The Great War Between Athens And Sparta: A Companion To The Military History Of Thucydides

Dr. Bernard W. Henderson

• Publisher: Hauraki Publishing
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781786256652
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

As "a companion to the military history of Thucydides," this learned and thoughtful treatise by a well-known Oxford tutor is assured of a hearty welcome. For Dr. Henderson, in retelling the story of the most famous of all wars, gives the essence of many commentaries on Thucydides, with numerous maps and plans, and also cites recent parallels to the old campaigns. Thucydides is so modern in his outlook that this method of treatment is not merely permissible but entirely appropriate. Dr. Henderson has a vivacious style and enters heartily into the spirit of the many dramatic episodes, such as Cleon's victory at Sphacteria, or the desecrating of the "Herniae" on the very eve of the sailing of the expedition to Syracuse, or the condemnation of the Athenian generals after their last great sea-victory at Arginusae. Even those who think that they know their Thucydides well may learn a good deal from the book. And the implied lesson of the crimes and follies that an uncontrolled democracy can commit—comes out stronger than ever.—The Spectator Archive

CHAPTER I—THE CAUSE OF THE WAR

§ 1. Sparta

SPARTA was bitterly jealous of Athens, and with reason.

Fifty years ago the two had fought gloriously side by side to drive the Persian invader away in rout from Greece. In that war for freedom Sparta’s had been the leadership by land and by sea. The glory of the victory was shared between them. Their friendship had seemed built now for ever on the rock of a common peril faced, a common triumph won.

In the fifty years which followed the last great victories of Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale, Athens had become mistress of a maritime empire. She ruled a thousand cities, boasted her poet.{1} This was exaggeration. Yet over two hundred paid her annual tribute. She was Queen of the Grecian seas, and there were but few islands or maritime cities outside of the Peloponnese which remained independent of her Empire. On land indeed, north of Attica’s mountain frontier, she had found her overvaulting ambition roughly checked by her dour Boeotian neighbours. In Egypt her armada had met with irreparable disaster. But where her fleets could reach she ruled her Ionian kinsmen sternly, ever since the middle of the century, as a despot rules unwilling subjects, granting them no voice in her counsels, suppressing revolts with harshness, champion of democracy in the subject cities whether this were to their taste or no. Less than ten years had passed since the proud island of Samos off the Asiatic coast had defied her. Pericles, greatest of Athens’ Imperialist statesmen, had crushed the secession. In the strength of her navy, in the numbers of her merchant ships, in wealth, resources, and fame Athens was supreme. Her ambition seemed limitless. More and more the Athenians began to dream of a western as well as of an Aegean maritime Empire. Pericles for the time held such dreams in leash. On the western coasts of Greece, in lower Italy, in Sicily, other Greek cities would resent and dispute Athenian predominance. Here Corinth, Sparta’s firm friend, the chief naval power of Sparta’s Peloponnesian Confederacy, and Corinth’s colony Syracuse, would not lightly brook Athenian intervention. Pericles sought no conquest in the west. But he was fully resolved to open the way for trade and commerce in Italian and Sicilian waters for his Athenian ships. He concluded treaties of alliance with Leontini, Syracuse’s near neighbour and her foe, and with Rhegium to safeguard the passage for Athenian ships through Messina straits.{2} A still greater affront to Corinth was his alliance with her erstwhile colony and bitter foe Corcyra.

Corcyra was necessary to Athens. In days before the invention of the mariner’s compass ships dared not strike boldly across the open sea Westward Ho! from the shelter of the Corinthian Gulf. The shortest sea passage was the safest, and traders for Italy and Sicily crept up the coast northwards to Corcyra before venturing across to Italy. Just before the outbreak of the great war the constant bickering between Corcyra and Corinth had flamed out into open war, the pretext, the affairs of a miserable little city Epidamnus on the western coast; the cause, the long-standing feud and commercial rivalry between the two powerful cities. Pericles concluded an alliance with Corcyra.{3} It was “defensive”, yet none the less it broke the spirit, if not the letter, of the “Thirty Years Peace”, which in 445 B.C. had ended the first war between the Athenian Empire and the Peloponnesian Confederacy.{4} The alliance with Corcyra was quite clearly to Corinth’s hurt. Yet the Athenian could not let one of the strongest navies in Greece, that of Corcyra, pass by absorption or defeat into the control of Athens’ greatest trade rival, Corinth. The Corinthians manned their warships and fell upon the blundering Corcyreans. A small watching Athenian squadron saved the defeated Corcyreans at the battle of Sybota Islands, hard by the greater island, from irremediable disaster.{5} The angry Corinthians retired baffled from their enterprise. Corinth appealed to Sparta to take up arms against the tyrant city of Greece.{6} Sparta’s proudest tradition was that of liberator of Hellas. She could not refuse the rôle.

For Corinth’s vigorous appeal was reinforced by two other most unhappy Greek cities.

Megara, on the isthmus of Corinth, was a city of ancient renown. But since the Persian wars she had fallen upon evil days. Her ill luck it was to be equally important to both of the two rival powers in Greece. In alliance with Athens, she safeguarded the latter from all peril of invasion by land from the south. In alliance with Sparta, she opened the highway to the most powerful army in the land to march undisturbed into Attica and there join hands with the Boeotians, Athens’ northern enemies, who, by themselves, dared not do more than make forays over the frontier, if they ventured even this. The strategical importance of Megara to both sides it is impossible to exaggerate. It was the friendship of Megara with Sparta that determined the plans of campaign of both sides at the outset of the great war.

If useful to Sparta, Megara was vital to Athens. She had two ports, Nisaea on the Saronic Gulf, almost in sight of Athens, Pagae on the Corinthian Gulf. Continuous walls linked Nisaea with Megara, as Peiraeus with Athens. No Peloponnesian army could mask the “linked-fortress” and brave the narrow passage of the Scironian Way between mountain and sea if Megara lay starkly hostile, threatening its communications with its base in the Peloponnese. Thirty years earlier the Athenians had won over Megara to their friendship. At that time Athens had been mistress of Achaea, the strip of coast land on the south of the Corinthian Gulf, of Naupactus, a lonely fort at the western entrance of that Gulf, and, using Pagae, her ships could range at will along the waters of the Gulf. Corinth was then so hemmed in as to be all but blockaded. But Athens had lost Megara by revolt, and the Peace of 445 B.C. had recognised Megara’s independence. The city had gladly (for Megara was Dorian by blood and instinct) joined the Peloponnesian League. Pericles had been forced to write off the loss of Megara, bitterest of all the losses of the black five years before the Peace.

But the statesman, most certainly anticipating by many years the coming of the great war, set himself to compel Megara once again to join the Athenian Empire. Force of arms he could not employ. This would but precipitate the coming of the war, and the longer this could be postponed, the greater became those financial resources of Athens which accumulated under his careful provision every year while peace lasted. He fell back upon the weapons of diplomacy, and declared a trade boycott of Megara. No Megarian goods could enter any port or city of the Athenian Empire. Megarian trade was ruined at a single blow. The city slowly starved when, after the outbreak of the war, its home lands were ravaged year by year by the Athenian troops in revenge for the plundering of Attica by the enemy.

Some years after the outbreak of the great war, in the spring of 425 B.C., the Athenian playwright of comedies, Aristophanes, a convinced if humorous pacifist, produced upon the stage a play entitled the Acharnians. In it he makes merry at the sufferings of the Megarians. The stout old Attic farmer holds his open market in defiance of laws and public opinion, of bellicose furious charcoal-burners and scoundrelly informers. To the market there comes furtively stealing an unhappy man of Megara, with “two little piglets” for sale. He comes upon the stage, speaking the broadest Doric, dragging his little daughters one by either hand.

“‘Guid day, Athanian market, Megara’s luve!

By Frien’ly Zeus, I’ve miss’t ye like my mither.

But ye, puir bairnies o’ a waefu’ father,

Speel up, ye’ll aiblins fin’ a barley-bannock.

Now listen, bairns, atten’ wi’ a’ yere—painch;

Which wad ye liefer, to be sellt or clemmed?’

‘Liefer be sellt! liefer be sellt!’ the children cry.

‘An’ sae say I mysel’!’ answers the father:

‘But wha sae doited

As to gie aught for you, a sicker skaith?

Aweel, I ken a pawkie Megara-trick;

I’se busk ye up, an’ say I’m bringin’ piggies.

Here, slip these wee bit clooties on yere nieves,

An’ shaw yeresells a decent grumphie’s weans.

For gin’ I tak’ ye hame unsellt, by Hairmes

Ye’ll thole the warst extremities o’ clemmin’.

Ne’est, pit this lang pig-snowties owre yere nebs,

An’ stech yere bodies in this sackie. Sae.

An’ min’ ye grunt an’ grane an’ g-r-r awa’,

An’ mak’ the skirls o’ little Mystery piggies.’”

He offers them to the puzzled farmer:

“Mon! wad ye hear them skirlin’? Now, piggies, skirl awa’.

Ye winna? winna skirl, ye graceless hizzies?

By Hairmes, then I’se tak’ ye hame again.”

“Wee! wee! wee!” the children squeak.

“She’s no tail,” the farmer grumbles.

“Aweel,” the Megarian explains,

“The puir wee thing, she’s owre young yet,

But when she’s auld, she’ll hae a gawcie tail.”

And so the jolly fooling goes on for many lines yet, till the Athenian buys one for “a tie o’ garlic” and the other for “half a peck o’ saut”.

“Traffickin’ Hairmes,” cries the exultant father,

“Wad that I could swap

Baith wife an’ mither on sic terms as thae.”{7}

Napoleon’s continental system injured but failed to break the spirit of England. In like manner Pericles’ boycott of Megarian traders provoked defiance, not submission. The “Megarian Decrees”, each harsher in tone than its predecessor,{8} failed of their object. Hungry and outraged, the proud little city appealed to Sparta to intervene by force of arms on her behalf. Let the Peloponnesian League of free and equal allies, of which Sparta was recognised head—yet all the cities had their rights of speech and vote in the great Common Council of the members—let the League take action to save one of its number from perishing. Let the Council of the League be summoned by Sparta—with Sparta rested this prerogative—and let the members vote their ultimatum to the foreign tyrant city.

From within the Athenian Empire itself came secretly a reinforcing petition. Long years had passed since the chief island of the Saronic Gulf, Aegina, had been the greatest of all colonising and trading cities of the mainland. Before Athens or Corinth had taken to the sea, Aegina had queened it in the Aegean. Now she lay prostrate under Athens’ heel. A reluctant member of the Athenian Empire, she found herself far more heavily taxed than any other city under Athens’ rule. The annual tribute imposed on her in recent years by Pericles was crushing. Thasos in the north Aegean in the years just before the war paid thirty talents annually. But Thasos may have had compensation made her in the recovery of her mines and markets on the Thracian mainland opposite for this heavy annual payment. The like sum had been year after year demanded of Aegina. Then, a short while ago, Pericles, ever on the outlook for new sources of r...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• PREFACE
• MAPS AND PLANS
• CHAPTER I-THE CAUSE OF THE WAR
• CHAPTER II-PERICLES
• CHAPTER III-THE BEGINNINGS OF THE WAR AT SEA
• CHAPTER IV-THE CAMPAIGNS IN THE NORTH-WEST
• CHAPTER V-CLEON
• CHAPTER VI-ATHENS’ FAILURES
• CHAPTER VII-BRASIDAS
• CHAPTER VIII-ALCIBIADES
• CHAPTER IX-SYRACUSE
• CHAPTER X-THE END OF THUCYDIDES’ NARRATIVE
• CHAPTER XI-THE END OF THE WAR
• EPILOGUE
• CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY