a centre of
culture and of art, the lesson and the glory of all Greece?
Pericles had no more reason than Sparta for desiring war; and this is precisely
the impression which we get from Thucydides. He tells us indeed that Pericles
urged the Athenians into the war; but neither at the place where this
statement occurs, (note 2) nor yet in the speech of Pericles at the end of the
Book is any motive assigned for this course of action. We can only conclude
that Thucydides was at a loss to understand what the motive could be. Yet some
one must have desired the war; and if the two protagonists on whom our
attention is commonly fixed are each without a sufficient motive, we must seek
elsewhere. In what direction?
[1. Ps.-Xen. de. Rep. Ath. ii.
2.
[2. Thuc. i. 127.]
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The clue is supplied when we take account of a certain point of
Thucydidean method. The facts which Thucydides in his introduction promises to
tell us are of two kinds: first, the events ([[paragraph]]rga)--what actually
was done in the war; and besides these, only `the accounts given of themselves
by the several parties in speeches (lÒg[[florin]])'. The history does,
in fact, consist of two elements--descriptive narration and speeches --what was
done and what was said. This arrangement involves a limitation important for
our present guidance. The arguments, pretexts, explanations, which occur in
the speeches must be such as could, and would, be used on formal occasions, by
speakers addressing a particular audience for a particular purpose. Further
the speakers are, almost always, official speakers, the leaders of
parties or the representatives of states; there is no room in the plan for any
statement of the views and aims of minorities, or of the non-official sections
of a majority. It may be that our secret lies in those dark places which the
restrictions of this method compel Thucydides to leave in darkness.