War - Peloponnesian

[BLUEHAWK]

Excerpted from THE NEW YORKER magazine, January 12, 2004, "Theatres of War", by: Daniel Mendelsohn, pp. 79-84

"Until the Peloponnesian War, warfare among various Greek city-states had for centuries been a regular, predictable affair - part of the rhythmic cycle of seasons. You planted your crops, went away to do battle with this or that enemy, and (you hoped) were home for the harvest. The entire war, usually a matter of some disputed bit of borderland, would be decided in a single battle fought on a single day.
The war that began in the spring of 431 represented what Kagan (author of "The Peloponnesian War, Viking press) rightly calls "a fundamental departure" from this tradition, not only in its scope, duration, and complexity but also in savagery and bitterness. After the Corinthian diplomatic crisis, ties between Athens and Sparta disintegrated. Hostilities began, on night early in 431, with a sneak attack on a small Athenian protectorate called Plataea. This sordid violation of the norms of Greek warfare set the tone for what was to come. As the conflict spread across many fronts, from Hellespont to Sicily to the coast of Asia Minor, it began to seem frustratingly unwinnable. The result, Kagan emphasizes, was a cycle of cruetly and reprisal that ended in a 'collapse in the habits, institutions, beliefs and restraints that are the foundations of civilized life.': schoolboys slaughtered in their classrooms by mercenaries, civilians murdered and enslaved en masse, supllicants draged from (or burned at) altars, the war dead left to rot on the battlefield. In the end, the great standard-bearer of Greek civilization itself, Athens, collapsed. Bankrupt and imploding with civil strife after nearly three decades of fighting, it was finally defeated by an alliance of Sparta and Persia, the traditional enemy of the Greeks."

[Desdichado]

There is a disturbing parallel between the fate of the Athenian democracy prior to and during the Peloponesian war and that of the US today.

After emerging from the Persian war as the "big winner" amongst the Greek coalition, Athens created the Delian League, a military alliance of Greek states against any future threat from the east.
Each of the states were to contribute a certain number of men and ships. However, as the cost of maintaining a standing military grew, poorer states were unable to meet their commitments, and so contributed money instead. Athens found herself more and more shouldering the burden of the alliance, until, in the end, she stood nearly alone, and her former allies became envious of her power - a power she never sought - and felt that they were financing someone else's empire, and so ceased their contributions. Athens, of course, bearing all the burden, demanded the biggest say in affairs, further ostracizing her allies.

And in the end, the cost of maintaining a powerful military alone, against a threat others had forgotten about, bankrupted the democracy, which fell into tyranny and war with her former allies, and the world would not see another for over two thousand years.

Oh well. Good effort.

I think Pericles' funeral oration to the slain after the first year (of thirty or so) remains one of the most powerful speeches on democracy to this day.

[BLUEHAWK]

Precisely Des... precisely.