De Souza - The Peloponnesian War, 431-404 BC

Guide To

The Peloponnesian War 431404 BC

Philip de Souza

Contents

Introduction

This book gives a concise account of one of the key periods of Classical Greek history. The Peloponnesian War, which lasted from 431 to 404 BC, was a conflict between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta. It was a confrontation between the leading land power of the time, Sparta, and the leading sea power, Athens. In a wider sense it was also a clash between a cautious, traditional oligarchy and an ambitious, innovative democracy. It is called the Peloponnesian War because Sparta was the head of an alliance of Greek states from the Peloponnese, the southernmost peninsula of mainland Greece. The stories of the Peloponnesian War feature some of the great personalities of the Classical World, including the revered Athenian statesman Perikles, the bold and resourceful Spartans Brasidas and Gylippos, the flamboyant Athenian general Alkibiades and the Spartan leader Lysandros, who eventually achieved the decisive naval victory that the Spartans needed to win the war.

The enduring fame of the Peloponnesian War is due in no small way to its principal historian, Thucydides, an Athenian citizen who took part in some of the early stages of the war as a naval commander. He was exiled from Athens in 424 and he decided to write a detailed account of the war because, in his view, it was such an important war that it was more worthy of a written history than any previous conflict. He carefully gathered as much information as possible, from eye-witnesses and documents, so that he could offer as accurate and well considered an analysis of events as possible. He was aware that this sort of history might not appeal to those who preferred a more romanticised and sensational account of the past, but he observed in his introduction: This is a possession for all time, rather than a prize piece that is read and then forgotten.

Thucydides work is incomplete, tailing off literally in mid sentence, just as he is explaining what happened after an Athenian naval victory in 411. It is likely that he had either died, or at least stopped working on it by 396 because he does not seem to know about an eruption of Mount Etna on Sicily that occurred in this year. We do not know whether he simply had not written any of the remaining books which would have covered the period 410 to 404 (there were probably to be two more), or whether he had drafts or notes but no final versions.

Another Athenian historian, Xenophon, continued the story of the war from a point just a few months after the latest events recorded by Thucydides. This could imply that Xenophon had a version of Thucydides work which was slightly longer than the one which now survives, for it seems clear that he intended his to be a continuation of Thucydides, although he is less detailed and analytical than Thucydides. Xenophon called his work the Hellenika, meaning an account of the doings of the Hellenes, which was the Greeks name for themselves. We can supplement these two main accounts from the works of many later classical writers, who provide biographical and historical details not mentioned by Thucydides or Xenophon, along with a small number of original documents from the time of the war, mostly decrees of the Athenians inscribed on stone.

Thucydides was the first writer who, in explaining the origins of a war, made a clear distinction between the immediate, publicly proclaimed reasons for the conflict and the longer-term, underlying causes of tension between the two sides. This explanatory scheme is still regularly employed by modern historians when they seek to account for the outbreak of more recent wars. It is a testament to the fascination of Thucydides subject and the quality of his work that, even in the twenty-first century, students of history, politics and warfare in universities and military academies across the world regularly study the events of the Peloponnesian War for the lessons it can teach them about politics, diplomacy, strategy, tactics and the writing of history.

Chronology