Military history has not been very popular after the Vietnam War. Perhaps the unease is because war itself is felt to have little utility in a postmodern world. No longer are disagreements said to arise from good squared off against evil, but rather from faulty discourse and misunderstandings between two nearly indistinguishable sides offering competing “narratives.” Recourse to violence, it seems nowadays, reneges on the promises of the Enlightenment: surely disputes result from ignorance and thus can be settled through proper talk and shared insight. More often the lessons of war lie not in military history, but are to be found in what our universities now offer as “Peace Studies” or “Conflict Resolution Theory.”

When it comes to our martial past, we in our present pride tend to cast moral aspersions on history’s Neanderthals: those benighted combatants on both sides who, unlike ourselves, resorted to war out of stupidity, greed, exploitation, vanity, or quests for power. But more often, we in the university simply do not want to read about war at all. Thus in the most recent Oxford Classical Dictionary (third edition, 1996)—the classicist’s invaluable guide to the people, places, and ideas of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds—the entry under “Peloponnesian War” earns a pitiful twenty-one lines: far fewer than “Gynaecology” at eighty-one lines, “Magic” at 122, “Homosexuality” at 337, or “Literary Theory” at 435. And in that authoritative dictionary’s single short paragraph about the war we read that the twenty-seven-year-long conflict—a conflict that wrecked fifth-century Athens and altered the course of the Greek city-states—“was recorded by the great historian Thucydides and that is the most interesting thing about it” (emphasis added).

So without Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, was the real Peloponnesian War—the fact, the event, what we might call the non-text version—just an uninteresting few thousand dead here and there, an unimportant democracy wrecked, and a minor renaissance ended? Forget that a quarter of the population of Athens (including Pericles) died within four years from a mysterious plague; forget that entire cities —including Potidaea, Mytilene, Plataea, Scione, and Melos—were either brutally conquered or simply razed; forget that almost 40,000 Athenians and their allies perished on Sicily, or that dramatic masterpieces—Trojan Women, Oedipus Rex, Acharnians and others—grew out of the ordeal. Put all that to one side because now, according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, “the most interesting thing” about that great conflict was the fact that Thucydides wrote about it. Brilliant, of course, Thucydides was: perhaps the greatest mind the ancient world produced. And his history did not merely chronicle the war but also analyzed it as a vehicle to explain to us the unchanging nature of man and his tenuous grip on civilized life. Nevertheless, the Peloponnesian War—the event, not the text—is the seminal historical event of the Greek city-state. It transcended even the genius who wrote about it and lesser chroniclers such as Xenophon, Plutarch, and Diodorus who rounded out the story. (Thucydides’ unfinished account breaks off amid the events of 411 BC.) Facts really do exist without texts.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, Americans at war worried about the outbreak of plague in their cities. Newspaper columnists warned that sending troops abroad to far distant Afghanistan or Iraq was tantamount to sending them to perish like the Athenian armada in Sicily. Newscasters admonished us not to bully neutrals as if they were poor Melians. In turn, defenders of the war argued that the United States was a democratic, open society—an Athens fighting for its life against those who preferred hierarchies and various castes of subservience. Neither side could agree whether America was an ascendant civilization or at the brink of an Athenian-like collapse, exhausted and so demoralized by a culture of excess that it no longer either believed in, or could defend, itself. Nevertheless, most agreed that the so-called “war on terrorism” was “new” and could drag on for “decades.”

The Peloponnesian War, then, is not really so ancient. Even if some classicists think that Athens’s war with Sparta was relatively uninteresting, outsiders still write books with titles like War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War or Hegemonic Rivalry: From Thucydides to the Nuclear Age. The conflict continues to be evoked in the present—its supposed lessons both astutely and clumsily applied to most of our own wars of the last century.

Russia—or was it really Hitler’s Germany?—purportedly was like oligarchic Sparta in its efforts to destroy a democratic, sea-faring America. Did not the Cold War, after all, similarly divide up the world into two armed camps, former allies who had united against the common enemy only a half century later to face off into decades of hostilities? Modern observers still recall that Victorian and maritime England (read: imperial Athens) went to war twice against the great land armies of autocratic Germany with its Prussian warrior code (read: modern Sparta). Do democracies—with their moral laxity and messiness—ultimately lose fights against more authoritarian states? Or was Thucydides right in concluding that democracies are more resilient and imaginative than other governments at war? Was the Sicilian expedition a lesson for Gallipoli, Vietnam, or any proposed great democratic crusade abroad?

Why is this ancient war between tiny Athens and Sparta still so often used and misused? First, it was long—twenty-seven years—and it lined up the entire Greek world into opposite armed camps. Second, the two antagonists were antithetical in nearly every respect, and thus the bipolar fighting was proclaimed to be a final arbiter of their respective values—political and cultural values that still divide us today. Third, it started in Greece’s great Golden Age, and its attendant calamity was felt to have ended for good that period of great promise. Fourth, players in the war were the greats of Hellenic civilization—Socrates, Pericles, Euripides, Alcibiades, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and others—and their lives and work reflect that seminal experience. Fifth, Athens lost, casting into doubt ever since not merely the power but also the morality of democracy, especially when it executed Socrates in the war’s aftermath. Sixth—and at last we arrive at the theme of the Oxford Classical Dictionary’s brief entry on the war—Greece’s preeminent historian, Thucydides, was not merely an analytical and systematic writer of a great extant history; he was also a brilliant philosopher who tried to lend to the events of the war a value that transcended his own time, making his history of ideas “a possession for all time” that could furnish lessons for men at war in any age. Thucydides’ man of the ages is a pretty savage creature whose known murderous proclivities are kept in check—albeit just barely—by an often tenuous and hard-to-maintain civilization.

A great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it,” Thucydides wrote, contending at the outset of his history that the struggle between the two opposing city-states would be cataclysmic because both belligerents were at the height of their powers and were eager to draw the rest of the Greek world into the equivalent of an ancient Hellenic World War. “The greatest disturbance in history,” he soberly added of the conflict that consumed his own adult life. Even 2,500 years later we tend to agree that it sabotaged much of what Greece could have accomplished. “It is,” the classicist Donald Kagan concludes in his newly condensed history of the war,[1]  

both legitimate and instructive to think of what we call the Peloponnesian War as “the great war between Athens and Sparta,” as one scholar designated it, because, like the European war of 1914–18 to which the title “the Great War” was applied by an earlier generation that knew only one, it was a tragic event, a great turning point in history, the end of an era of progress, prosperity, confidence, and hope, and the beginning of a darker time.

Most wars, of course, do not end like they start. Before Shiloh (April 6–8, 1862), for example, Grant thought one great battle would win the Civil War. After the battle he realized that years, thousands of lives, and millions of dollars in capital were needed to ruin rather than defeat a recalcitrant Confederacy. So too the Spartans marched into Attica in Spring 431 BC thinking that a year or two of old-style ravaging of fields would bring them victory; seven years later neither side was closer to victory, and they still had another twenty far-worse seasons to go.

If the earlier united victory over the Persian king Xerxes (480–479 BC) marked the inauguration of the triumphant Golden Age, this classical century that started with such great promise finally crashed with the self-inflicted wreckage of the city-states. Thousands of free Greeks who had once united to fight Persians now killed each other and aided Persians. The carnage that Darius and Xerxes once could only hope for at Marathon and Salamis, Pericles, Cleon, Alcibiades, Brasidas, Gylippus, and Lysander a half century later brought about, killing more of their own people in a year than had the Persians in a decade.

Thucydides felt strongly that Sparta had invaded the Athenian countryside in spring 431 because “they feared the growth of the power of the Athenians, seeing most of Hellas already subject to them.” Of course, there were various other more immediate pretexts for war—Athens had imposed economic sanctions against Megara, a Spartan ally; both sides sought to draw a neutral island of Corcyra into their respective alliances; they each quarreled over the loyalty of the key northern city of Potidaea; the Boeotians wished to eliminate the outpost city of Plataea that brought fear of Athenian imperialism to their doorstep. And so on.

But Thucydides stuck to his thesis about the “clash of civilizations,” believing that there were larger underlying differences between the two powers—perhaps not always perceptible to Athenians and Spartans themselves—that would ensure the more immediate and minor disagreements would eventually lead to a cataclysm. After all, if Sparta ignored the pretexts of Corinthian and Megarian grievances, the sheer dynamism of Pericles’ imperial culture—majestic buildings, drama, comedy, intellectual fervor, an immense fleet, radical democratic government, an expanding population, and a growing overseas empire—would eventually spread throughout the Peloponnese and offer incentives to Sparta’s friends that she could not hope to match. Who, after all, could win a war of attrition against the world’s first America—when you could offer only ingots as money, a ramshackle hovel as a national capital, and a Gestapo-like storm corps in lieu of an army of liberation?

Still, scholars argue over Thucydides’ glum appraisal that war was inevitable and overrode what individual Spartan and Athenian leaders might do or not do in any given crisis. Yet few now—in part thanks to the work of Professor Kagan—question his keen appraisal that states can war over ideas, perceptions, fears, and honor as well as particular material grievances. Sparta’s fault in breaking the peace of 431 was not so much that it was culpable in any given context, but rather it was all too human—and thus prone to all the wild emotions that sometimes make men do what is not in either their own or the general interest. In the post-Marxist era, we still find it hard to think men will fight for reasons other than exploitation, colonialism, or for taking someone else’s money or land.

The Peloponnesian War itself proved to be a colossal paradox. Sparta had the most feared infantry in the Greek world. Yet it was Sparta’s newly created navy that finally won the great battles of the war. Democratic Athens sent almost 40,000 allied soldiers to their deaths trying to capture far-off Syracuse, the largest democracy in the Greek world—even as thousands more of her enemies were to plunder her property with impunity less than twenty miles outside her walls from the base at Decelea. Alcibiades at times proved the savior of Athens, Sparta, and Persia—and their collective spoiler as well. Athens started the war off with gold piled high in its majestic Parthenon; it ended the conflict broke and unable even to flute the final columns of the Propylae, the monumental gateway to the still unfinished temples on the acropolis. Sparta fielded the most terrifying army in Greece, and yet most of its opponents fell not in pitched battle, but rather either to disease, at sea, or in guerrilla-style killing.

Pericles planned the war and reminded his countrymen of what was required to see them through, but he did not even survive the conflict’s third year—a victim of a plague that he helped to induce by ordering all of Athens’s rural population to evacuate inside the crowded city’s walls. The philosopher Socrates had doubts about democratic Athens’s hubris and megalomania, but not enough reluctance to prevent him from fighting heroically in her cause in his pot-bellied middle age. Thucydides used the broad message of the war’s senselessness to explore his bleak views about human nature, but no Athenian fought more unquestioningly and without cynicism in service to his country.

No ancient war—not Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, the grandiose invasions of Alexander the Great, or Hannibal’s romp into Italy—is more contradictory than the three decades of intramural fighting between Athens and Sparta: a land versus maritime power; the starkness of the Dorians contrasted with Ionian liberality; oligarchy pitted against democracy; ostentatious wealth set against practiced dearth; a majestic imperial city dethroned by a rural hamlet; and a humane imperialism that killed the innocent even as a garrison state championed the cause of state autonomy abroad. No wonder classicists tend to avoid it all and prefer to publish on its bits and pieces—treaties, generals, decrees, finances, rhetoric, and the like. It is all too big and confusing, and so by our experts in desperation better relegated to a single paragraph of twenty-one lines.

In contrast, Donald Kagan set out to chronicle the entire war in all its complexity. He did just that for much of his scholarly career while teaching at Cornell and Yale. Four volumes published over nearly twenty years, beginning in 1969 with the origins of the conflict and ending, in 1987, with the utter defeat of Athens. Kagan ranged widely throughout European history, invoking ancient wars to elucidate Spartan or Athenian strategy. He frequently posed counterfactual questions and often doubted Thucydides (most famously about the latter’s judgment that the war was inevitable and arose from Spartan “fear” over growing Athenian power). Kagan asked practical questions about the financing of the war, criticized Pericles’ judgment, and occasionally labeled Thucydides a revisionist whose sober grand assessments did not always reflect the data of his own narrative.

It was not especially prudent of Kagan to begin a career by starting a grand multivolume narrative about an ancient war—especially at Cornell at a time of another unpopular war and general campus unrest when most scholars were more interested in social, economic, and cultural history and turning out scads of articles and monographs for promotion and tenure rather than sober four-volume masterpieces. But Kagan persevered and his work endures thirty-four years after the first volume appeared for a variety of reasons besides its proven reliability, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. He went toe-to-toe with the great triad of German historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Georg Busolt, K. J. Beloch, and Eduard Meyer—most of their work still untranslated—and helped to reintroduce them, not always with approval, to a modern American audience. Kagan reminded us of the role of factions within the city-states, that Athens did not simply execute the Melians or Spartans seek a break in the hostilities, but rather particular groups of Athenians and Spartans did so and in constant friction that reflected their own wide disparities of wealth, property, and lineage.

But Kagan’s greatest achievement was to remind us of the personal element in war—what Thucydides himself called “the human thing.” (This was also a theme of Kagan’s later book On the Origins of War.) It is not always cosmic ideas or profit and ideology that start wars, but rather very human urges of real people transferred to a grand scale—urges like honor, fear, prestige, and perceived (rather than real) grievances. The result is that his Peloponnesian War, like Thucydides’ own, serves a wider didactic purpose than the preservation of old facts and ancient men’s lives.

Kagan’s history reminds us that fickle and weak people often say one thing precisely so that they can act on another. I wish our current critics would read of the professions and excuses of the hurt Spartans and aggrieved Athenians and then ask in a similarly skeptical mood why we should listen to what bin Laden says caused his jihad. For Kagan, Sparta was no more doomed to go to war than Hitler needed Lebensraum. Sparta went to war primarily because it thought it might win a cheap victory over an imperial Athens, and thereby increase it stature without much cost. Thebes attacked Plataea not simply because it posed a danger but because it offered an opportunity— an opportunity more psychological than material. Britain needed the Falklands no more than did Argentina, but the dictatorship of the latter saw a chance for a quick cheap victory that could placate domestic unrest, while England for its future security could not afford the dangerous precedent of letting a second-rate power attack a great nation with impunity. States then do, as Kagan reminds us, fight over perceptions and professions (prophaseis)—not always for sheep and rocky windswept islands in the South Atlantic.

In the present single volume, condensed by 75 percent from the four-volume original, Professor Kagan has tried to make the Peloponnesian War come alive as a story, taken for the most part from a judicious reading of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, and Diodorus. The astute comparisons to later wars, the footnotes, and scholarly controversies of the earlier volumes are gone. They are replaced by a fast-paced narrative, with plenty of maps, that presents the Peloponnesian War year by year in very short titled subsections. His earlier perceptions and judgments remain, but they are implicit and fade into the narrative. It is now the train of events that must take first stage.

Kagan’s abridged Peloponnesian War is still important because the solid judgment of its author remains throughout. No one—not a majestic Pericles, a fiery Cleon, or the chameleon Alcibiades—can fool Don Kagan; he appreciates the genius of bad men he does not like, and praises the inspiration of rogues he despises. Bad plans like Sicily can work if implemented well; good ideas of good men failed in the Delium campaign for bad luck and the simple want of common sense. Things about radical Athens bother him, but not to such a degree that he denies its energy and dynamism. He admires Spartan discipline, but hardly the blinkered society that was at the bottom of it all. If democracy was often murderous, oligarchy and tyranny brought the same violence but without the grandeur.

Finally and most importantly, Kagan has no condescension for his subjects. Cleon and Brasidas, Nicias and Lysander are not silly squabbling ancient peoples in need of modern enlightenment, but men of universal appetites to be taken on their own terms, just like us whose occasional crackpot ideas, fears, jealousies, and sins can sometimes—if the thin veneer of civilization is suddenly stripped away—lead into something absolutely godawful. If you don’t agree, ask the Serbians, Rwandans, Afghans—or those with cell phones and briefcases who politely boarded planes to butcher thousands.

Notes
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1. The Peloponnesian War, by Donald Kagan; Viking, 512 pages, $29.95. Go back to the text.

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