Crtd 07-05-27 Lastedit 08-09-12

Thucydides
Your neighbour is your enemy, and the enemy of your enemy is your friend

The Peloponnesian war was fought in the second half of the fifth century BC, largely between Greek tribes only. It was in the classical Greek times, revered ever since five hundred years ago this period became the object of admiration in Europe. This was the period of the philosophers Socrates and Plato, playwright Sophocles and Aristophanes, the politicians Pericles, general Alcibiades, and last but not least: Thucydides, an exiled Athenian general, author of the history of the war, the book we deal with here. Al these Athenian people knew each each other in person, Alcibiades, for instance, in his youth was Socrates' boy friend (click: Plato's Symposion).
At the time the war started, the older generations could still remember how all Greeks had fought together to defend themselves against the border armies of the enormous Persian empire, ruled by the Persian King seated in Persepolis, Southern Iran. Though for the Persians this was a minor border operation involving only a small part of army and fleet, and surely not a danger to their empire, their loss made the Greek celebrate as if they had conquered Persepolis. For five hundred years now, European grammar schoolchildren celebrate the Greek victory in these skirmishes as though it is major event of world history. But what it correctly teaches is the Athenian spirit of the time: many words, bust up's and boasting.
The Persian war had forced the Greek to raise the level of their shipping techniques to the standards of the enemy, who got theirs from the Phoenician sea traders residing in what now is called Lebanon. In fact, the King of Persia resided too far to know much about naval battle. He was brought over and put in a watchtower to oversee the decisive naval battle at Salamis, won by the Greek fleet. A wind change did much of the job. Greeks of course claimed they had anticipated it. So would the Persians and Phoenicians if it had gone the other way.
The Persian debacle at Salamis gave the Greek the time to unite and finally forced the Persians to give up, both on land and on sea. This made free the Greek cities in the Aegean Sea and on what now is called the Turkish coast. Peace broke out with the Greek coastal and island cities in a military and trade advantage to the land locked Greeks, since the Persian war had boosted Greek shipping which at the time was by far the most efficient way to transport trade goods, arms and soldiers. Among these Greek seafaring cities, Athens aspired leadership, both in terms of numbers of ships and in terms of decision making. A Greek seafaring cities' alliance was formed, the Delian League. Some Greek cities allied voluntarily with Athens to provide ships, soldiers and money, others did so out of fear. The league grew and tributes in fact often became seen as tributes to leader Athens, bribes in exchange for not getting trouble with the Big Brother. Thus, the first democracy in the world started to crypto-dictatorially  rule an empire with their fellow Greeks as subjects. The hidden dictatorship was never formalized and every "agreement" got cast in the most amicable and democratic of words. Athens ruled the sea and its coast in the Aegean, and part of what is now the Greek side of the Adriatic. Greek cities, colonies of  home cities like Athens, Corinth, Thebes, Sparta, Argos etc. at the time were already scattered all over the North Mediterranean (up to Marseille and even Northern Spain in the West, and up to the far East coast of the Black sea coast, but most of the ones beyond Byzantium Eastward, and over the Adriatic Westward felt themselves too far to be bothered by the war. In the nearer vicinity, where Athens had not made "friends" already, it was in threat of doing so soon.
This forced other Greek cities to unite, and that is where Thucydides starts his history in detail. The cities not yet subdued by the Athenian democrats were mostly landlocked, primarily relying on land armies (though there were also some seafaring cities, notably Corinth, who thus far had been strong enough to stay clear of Athens). Their leader was Sparta. In the time of the Persian war the Greeks, albeit with some difficulty, had united. Now they got divided. Without going into Thucydides' details, the pattern seems to be along the two following principles:

	Your neighbour is your enemy, at least not to be trusted
	The enemy of your enemy is your friend

This led to a chessboard pattern of coalition, where cities "near" Sparta, if dissatisfied, tended to look for help to Athens (say "yellow"), and cities "near" Athens looked for help to Sparta (say "brown"). Then: if a near or even adjacent rival city turns to one bloc, you turn to the other. "Nearness" depends on whether it is defined by reach over land or over water. This complicates matters because in the early stages of the war, nearness to Athens had to be mainly measured over sea and nearness to Sparta over land. Later on in the war, after the Spartans and their allies had been forced to raise their seafaring skills and investments, large parts of the Athenian fleet got destroyed and Athens would need time to rebuild it, every city had to recount reach and danger of their main threats in the two blocs. This for instance, led to Argos, giving up its neutrality, allying itself with Athens rather than being underdog in an alliance with Sparta.

The pre-war chess board. Spartan general Brasidas hasted to establish a Spartan presence in the North Aegean. To be sure, Greek colony-cities at the time were scattered all over the North Mediterranean (up to Marseille and even Northern Spain in the West, and up to the far East coast of the Black sea, but most of them, Syracuse included(!) were too far to feel themselves forced into the homeland affairs)

The first attempt by Sparta and its allies was to use their threat and power to draw some barriers to the expansion of Athenian power. But this stranded on Athenian self confidence and ambition. A war followed that ended with the "Nicias peace" made possible mainly by the spectacular successes of Spartan general Brasidas in "liberating" North Aegean cities from Athens, a success appreciated neither by Athens nor, Thucydides claims, by Brasidas' rivals at home in Sparta. At the time it may have seemed to some that the existing Greek chess-board structure could be stabilized into a more permanent equilibrium, but the Nicias peace turned out to be a preparation for a new surge of aggression by both sides but especially by Athens, because she recovered at an astonishing speed from the war expenditure. This was the result of Athens' overseas trade and the extortion of "allies" and subject cities. Not only the classical type of war, with little collateral damage, killing men only, but even a recent indiscriminately killing plague epidemic was overcome, in Athens, by a remarkable rate of human reproduction. The resulting new echelons of enthusiastic youth and the impossibility of internally using the enormous wealth finding its way to Athens made young general Alcibiades and others dream of making themselves felt in Sicily, and later may even in Carthago, the Phoenician city near where now is Tunis, which dominated the entire Western Mediterranean Sea (the shaded area in the map above)! Thucydides claims that the Athenians did not even know the full size of Sicily and underestimated it. One of the problems of Athens was what to do with wealth after everybody filled his limited stomach and buildings had been set up in the most luxurious manner imaginable at the time. Stay sitting at home and lead a quiet life? The Athenian democracy voted overwhelmingly against, to the worries of even quite some generals. Athens and her "allies" went on a mission to control Sicily, Alcibiades wholeheartedly serving, other Athenian generals less than convinced of the rationality of the entreprise. Even after having been informed of the plans by reliable sources, many able statesmen in Sicily were unwilling to believe the Athenians were really coming. But they came, though Alcibiades was recalled to Athens before the army had reached Sicily. He suspected to be put to an unfair trial at home, and fled to Sparta, where he became an adviser of the Spartan league, successful in the effect of his recommendations, but not in winning the trust of all his former enemies there. His affair with the wife of the Spartan king (= army commander) Agis was not of much help either (though from many like stories in history we know that tools can be effective tools).

Those on Sicily who had the courage to be enemies of Athens not only managed to hold out long enough for help to come, but even got so close to victory that Athens had to send another fleet and army of the same size as the first to save the situation. But at the time the Spartan allies sent massive help to the other side, adding not only to the manpower and the ships but also to the military expertise of the quickly learning Sicilians. This ended with the complete destruction of everything Athens had sent to Sicily. Only a few Athenians managed not to be killed or sold off as a slave, and could, each after his own private Odyssey, bring the message home.

Thucydides then turns his attention back to the East to deal with the internal instability this debacle caused in Athens, and the way in which Persian satrap Tissaphernes (see maps) balanced between Sparta and Athens in order keep his chances to regain the Greek cities on what is now called the Turkish side of the Aegean Sea. In this effort he was competing with his Persian colleague of the satrapy North of him, Pharnabazus (see maps). Both gentlemen had for a long time been unable to collect the tributes expected from them by the Persian King, due to the hegemony of Athens in the Aegean.

For unknown reasons, Thucydides' history ends well before 404 BC, when the Spartans actually take Athens, winning hegemony in Greece but loosing influence, money and independence of a lot of Greek cities at the Persian side of the former Athenian empire. Carthago was seen neither by Alcibiades nor by any other Athenian. Alcibiades got poisoned by, or on request of, the Spartans while, after a short triumphant stay in Athens, in exile at the court of Pharnabazus. Socrates was poisoned in Athens for, among other things, spoiling the youth, by with the persecutors meant: Alcibiades. For serious empire building the Greek had to wait for Alexander taking over his father's Macedonia 60 years later.

Some problems of war

It is not easy to determine the right size of army for an operation. It is not the bigger the better, because armies eat. Big armies have to break up quickly because they quickly deplete the locally available food stock. Properly built city walls were insurmountable obstacles for an attacking army at the time. When you want to beleaguer a city that might hold out a year with her food stock inside, you need a small army, capable of feeding itself from locally available sources for a long time. Big armies have to move fast. Alexander the Great's high speed of conquest of Persia was forced upon him by the size of the army he had to feed every day. If a giant army moves too slow, the tribes and towns passed by the army perish due to slave taking, pillaging and food shortage. Few people survive and they are likely later to be chased by invaders. If on the other hand you manage to move fast enough to leave some food to the people you pass at least to survive the winter, this means you leave behind something like a coherent society that can be ruled as part of an empire.

Defenders of a well equipped city with solid stone walls were virtually invincible except by starving them. Starving a city required 

• a beleaguering army small enough to be fed long term by local sources.

• an adequate defense for this small army at the back, against relief coming from outside, from other cities, at least adequate to hold out until assistance could arrive

Surrounding a city with a beleaguering wall was possible even with seafaring cities because most of them were founded at some distance from their sea port, to be better defensible against pirates. In the era of the beleaguering walls, it became attractive to connect city and port, if reasonably close to each other, with long walls. The city could not any more be surrounded by a beleaguering army and could import food from the sea side, unless a naval blockade would be part of the beleaguering, which easily made its costs exceed the probable benefits.
One of the supreme moments of the defeat of the Athenian beleaguering of Syracuse was when the Syracusians managed to block the finishing of the North end of the Athenian double beleaguering wall by a counter wall (as Thucydides claims, by using the stones put ready by the Athenians to build their own wall). The Syracusians had tried it twice before in vain, but this time they succeeded. This feat, minor as it may seem to modern readers used as they are to bombs and cannons, turned the tables in the war. Now everybody knew Syracuse was to remain accessible by land and by sea.

The logic of making the enemy of your enemy your friend also worked inside cities: city parties tended to unite against other parties. In cases of higher tensions, such as war, this naturally ended where all got united into two parties, each unifying a pretty diverse set of people who often would be ready to oppose each other might the circumstances be different, each of them only inspired to keep the other one in check. To confuse matters more, if the strongest party in some city happened to favour an alliance with "democratic" Athens (often for no democratic reasons at all), and - hypocritically or not - adopt a democratic model for city rule, their opponent city party would look to Sparta and call themselves "oligarchs" and favour a more oligarchic rule, that is, one with less power for the big citizen's meetings, less talking and more short and to-the-point closed meetings of a smaller committee of the powerful. And the other way around. Inside cities, quite some energy was spent on suing, exiling and murdering members of opposing parties. Quite some beleaguered cities were secretly opened, or in continuous danger to be so, by members of the party considering its interest to be enhanced by the beleaguering enemy. Thus the chess board system ran through most of the cities themselves, may be not including Sparta, but certainly including Athens, where after the Sicilian debacle so many thought that now the Spartans were coming it might be profitable to pose as "liberators of Athens from democracy", and Athens did have a short lived rule imposed by a quasi oligarchic coup.

To decide for one war-operation is not like deciding for a general war, like the one Thucydides reports. To form proper expectations of a war that may last for many years is hard due to matters of good and bad luck in big battles, but in a large part due the quick and unpredictable spread of decisive knowledge and ideas of military technique. In militarily targeted cities, the prospect of all males being killed and women and children being sold off in slavery did dramatically stimulate brain and senses.

	During the Peloponnesian war, landlocked Sparta produced a generation of expert naval generals.
	Corinth started to build triremes reinforced at the bow, able to sink Athenian ships by frontal ramming (previously, ship ramming was thought to be successful only if coming in from the side). After loosing its existing generation of ships, of course, the Athenians reinforced the bows to but now they were catching up instead of leading.
	Syracuse hammered hardwood poles in the sea bottom before its city walls, with sharp peaks below the surface. A interesting diver's war ensued between defenders and attackers of these poles, with little profit for the Athenians.

Some problems of peace

The main problem of peace is the peace time increase in numbers of the male youth. In Greek times these were essentially idlers, since slaves did all the work. The free citizen's task was to serve in the military. Since they also were the driving force behind the political decisions in the cities. The Greek cities basically were army democracies or army oligarchies (where the latter tended to be more peaceful). In the past five centuries, European civilization has been relatively over-impressed by the Greeks who engaged in art, architecture, philosophy, theatre, sports. But apart from the sports, to the average small-brain high society youngster these cultural activities were rather boring pastimes and the only real thing was war. Hence the necessity to have the the male youth slaughtered off every now and then. And they used to vote for it and go for it in high spirits. (This was also one of the problems that later faced the generals of the Roman legions at the Rhine: an army is not like a machine that you can leave in the garage as long as you do not need it 1 Authority: the Security Problem among Cooperating Killers, neither can you take it out whenever you want it).
The whole tendency of peace naturally leading to war was enhanced by the accumulation of wealth in peace time. What to do with it? There is not a big relief to be obtained from food consumption increase: stomachs are limited. What to do after all ideas for private and religious architecture have been realized and all statues in town are covered with a thick layer of gold? You can't just keep doing athletics competitions? Let's go to Sicily!