The Fall of Classical Greece

The plague was followed by a series of poor decisions by both sides.  For the most part the two states never directly faced off, this was largely because of their opposing strengths; Sparta’s hoplite army could defeat any land-based enemy and Athens had the most powerful navy in the Aegean. Athens did not want to fight Sparta on land, and Sparta did not want to fight Athens at sea.

In 424 BCE Athens attacked Boetia, a Spartan ally just north of Attica that allowed Spartan raiders easy access into the Athenian countryside.  This was supposed to be an equal-sided pitched battle. Hoplite battles were normally fought on even ground at a set time and with roughly an equal number of troops. There were generally no surprises and winning was determined on the individual strength and resolve of the men. Battles were usually over in a matter of minutes. But at the Battle of Delium the Boetians charged downhill towards the Athenian army and eliminated it. The Athenians lost nearly 15 per cent of their hoplite army.  The Athenians received another severe blow when they tried to regain Amphipolis, an important ally that had recently surrendered to Sparta. Thucydides was sent to save the city but arrived too late. He spent the next 20 years in exile.  The Peloponnesian War marked the end of formalized warfare in Greece.  Whole cities were destroyed and their inhabitants murdered or enslaved.  

After a decade of fighting the Peace of Nicias sought to ally Sparta and Athens. The terms stated that peace between the Peloponnesian League and the Delian League was to last for 50 years, and both sides were to return what land they had gained from the enemy. This “uneasy peace” did not last long. By 418 BCE the truce was officially over; Athenian coastal attacks of the Peloponnesus had not ceased, and King Agis of Sparta attacked Mantinea and Argos.

In 415 BCE the Athenians embarked on their most controversial and disastrous military expedition to date. They “resolved to sail again against Sicily…and, if possible, to conquer it….they did not realize that they were taking on a war of almost the same magnitude as their war against the Peloponnesians”. The Athenians believed that if they could conquer the large, fertile island they could cease grain imports into the Peloponnesus as well as increase imported grain for themselves. They underestimated the size and strength of Sicily.  The expedition was also poorly led. The Athenian Assembly sent three commanders: Nicias, Lamachus, and the traitorous Alcibiades who jumped ship in southern Italy and fled to Sparta. After arriving at Syracuse the Athenian fleet waited several months before attacking thus enabling the Syracusans to prepare. When they finally attacked they won a hoplite battle but were unable to breach the reinforced city walls. They began constructing a siege wall, Syracusans built counter-walls but could not keep pace and victory looked certain for Athens.  Then the Spartan fleet, having been informed by Alcibiades of the Athenian’s plan, landed on the island and attacked the Athenians from the rear. Athenian naval reinforcements were sent but modified Spartan and Corinthian ships smashed through the Athenian triremes and 25000 sailors and nearly all the Athenian ships were destroyed.

A night attack on Syracuse also ended disastrously. When the Syracusans began fighting back Athenian soldiers panicked, and in the dark began killing their own men. Some 40,000 Athenian soldiers attempted to retreat to Catana, a city in northern Sicily that was Athenian friendly.  More Athenians died while fleeing than in all other Sicilian battles; 9000 hoplites and countless foot-soldiers perished. “This was…the greatest action that we know of in Hellenic history…to the vanquished the most calamitous of defeats…their losses were, as they say, total; army, navy, everything was destroyed…”. This failed conquest of Sicily was the second major factor in Athens fall from preeminence.  

While the Athenians flailed in Sicily, Spartan troops urged by Alcibiades, set up base in Decelea, which gave them control of rural Attica and prevented food supplies from reaching Athens. The Athenians were forced to break into the ‘Iron Reserve’, a secret stash of 1000 talents to construct a new fleet. In order to construct a fleet of their own, Sparta made a deal with King Darius of Persia: the Persians would provide gold for a fleet if Sparta surrendered Ionia. The Spartans agreed and the Peloponnesian War moved to the sea.  The Battle of Arginusae in 406 BCE was the biggest naval battle in Greek history and Athens greatest naval victory. The Athenians destroyed two thirds of Sparta’s fleet. Sparta, exhausted and defeated, offered peace but the Athenians refused, arrogantly assuming their rivals could never recover from such devastating losses. This was the third massive blunder of the Athenians. Backed by Persian gold Sparta quickly rebuilt her fleet.

The final battle of the Peloponnesian War was at Aegospotami, a harbour in the Hellespont. For days the Athenians tried to lure the Spartan admiral Lysander into battle. He waited until many Athenian sailors were off searching for food and water then, in a surprise attack, destroyed 171 Athenian triremes and killed 3000 soldiers.  With this defeat Athens was forced to join the Spartan alliance, destroy the Long Walls, surrender all but twelve ships, and abandon democracy. Athens was finished.

In three decades the once paramount polis of Athens had lost a third of its population to war, disease, and famine; she was bankrupt and was no longer a player in Mediterranean trade. She was now ruled by the oligarchic Spartans, and a tyrannical group of thirty Lysander loyalists who slaughtered more than five per cent of her remaining population. The events of the last twenty-seven years, the plague, loss of tribute-bearing states, the violence wrought upon its allies, the financial burden of having to rebuild several fleets, bankruptcy, the humiliation of an enemy-occupied homeland, the Sicilian disaster, the broken down class barriers, political turmoil, and the monumental losses at sea had changed the city of Athens. She was defeated and demoralized but was not destroyed. Population soon rebounded, arts and philosophy were restored, and trade and agriculture grew productive again. Athens had been brought to its knees by the plague and a few massive blunders, not because of superior Spartan strategic tactics and military ingenuity.  Athens was able to throw off the Spartan yoke in little over a year and reinstate democratic rule. An oligarchic Sparta was incapable of running an empire, even with Persian support. Classical Athens demonstrates a remarkable example of the resiliency of democracy.

But, if Athens had not been so determined to spread democracy and to extend their empire throughout the Aegean, the thirty year long battle and its irreparable damage to classical Greek civilization may have been avoided entirely. Lessons to be learned from the Athenian empire are glaringly apparent in today’s world of superpowers run by corporations where present-day governments, in a quest for secure oil reserves, again wage war under the guise of spreading democracy.  The economic and political costs of the war in Iraq have been devastating to America and her allies.  America finds herself increasingly weakened and isolated from the rest of the world. Any claims the United States may have had to moral superiority have been destroyed.  Tens of thousands of civilians are being slaughtered in the chaos that the war has created. Iraq’s infrastructure has been destroyed and the economy devastated.  Much of the population has been reduced to poverty.  It is imperative that democracy consider human rights before the interests of the state.  The deplorable impact upon the populace by Athens attempts to spread democracy throughout ancient Greece are being echoed today in America’s attempts to impose democracy in the Middle East.  The war is undermining and making unpalatable democracy itself.  And, like ancient Athens, America risks finding its seemingly infinite power and prosperity irrevocably damaged.  “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

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References

Bagnall, Nigel

2004        The Peloponnesian War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Greece. New York: Thomas Dunne Books.

- Detailed book on the Peloponnesian War, although rather dry. It did however provide a great description of the events leading up to the war and what events may have perpetrated it. It also had good maps, a list of the main players in the war, and a ‘historical survey’, which listed all the city-states involved and how they contributed to the outcome of the war.

Hanson, Victor Davis

2005        A War Like No Other. New York: Random House

- A very entertaining and accurate book on the Peloponnesian War. Hanson does not write like an historian, he writes as thought he is telling a story. This made the book enjoyable to read, but I did find it lacked continuity. He explained major themes of the war but had to jump around between events to do so. I often got confused as to which part of the war I was reading about.

Hornblower, Simon

2002        The Greek World 479-323 BCE. London: Routledge.

- This book covers Greek history from the Persian invasion to Alexander the Great, essentially Classical Greece. There is a small discussion on the Peloponnesian War, but the majority of the text focuses on the before and after; that is how much the war changed Greece. It was an interesting read, although at parts rather technical and dry, but nonetheless informative on the causes and effects of the Peloponnesian War.

Kagan, Donald

2003        The Peloponnesian War. London: Viking.

- A mammoth book on nothing but the Peloponnesian War. Kagan discusses every event in the war, taken from the writings of Thucydides and Xenophen. This makes his book very long and descriptive, but like Hanson he writes like a story-teller so his text is very engaging. Some parts (particularly the battle tactics drawn from Thucydides) are less entertaining. Nonetheless, a very clear and complete book.

Morris, Ian & Barry B. Powell

2006        The Greeks: History, Culture and Society. New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc.

- Survey textbook for my Classical Studies course. Just gives a chapter-long overview of the war, but is very complete in its description. The text lacks analysis, but it helped clarify certain events that some other authors went into far too much detail about. Overall, the book is very good; it discusses every aspect of ancient Greek life.

Santayana, George

1906        The Life of Reason. New York: Prometheus Books.

- I only used his book for the quote. It demonstrates how something written one hundred years ago is still applicable in today’s society and justifies the importance of understanding and learning from history.

Thucydides

1972        History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner. London: Penguin Books.

- Thucydides, being our only primary source on the Peloponnesian War (up until 407 BCE at least), writes on the war from the militaristic standpoint. His analysis varies from being dry (when he is describing the military tactics in detail) to being extremely interesting (pretty much everything else). However, there is the problem of reliability when it comes to his discussion: he was not present at many of the events and speeches he writes about. Some of what he says must be taken with a grain of salt, but nothing he wrote about has been archaeologically disproved. His history is as accurate as we can ever hope to get.

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Notes

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