The Peloponnesian War, Kagan
3.0 Stars
11-20-2024

happiness requires freedom, freedom requires courage, courage requires setting fire to a cop car

This book covers the Peloponnesian War, i.e. ~4 decades of internecine war between the city states of ancient Greece. These wars were ruinous for Greece's power and culture and civilization, and it's basically the last time you hear about them influencing world history, but the wars *did* at least generate a lot of interesting vignettes and international relations case studies, and so they were not a complete waste. One of the reasons this time period is still interesting 2500 years later is that A) the city states of Greece had a sort of Pre-Cambrian Explosion of different models of governance, with each city having its own bespoke combination of kings, consuls, senates, direct democracy, republic, elected generals, oligarchs, navarchs, pentarchs, decarchs, etc. etc. So you had all sorts of wild political setups, as people started the various political experiments that would, over the millennia, gradually refine themselves into our own perfected form of governance. These states were then pitted against each other by B), the fact that none of them really had a good way of subduing any of the other states. Occasionally one of the cities would defeat another city-state, but they had no effective way of making these victories stick, either by incorporating the defeated into their own polity, or by doing an Israel and murdering/driving off the previous inhabitants (or at least this was true of the major city-states, a few of the minor city-states were more-or-less completely destroyed in the fighting). The city states did occasionally place down their own settler-colonies in claimed lands, but these colonies mostly did not grow to significance in a reasonable time, and if they did become significant they would "bud" off from their mother-city and become their own independent entity, and so there was no real and solid empire building going on. So instead you have this more or less constant froth between the states, as they did their best Machiavellian plotting against each other, and the wheel of fate brought the various cities high, and then low, and then high again. Again, not great for the Greeks, but interesting if you want to see every possible configuration of ancient state craft and diplomatic relations.

Whew. Ok, one quick caveat, there wasn't really any "good guys" during these wars. Other people on the internet have written plenty about this, but the quick summary: The Athenians are the easiest to identify with, since they practiced direct democracy among their citizens. If you are being charitable to the Athenians, they were a bit like America's founding fathers, very concerned with good governance and rights and metaphysics but also blithely unconcerned with the rights of women, slaves, and people outside of their empire. If you are being slightly less charitable to the Athenians, they were more akin to a group of verbose cartel members, who did invent the discipline of History in the West, but also ran a mini-empire on the basis of "you give us your money and we will not kill you and enslave your family". Also, I'm not 100% sure if this is a virtue or not, but the Athenians were often refreshingly clear-eyed about their tyrannies, and for the most part did not go in for the sort self-justifying bullshit that has been one of the more odious hallmarks of conservatives over the last few millennia. The Athenian's main opponents, the Spartans, were kind of like the Old South, except way, way, way, way, way, way worse. Like imagine the South except with far more slaves and far harsher slavery, but also weirdly a lot more homosexual pedophilia. So the Spartans had all the flaws of Athens, except at a greater magnitude, and with basically none of the virtues.

A few notes on the war:
- one of the differences between more modern wars and the ancients was that for the ancients, the populations were smaller and the politics were different, and so you did not have this sharp separation between politicians and generals, which had the effect of having a society's decision making powers being more evenly distributed. I.e. in the modern world you generally have political decision making nodes at home, and they send out orders, and the military people implement those orders more or less faithfully in far flung locations across the globe. In the ancient world though, you often had the political decision makers right there with the army, resulting in more interesting events. In one memorable example half way through the war, the armies of both alliances had been levvied up, and they had spent weeks stalking and maneuvering against each other, and a climactic battle was about to begin, when negotiators from both sides went out into the field, talked for 20 minutes, and then went back to their respective armies and told them that the battle was off, a temporary settlement was negotiated, everyone go back home. In another example, the Spartan general Braisdas approached an enemy city with his army. Rather than proceeding immediately to battle, siege, and slaughter, Brasidas instead requested to address the city, was allowed inside the gates on his own, rolled a 20 on his rhetoric check, and convinced the city that it would be more advantageous to switch sides rather than to fight a battle. Again, not something you usually see in modern war, e.g. General Petraeus is not going into Baghdad on his own to convince them to make peace. So with the decision makers from both sides on the front lines, and often with a personal and immediate stake in the battle, there was much more room for cleverness, negotiation, rhetoric, deception, betrayal, side-deals, etc. While in the modern world the outcome of these sorts of conflicts are usually more or less pre-determined, with luck favoring the side with larger battalions and better cannons, and the process working itself out through attrition and endlessly iterated die rolls. So the ancients were much more narratively interesting.

- One of the reasons the war was so destructive was that it was not just a war between countries, or alliances, but a war between ideologies of governance. The Athenians represented the Democratic system, and the Spartans the Oligarchic system. And these ideologies were spread through all the varying city states to varying degrees, with each polity having a 40%-60% or 30%-70% split between these traditions. So as various city states joined one side or the other of the conflict, they always had an internal faction that would prefer to join the other side, which resulted in innumerable betrayals, massacres, pre-emptive massacres, exilings, etc. etc. The war acted as a spark that touched off internecine war in city after city as the years wore on. In the worst case, control would flip back and forth multiple times, as first one faction and then another would take over a city, with each take over prompting some amount of repression, exiling, or mass killing of the opposing faction. Oh right, and as is usual in civil conflicts, you also have a outside parties (in this case the Persians) stirring the pot and trying to keep the conflict going as long as possible in order to weaken their enemies.

--- It's tempting to think of this as a potential model for our American situation, where there are not red or blue states, but rather state after state that is shaded one way or another. In which case it would be a pretty dire model, since in the Peloponessians the main war and the countless small side wars that it sparked were so ruinous. I'm not sure though that it is a valid model, since the US is so very much more centralized than they were, and so it wouldn't be dozens and dozens of small violent brushfires spreading out across sovereign city-state after city-state.

--- It's also tempting to look at their situation, with its more or less even split between democratic and oligarchic tendencies, and go "wait a minute, have we made any progress at all in the last 2500 years? Should we be looking at biological and system dynamics factors with which to improve the world, rather than cultural/educational/technological methods?". I think that's a bit of a false impression though, since even the enlightened Athenians of the Ancient world would be considered fairly barbaric by modern standards. So we have progressed a ways since 500 BC, but we do still have divides between elements that want to go further and elements that want to retract. Not saying that biological/system factors are not the important ones, just that this history does not really prove that is the case.

- Naval battles in the Ancient world were essentially random, though the Athenians benefited from their unique national ability to pull out off some absolute naval bullshit at clutch moments. If I was playing a board game as the Spartans, and the Athenians did to me half of what the Athenians did to the Spartans in real life, I would have thrown over the board and rage quit the game. The Spartans though were more dedicated than me, building and then losing fleet after fleet after fleet, in their decades long pursuit of finally driving the Athenians off the sea so that they could finally lay siege to the Athenian capitol. Even at the very end of war, when the battered and half-manned Athenian fleet was facing a Spartan fleet with more ships, better crews, and more training, the Athenian admirals still managed to get together the night before the battle, come up with a completely new tactic that had never been seen before in Greek naval war, and turn what should have been an inevitable defeat into a complete victory. Again, absolute bullshit.

-- As mentioned, these wars have been the basis of countless international relations papers, since you have so much of nation state power relations demonstrated so quickly and in such a small and contained area. It reminded me a bit of the Charlie Stross short story, where Cthulhu aliens create a flat and nearly endless world, and then copy-and-pasted countless human civilizations into the world to observe their interactions. So the Peloponnesian war was kind of a petri dish for international relations, as one classic situation after another played itself out.

- There's an argument to made that it all went wrong at the Battle of Mantinea (418 BC), when the Spartan alliance narrowly defeated the Athenian alliance forces. Defeat in this battle would have spelled the end for Spartan prestige and the Spartan alliance, as well as taking control of a crucial geographic node that allowed the Spartans and their allies to combine forces. Basically, defeat would have driven a spike into the heart of the alliance that Sparta had maintained for centuries. Instead Sparta won the battle, beginning the second half of the war, where over a period of 15 years Sparta gradually dug itself out of the hole it was in, moving 3 steps forward and 2 steps back, until it had finally conquered Athens. Athens' defeat discredited the democratic system in Greece, and Sparta installed oligarchies in city after conquered city, thus inevitably leading to the current situation we find ourselves in.


A now, at last, the most absolutely minor of interesting/amusing anecdotes from the book:

- A constant theme of the history is a sort of fractal political bickering. E.g. you have three generals sent out in control of the Athenian fleet. Two of the general cannot stand each other, and so basically always veto each others' plans. The third general and his plans become the de facto only option, as they are the only ones that are not immediately met by vindictive and vociferous complaints, and so he is essentially the only one in command of the expedition as the other two generals fume at each other. In a reverse of this, Nicias and Alcibades were the two dominant politicians in Athens for a time. Neither one could take control, and neither one could bend to the other, and so they steered the policy of Athens in sharp zig zags for a while, as first one and then the other got to make policy, before being quickly reversed by his opponent. A civic minded politician Hyperbolus, in an effort to resolve the dilemma and have Athens' policy be all one thing or the other, called for a vote of ostracization. This was a specific and rarely used Athenian political process, basically the legislative equivalent of a duel, where the winner of the ostracization vote suffered no harm while the loser would be forced into exile, never to return. Basically a motion of "either he goes or I do". Nicias and Alcibades considered the ostracization vote, and both realized that they were at risk of losing the vote, and so instead they made of motion of ostracization towards Hyperbolus, and cooperated in this one case to vote Hyperbolus out of society so that they could go back to bickering with each other without any outside interference.

- Nicias and the expedition to Sicily. Nicias thought the expedition was a terrible mistake, but the people loved the idea and wanted him to lead the expedition. Thinking of a clever ploy, Nicias told the people that he would be willing to lead, but the expedition would need massively more men, ships, resources, etc than they had thought. In this way he thought to dissuade them by the enormous cost of the expedition. Instead the people gave him everything he asked for, leaving him to lead the foolish expedition but now at a massively increased scale.

- Holidays are the worst. In numerous cases, city-states used holy days, bad omens, poor auguries, etc. to get out of obligations that they did not feel like following through on. E.g. sorry, can't send our troops out, it is the Carneiusian holy days and the doves did not fly West. In a reverse of this, in order to avoid fighting during holy days, at least one enterprising city state changed their calendar, basically extending the current month for day after day after day in order to avoid the impropriety of fighting during the holy month.

- Corinth, which spent a solid 3 decades being a city-state of incredibly messy drama queens, stirring up trouble and reneging on obligations in case after case after case. Or maybe Thucydides was just biased against them.

- An Athenian army approaches an Oligarchic city that is part of the Spartan alliance, however the city has a strong Democratic component too. The Democrats inside the walls planned to betray the city to the Athenians, but before they could successfully do so a Spartan army that was gathering fresh troops in the region heard about the fracas, and marched to the area to suppor the city. At this point, rather than opening the gates and joining forces with the Spartans, the Oligarchs inside the city decided to close their gates to both sides, with the thought that they Athenians/Spartans would fight outside the walls, and the Oligarchs inside the city would avoid battle losses/making themselves vulnerable to their enemies within the city by marching out the city gates. Outside the gates, the Athenian and Spartan armies eyed each other. The Spartans did not see any reason to go on the offensive, as their strategic goal was merely to defend the city, which did not require them to suffer the penalty of attacking an entrenched enemy on their chosen ground. For their part the Athenians did not find the odds of battle favorable, and so the Athenian army marched out the area. The Spartans left shortly after that as well, with the end result being only that the Democrats inside the city then had to flee to avoid reprisals. Anyway! It's a great example of people on the spot having the intelligence & autonomy to make decisions, and how one group after another went "eh, I don't want to fight without superior force, and therefore I'll fold/wait/withdraw rather risk as a battle that only has a 40% - 60% chance of success."

- Through the vagaries and convolutions of war, Oligarchic cities ended up in the Athenian alliance, and Democratic cities ended up in the Spartan alliance. In one case a Spartan commander and his army were working with the army of an allied Democratic city, and together they were facing off against an Athenians army. The Spartan commander wanted to attack the Athenians, but his allied Democrats objected and wanted more debate before taking action. The Spartan commander, used to extreme hierarchy, didn't appreciate this extended back-talk and grabbed and throttled one of his questioners, leading to a general outbreak of fighting as the Spartans and their erstwhile allies turned on each other. I kind of love this anecdote; I feel like we have all been both the Spartan commander (Polydamidas) and his democratic heckler at various times in our life.

- Ok, this is not so much a minor episode as a funny episode. The first phase of the long war came to an end with a decisive Athenian victory. How did they win this victory? The Athenians fleet put a small force on an island chain right off the Spartan homeland, with the intent to use the islands as an outpost for raiding/slave liberation. The scale of this all was incredibly small; the islands were only a few hundred yards across and a few miles long, and the distance from the mainland was only about a 0.5 to 2 miles at various points. The Athenian fleet then left. The Spartans responded by landing an army to destroy the Athenians outpost, only for the Athenian navy to promptly roll back in, drive off the Spartan ships, and cut off the Spartan army from the mainland. At this point the Spartans had an army representing about 15% of their warriors and nobles, completely trapped on a more or less barren island, and only about a half mile away from their mainland yet completely without means of escape. In Starcraft this maneuver is known as "the moron magnet", where you use a weak unit to draw an enemy force into a vulnerable position where it can be pounced on and destroyed. The humor of the situation is obvious; it's as if the US army managed to get 15% of its forces, as well as a dozen of so Senators, trapped on Martha's Vineyard and entirely cut off by the Chinese navy. The Spartans had no hope of driving off the Athenian navy, and so were forced to sue for peace rather than lose such a large proportion of their people to starvation and thirst.

- And finally you have the Wisdom of Pericles. Pericles was the Athenian leader at the start of the war, and he was basically the perfect Athenian, intelligent, incisive, wise, persuasive, respected, far seeing, moderate. To understand Pericles' logic going into the war you have to understand siege warfare of the time; oddly enough the Greeks had absolutely no way to break down a complete and defended wall. Attackers could try to negotiate, they could try to starve out the inhabitants of a walled city, or they could rely on internal treachery to open the gates, but the Greeks did not have catapults, battering rams, siege towers, sappers, etc and so absolutely could not overcome a defended wall. Due to a geographical oddity the city of Athens was separated from the mainland by only a narrow strip of land, which meant that the Athenians did not have to wall off their city, but rather could just wall off that strip of land in order to keep like 70% of their territory safe from attack. It was as if the majority of their homeland was protected by an impenetrable force field, with the only possible means of attack being by sea, where the Athenians had by far the strongest navy of the region. So when the Spartans were war mongering, Pericles did not see it as a upcoming and fatal clash of empires, rather Pericles' reasoning was that after a season or two of the Spartan army fruitlessly marching before the Athenian walls, the Spartans would see the futility of trying to destroy Athens, the peace faction in Sparta would re-take power, an end to the squabble could be negotiated, and the two alliances could move forward in mutual. The utter fool. What Pericles did not count on was the immense power of stupid people in large numbers. Cue thirty years of escalating violence, the Spartans trying time after time after time to wrest Athens' maritime empire away, the destruction of the Greek world, and the death of two thirds of the Athenian population.