The Peloponnesian War

In the 5th century BC, the Greek world found itself in the middle of one of its greatest wars. This wasn't one of their existential conflicts against the Persians. This time, it was a war of Greeks against Greeks. An alliance of city-states led by Athens fought a coalition led by Sparta for control of the Greek world. Over nearly 30 years, the two city-states fought for supremacy, leaving a lasting impact on the Greek world that would change its course forever.

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That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash daily to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince dot com slash daily. To understand the causes of the Peloponnesian War, it's essential to understand the political landscape of the Greek world in the late 5th century BC. The Peloponnesian War was rooted in the shifting power dynamics of the Greek world following the Persian Wars, which took place from about 490 to 479 BC.

This was the conflict that saw many of the famous battles of antiquity, including the Battle of Marathon and Thermopylae. During the Persian invasions, two dominant Greek powers, Athens and Sparta, had cooperated to defeat their common enemy. However, the aftermath of that victory sowed the seeds of conflict between them. Athens emerged from the Persian Wars not only as a symbol of Greek resistance, but as a rising imperial power. It led to the formation of the Delian League in 478 BC.

an alliance of city-states meant to defend against further Persian aggression. Over time, Athens transformed this alliance into a de facto empire, compelling tribute payments, suppressing revolts, and using the League's resources to fund its own projects, including rebuilding the Acropolis. The Athenians also moved the League's treasury from Delos to Athens in 454 BC in a show of dominance.

Sparta, traditionally the most powerful land-based state in Greece and the leader of the rival Peloponnesian League, viewed Athenian expansion with increasing alarm. And if you're not familiar with the geography of Greece, the Peloponnese is a peninsula that's almost an island. It's connected to the rest of the Greek mainland by the very narrow isthmus of Corinth, which is only 6.3 kilometers or 3.9 miles wide. The Spartans were culturally conservative and preferred a stable balance of power.

As Athens grew in economic strength, naval supremacy and political influence, often at the expense of smaller city-states, Sparta and its allies came to see it as a direct threat to their autonomy and the regional order. The fundamental tension arose from what historians now call the Thucydides Trap, named after the Athenian historian Thucydides who documented much of the war.

The Thucydides trap refers to the inevitable conflict that arises when a rising power, in this case Athens, threatens to displace an established power such as Sparta.

The war began in 431 BC with a strategy that seemed logical to both sides but proved deeply flawed. The Spartan king Archidamus led annual invasions of Attica, the territory around Athens, hoping to force the Athenians into a decisive land battle where Spartan superiority would prove decisive.

The Athenians, following the strategy of their leader, Pericles, withdrew their population behind their long walls, the defensive fortifications that connected Athens to its port at Piraeus, and used their naval supremacy to raid the Peloponnesian. coast. This created a strategic stalemate that neither side had anticipated. The Spartans could devastate Athenian farmland, but they couldn't force a decisive battle.

The Athenians likewise could strike coastal targets, but couldn't break Spartan power on land. It was like watching a heavyweight boxer fight a judo master. Each was supreme in their own element, but neither could force the other to fight on their preferred terms. The turning point came with a plague that struck Athens in 430 BC.

This devastating epidemic, which killed perhaps a third of the population, including Pericles himself, fundamentally altered Athenian society and their strategy in the war. The cramped condition behind the long walls, with rural refugees packed into the city, created perfect conditions for the disease to spread. The psychological impact was even more profound, and many Athenians began to question whether the gods favored their cause.

This phase of the war, known as the Archidamian War after the Spartan king, dragged on for a decade. The period was punctuated by battles like those at Phylos and Sphacteria, which saw the rare capture of Spartan hoplites by Athenian forces.

The war was eventually paused with the Peace of Nicias signed in 421 BC. It was intended to be a 50-year truce between Athens and Sparta after the first phase of the Peloponnesian War. However, during what was nominally still the period of peace, the treaty had effectively collapsed. The Battle of Mantinea, fought in 418 BC, was the largest land battle of the Peloponnesian War and marked a temporary resurgence of Spartan prestige after years of military and diplomatic setbacks.

The fact that the battle took place during the peace of Nicias showed how little regard either of them had for the treaty. The battle was sparked by a shifting web of alliances. Argos, Mantinia, Elis, and Athens had formed a coalition against Sparta, threatening its dominance in the Peloponnese. In response, the Spartans, led by King Aegis II, mobilized a large force to confront the alliance near the city of Manatea in Arcadia.

The battle was a traditional hoplite clash, and despite early confusion in the Spartan ranks, they achieved a clear and decisive victory, routing the coalition forces. The triumph at Mantinea restored Spartan confidence and reaffirmed their military reputation, which discouraged further revolts amongst their allies and temporarily stabilized the internal Greek balance of power in Sparta's favor.

In 415 BC, Athens embarked on what would prove to be its most disastrous decision, the invasion of Sicily. This massive expedition involving over a hundred ships and thousands of men represented both the magnificent and tragic aspects of Athenian democracy. and democratic politics. The wealthy young aristocrat Alcibiades envisioned a Sicilian conquest that would make Athens the master of the western Mediterranean.

It was initiated ostensibly to help the small Sicilian city of Segestia, an ally of Athens, in its local conflict with Selenute, which was backed by Syracuse, which was friendly with Sparta. The moderate Athenian Nicias opposed the expedition, but was maneuvered into leading it when his warnings about its dangers were used as arguments for sending an even larger force. The expedition became a perfect storm of bad leadership,

political interference, and military miscalculation. Alcibiades was recalled on charges of religious sacrilege just as the campaign began. Nicias, never enthusiastic about the venture, proved overly cautious. The Athenians found themselves besieging Syracuse, one of the most powerful cities in Sicily, with inadequate forces and no clear strategy for victory. The disaster was almost complete.

The entire expedition was destroyed, with most of the survivors sold into slavery. Athens lost not only ships and men, but its aura of invincibility. It was as if a modern superpower had lost an entire carrier group along with all of its most experienced personnel. Alcibiades, who was one of the biggest forces in promoting this expedition after being recalled to Athens in 413 BC,

defected to Sparta rather than returning and gave them crucial intelligence. The final phase of the war saw a shift in strategy.

Sparta established a permanent fort at Dekelia in northern Attica, disrupting Athenian supply lines and encouraging revolts among its allies. the destruction of the Athenian-Cicilian expedition opened the door for Sparta to do something that would have been unthinkable just years earlier. Ally with Persia, the great enemy of all Greeks.

The Persians, who were eager to weaken Athens, provided gold that allowed Sparta to build a fleet and challenge Athenian naval supremacy. The final phase saw warfare of unprecedented intensity and violence. Both sides employed tactics that would have horrified earlier generations, including mass executions of prisoners, the systematic destruction of neutral cities, and the use of barbarian Persian gold to settle Greek disputes.

The war at this point had corrupted both sides, turning them into versions of themselves that their ancestors might not have recognized. The end of the war came at Aegospatami in 405 BC in what is modern-day Turkey, where the Spartan Admiral Lysander destroyed the last Athenian fleet with a combination of tactical brilliance and Athenian overconfidence.

With their fleet gone and their city under siege, the Athenians faced starvation and surrender. The war ended with Sparta imposing harsh terms on Athens. the destruction of its long walls, the loss of its empire and navy, and the establishment of a pro-Spartan oligarchy known as the Thirty Tyrants. Although Sparta emerged as the dominant power in Greece, its victory was short-lived.

30 years of conflict between Athens and Sparta devastated the major Greek city-states, leaving them economically ruined, militarily exhausted, and politically fractured. Athens, once the strongest naval power in the eastern Mediterranean, was defeated and stripped of its empire. Sparta despite emerging victorious lacked the administrative and financial infrastructure to maintain control over its new possessions and quickly alienated its former allies.

This led to renewed warfare amongst the Greek city-states, including conflicts like the Corinthian War and the Thebian-Spartan War, all of which destabilized the region even further. And in that power vacuum that followed, Macedonia... long considered a peripheral and semi-barbaric kingdom to the north, was uniquely positioned to take advantage. They had been on the sidelines during most of the wars that were fought, avoiding most of the damage that the rest of Greece had.

Philip II, who ascended to the throne in 359 BC, had spent part of his youth as a hostage in Thebes, where he observed Greek military and political systems firsthand. He used this knowledge to reform the Macedonian army, introducing the phalanx formation armed with long spears called sarissas, refining cavalry tactics, and centralizing his authority.

As the Greek city-states remained mired in mutual suspicion and conflict, Philip expanded Macedonian territory and influence with relatively little unified resistance.

His decisive victory over the Greek coalition at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC marked the end of effective Greek independence. Thus, the long-term disintegration of Greek unity and strength caused by the Peloponnesian War paved the way for Philip II's rise and the subsequent Macedonian domination of Greece and the emergence of Alexander the Great.

Perhaps most importantly, the Peloponnesian War brought about the end of the golden age of classical Greece by destroying the political stability, economic prosperity, and cultural confidence that had defined the 5th century BC. particularly in Athens. Much of what we think of when we think of ancient Greece came from that period earlier in the century.

Athens was the intellectual, artistic, and democratic heart of the Greek world, producing achievements in philosophy, drama, architecture, and politics. However, after the war with Sparta, it was never the same again. Before I close, there's one other thing about the Peloponnesian War that deserves mention. This war took place almost 2,500 years ago.

Yet, we know far more about it than we do about almost any other war from this period in history. In many places, we might have an inscription on a tomb or other scant information we have to piece together. But for the Peloponnesian War, we know so much about it thanks to the aforementioned Thucydides.

His history of the Peloponnesian War, though never finished, is one of the most important historical accounts to survive from antiquity and provides an in-depth narrative of the causes, events, strategies, speeches, and political dynamics of the war. He was, in many senses, one of the first modern historians. Thucydides approached history with a critical and empirical mindset, rejecting myth and divine causality in favor of rational analysis,

eyewitness accounts, and careful chronology of events. He also included restructured speeches to explore the motives and reasoning of key figures, giving insight into the ideological and psychological dimensions of the war. For example, earlier conflicts such as the Greco-Persian Wars are known largely through Herodotus, whose work mixes historical fact with anecdote and folklore.

Other conflicts we know about from authors who might have lived centuries after the events took place. The Peloponnesian War wasn't the biggest war in ancient history. It was smaller than the Greco-Persian Wars which predated it. However, it was an important war insofar as it marked a transition in the history of Greek city-states and laid the foundation for the likes of Philip and Alexander, which came after.

The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Oakton and Cameron Kiefer. I want to thank everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible.

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