LECTURE 5: CRISIS AND CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY
In 431 BCE war broke out again between Athens and Sparta and its allies. The immediate causes of the Peloponnesian War vary from account to account. However three causes are fairly consistent among the ancient historians, namely Thucydides and Plutarch. Prior to the war, Corinth and one of its colonies, Corcyra (modern-day Corfu), got into a dispute in which Athens intervened. Soon after, Corinth and Athens argued over control of Potidaea (near modern-day Nea Potidaia), eventually leading to an Athenian siege of Potidaea. Finally, Athens issued the "Megarian Decrees", a series of economic decrees that placed economic sanctions on the Megarian people. Athens was accused by the Peloponnesian allies of violating the Thirty Years Peace through all of the aforementioned actions, and Sparta formally declared war on Athens.
It should be noted that many historians consider these to be merely the immediate causes of the war. They would argue that the underlying cause was the growing resentment on the part of Sparta and its allies at the dominance of Athens over Greek affairs. The war lasted 27 years, partly because Athens (a naval power) and Sparta (a land-based military power) found it difficult to come to grips with each other.
Sparta's initial strategy was to invade Attica, but the Athenians were able to retreat behind their walls. An outbreak of plague in the city during the siege caused heavy losses, including that of Pericles. At the same time the Athenian fleet landed troops in the Peloponnese, winning battles at Naupactus (429 BC) and Pylos (425 BC). But these tactics could bring neither side a decisive victory. After several years of inconclusive campaigning, the moderate Athenian leader Nicias concluded the Peace of Nicias (421 BC).
In 418 BC, however, hostility between Sparta and the Athenian ally Argos led to a resumption of hostilities. At Mantinea Sparta defeated the combined armies of Athens and her allies. The new fighting brought the military party, led by Alcibiades, back to power in Athens. In 415 BC Alcibiades persuaded the Athenian Assembly to launch a major expedition against Syracuse, a Peloponnesian ally in Sicily. Though Nicias was a skeptic about the Sicilian Expedition, he was appointed along with Alcibiades to lead the expedition. Due to accusations against him, Alcibiades fled to Sparta where he persuaded Sparta to send aid to Syracuse. As a result, the expedition was a complete disaster and the entire expeditionary force was lost. Nicias was executed by his captors.
Sparta had now built a fleet (with the help of the Persians) to challenge Athenian naval supremacy, and had found a brilliant military leader in Lysander, who seized the strategic initiative by occupying the Hellespont, the source of Athens' grain imports. Threatened with starvation, Athens sent its last remaining fleet to confront Lysander, who decisively defeated them at Aegospotami (405 BC). The loss of her fleet threatened Athens with bankruptcy. In 404 BC Athens sued for peace, and Sparta dictated a predictably stern settlement: Athens lost her city walls, her fleet, and all of her overseas possessions. Lysander abolished the democracy and appointed in its place a council of thirty to govern Athens.
The end of the Peloponnesian War left Sparta the master of Greece, but the narrow outlook of the Spartan warrior elite did not suit them to this role. Within a few years the democratic party regained power in Athens and in other cities. In 395 BC the Spartan rulers removed Lysander from office, and Sparta lost her naval supremacy. Athens, Argos, Thebes, and Corinth, the latter two former Spartan allies, challenged Sparta’s dominance in the Corinthian War, which ended inconclusively in 387 BC. That same year Sparta shocked the Greeks by concluding the Treaty of Antalcidas with Persia. The agreement turned over the Greek cities of Ionia and Cyprus, reversing a hundred years of Greek victories against Persia. Sparta then tried to further weaken the power of Thebes, which led to a war in which Thebes formed an alliance with its old enemy Athens.
Then the Theban generals Epaminondas and Pelopidas won a decisive victory at Leuctra (371 BC). The result of this battle was the end of Spartan supremacy and the establishment of Theban dominance, but Athens herself recovered much of her former power because the supremacy of Thebes was short-lived. With the death of Epaminondas at Mantinea (362 BC) the city lost its greatest leader and his successors blundered into an ineffectual ten-year war with Phocis. In 346 BC the Thebans appealed to Philip II of Macedon to help them against the Phocians, thus drawing Macedon into Greek affairs for the first time.
The Peloponnesian War was a radical turning point for the Greek world. Before 403 BC, the situation was more defined, with Athens and its allies (a zone of domination and stability, with a number of island cities benefiting from Athens’ maritime protection), and other states outside this Athenian Empire. The sources denounce this Athenian supremacy (or hegemony) as smothering and disadvantageous.[2]
After 403 BC, things became more complicated, with a number of cities trying to create similar empires over others, all of which proved short-lived. The first of these turnarounds was managed by Athens as early as 390 BC, allowing it to re-establish itself as a major power without regaining its former glory.
This empire was powerful but short-lived. In 405 BC, the Spartans were masters of all - of Athens’ allies and of Athens itself - and their power was undivided. By the end of the century, they could not even defend their own city.
On this subject, there had been a heated debate among Sparta's full citizens. The admiral Lysander felt that the Spartans should rebuild the Athenian empire in such a way that Sparta profited from it. Prior to this, Spartan law forbade the use of all precious metals by private citizens, with transactions being carried out with cumbersome iron ingots (which generally discouraged their accumulation) and all precious metals obtained by the city becoming state property. Without the Spartans' support, Lysander's innovations came into effect and brought a great deal of profit for him - on Samos, for example, festivals known as Lysandreia were organized in his honour. He was recalled to Sparta, and once there did not attend to any important matters.
Sparta refused to see Lysander or his successors dominate. Not wanting to establish a hegemony, they decided after 403 BC not to support the directives that he had set up.
Agesilas came to power by accident at the start of the 4th century BC. This accidental accession meant that, unlike the other Spartan kings, he had the advantage of a Spartan education. The Spartans at this date discovered a conspiracy against the laws of the city conducted by Cinadon and as a result concluded there were too many dangerous worldly elements at work in the Spartan state.
Agesilas employed a political dynamic that played on a feeling of pan-Hellenic sentiment, launching a successful campaign against the Persian empire. However, the Persian empire reacted and - with access to Persian gold - changed from backing Sparta to backing the Athenians, who used Persian subsidies to rebuild their walls (destroyed in 404 BC) as well as to reconstruct their fleet and win a number of victories, notably at Cnidus.
In 394, the Spartan authorities decided to force Agesilas to return to mainland Greece. For six years, Sparta fought Corinth, with Corinth partly drawing on Athenian support. This war had descended into guerilla tactics and Sparta decided that it could not fight on two fronts and so chose to ally with Persia.
An edict was promulgated by the Persian king, preserving the Greek cities of Asia Minor and Cyprus as well as the independence of the Greek Aegean cities, except for Lymnos, Imbros and Skyros, which were given over to Athens. It dissolved existing alliances and federations and forbade the formation of new ones. This is an ultimatum that benefitted both Athens, which held onto three islands, and Sparta, chosen as the guarantor of the peace.
On the other hand, this peace had unexpected consequences. In accordance with it, the Boeotian confederacy was dissolved in 386 BC. This confederacy was dominated by Thebes, a city hostile to the Spartan hegemony. Sparta carried out large-scale operations and peripheral interventions in Epirus and in the north of Greece, resulting in the capture of the fortress of Thebes, the Cadmea, after an expedition in the Chalcidice and the capture of Olynthos. It was a Theban politician who suggested to the Spartan general Phoibidas that Sparta should seize Thebes itself. This act was sharply condemned, though Sparta eagerly ratified this unilateral move by Phoibidas.
In 378 BC, Sphodrias, another Spartan general, tried to carry out a surprise attack on the Piraeus, whose gates were no longer fortified, but was driven off 10km before the Piraeus. He was acquitted by the Spartan court, but the attempted attack triggered an alliance between Athens and Thebes. Sparta would now have to fight them both together, with Athens trying to recover from the disaster of 404 BC and the Thebans attempting to restore the former Boeotian confederacy with Epaminondas.
In the 370s, Sparta fought Thebes. Athens came to mistrust the growing Theban power, particularly due to Thebes’ razing in 375 BC of the city of Platea, and so negotiated an alliance with Sparta against Thebes in 375 BC. In 371, however, Sparta suffered a bloody defeat at Leuctra, losing a large part of its army and 400 of its 2,000 citizen-troops. Sparta’s hegemony was over, replaced by that of Athens.
The Athenians forbade themselves any return to the situation in the 5th century. In Aristoteles’ decree, Athens claimed its goal was to prevent Spartan hegemony, with the Spartans clearly denounced as "warmongers". Athens’ hegemony was no longer a centralized system but an alliance in which the allies had a voice. The Athenians did not sit on the council of the allies, nor was this council headed by an Athenian. It met regularly and served as a political and military counterweight to Athens. This new league was a quite moderate and much looser organisation.
It was important to erase the bad memories of the former league. Its financial system was not adopted, with no tribute being paid. Instead, syntaxeis were used, irregular contributions as and when Athens and its allies needed troops, collected for a precise reason and spent as quickly as possible. These contributions were not taken to Athens--unlike the 5th century BC system, there was no central exchequer for the league--but to the Athenian generals themselves.
The Athenians had to make their own contribution to the alliance, the eisphora. They reformed how this tax was paid, creating a system in advance, the Proseiphora, in which the richest individuals had to pay the whole sum of the tax then be reimbursed by other contributors. This system was quickly assimilated into a liturgy.
This league responded to a real and present need. On the ground, however, the situation within the league proved to have changed little from that of the 5th century BC, with Athenian generals doing what they wanted and able to extort funds from the league. Alliance with Athens again looked unattractive and the allies complained.
The main reasons for the eventual failure were structural. This alliance was only valued out of fear of Sparta, which evaporated after Sparta's fall in 371 BC, losing the alliance its sole raison d'etre. The Athenians no longer had the means the fulfil their ambitions, and found it difficult merely to finance their own navy, let alone that of an entire alliance, and so could not properly defend their allies. Thus, the tyrant of Pherae was able to destroy a number of cities with impunity. From 360, Athens lost its reputation for invincibility and a number of allies (such as Byzantium and Naxos in 364) decided to secede.
In 357 BC the revolt against the league spread, and between 357 and 355, Athens had to face war against its allies, a war whose issue was marked by a decisive intervention by the king of Persia in the form of an ultimatum to Athens, demanding that Athens recognise its allies' independence under penalty of Persia's sending 200 triremes against Athens. Athens had to renounce the war and leave the confederacy to weaken itself more and more. The Athenians had failed in all their plans and were unable to propose a durable alliance.
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