The Gathering Storm
Sparta had had mixed fortunes since leading the Greek armies to victory at Plataia in 479. She had had to fight a war with her old enemies Argos and Arcadia in the 470s, and at the same time face a revolt of her serfs in Messenia. The Spartans were heavily outnumbered, and had to give up some territory to Argos in order to be able to defeat her other foes.
A destructive earthquake in 465 caused great loss of life. Immediately the helots – Sparta’s serfs – rose in more serious revolt than for many years. The Messenians holed themselves up in a strong mountain fortress, and could only be reduced after a long siege.
Then Sparta suffered reverses and loss of influence in a short war with Athens in the 450s, though she turned the table by invading Attica and giving the Athenians a fright in 446, which led to the favourable 30 Years Peace in 445.
Sparta stood for traditional aristocratic values, and was seen as the champion against new-fangled and dangerous democracy by many throughout Greece. Just as the Athenians sponsored democratic governments amongst their allies, the Spartans supported oligarchies amongst theirs.
The two leading Greek states represented opposing causes, and could not for long live together. This was all the more so because many groups amongst Sparta’s allies looked to Athens to help them establish democracies within their states, whilst other groups amongst Athens’ allies looked to Sparta to help them stamp out democracy within theirs!
The Peloponnesian Wars: Phase 1
The clash came with a dispute between Corinth and her neighbour Kerkyra in 431, with Corinth looking to support from Sparta and the Peloponnesian League and Kerkyra looking to Athens and the Delian League. The resulting general warfare was desultory and complicated, but the outstanding features and events are easily described.
The first years of the war were characterized by Spartan invasions of Attica, causing much damage to the countryside surrounding Athens but with no real damage done to the Athenian people or their ability to wage war. They crowded inside the long walls that encircled the city and her port, and were provisioned by her fleet.
A serious plague struck the crowded city in 429-27, and a quarter of her inhabitants died, including Pericles. Even this did not seriously affect the Athenian ability to wage war while they dominated the sea.
The Peloponnesian Wars: Phase 2
At the core of the next phase of the war was an audacious Spartan campaign (424) to seize Amphipoklis, an Athenian ally on the north coast of Greece which controlled access to a rich gold- and timber-bearing region.
This was a serious blow to Athens, but her attempts to recapture the city failed. In the same year a march into Boiotia was soundly defeated, and in 421 both sides were happy to make peace.
The Peloponnesian Wars: Phase 3
War resumed again in 417 when Sparta invaded and defeated Argos, an Athenian ally. The outstanding episode of this phase of the war was a huge Athenian invasion of Sicily (415-413) which ended in horrific disaster for her.
The Peloponnesian Wars: Phase 4
The final phase opened with Sparta’s occupation of Deceleia, very near Athens and (more importantly) causing her loss of control of the Laurion mines, on which a great deal of her ability to fund the war depended.
The next few years involved a naval war for control of the Aegean and the Bosphorus (through which much of Athens’ grain passed). The Peloponnesian fleet was now funded by the Persians, who took the opportunity to re-occupy some Ionian cities. Athens won some resounding successes, but when her grain supply was cut off by the Spartan victory at Aigospotami (405), which was followed by a general revolt of her allies, it was only a question of time before she surrendered (404).
Brutalization and Beauty
Many other events took place in the war, and all Greeks were affected in some way or other. Away from the front lines bloody class war engulfed many cities, with revolutions and counter-revolutions featuring vindictive atrocities.
In the front line, whole cities were destroyed, the men killed, the women and children sold into slavery. Thucydides, the great Athenian historian who chronicled the war in what is regarded as the first “modern” (i.e. analytical) work of history, comments on the decline in morality that a long war brings.
Despite all this, men continued to produce great works of art and literature – even in beleaguered Athens, even as her fall approached. These were the years when Hippocrates, the founder of Western medicine, worked, as did the philosopher Demokritas; the great playwrights Euripides and Aristophanes moved the boundaries of drama forward; and above all, Socrates, the great questioner of all things, was busy irritating people by asking them to think through their received beliefs and attitudes.
Next:
The History of Ancient Greece, Part 9: The Fourth Century
Article © TimeMaps 2007.
Last updated: 13th August 2007
