Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War , livre ebook

The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War
DONALD KAGAN

Cornell University Press
ITHACA AND LONDON
For my son, Bobby
Preface
The attempt to write another book on a subject so old and so often treated requires an explanation, perhaps even a defense. Thucydides, after all, dealt with it authoritatively, and most of our evidence comes from his history. Yet it is rewarding to take up the matter once again. In the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, to be sure, such titanic figures as Grote, Beloch, Busolt, and Meyer undertook encyclopaedic histories of Greece in which they dealt with the origins of the Peloponnesian War in detail and with great intelligence and learning. In my judgment there is, even today, no better study of the problem than the sober and magisterial account of Busolt. Therein lies one of the reasons for writing this book, for in the years since Busolt wrote, a great deal of new material has been given to us, chiefly in the form of Athenian inscriptions. In addition, more than half a century of important scholarship has illuminated Greek history. No one can write about Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War in quite the same way after the publication of the Athenian Tribute Lists, Gomme’s Historical Commentary on Thucydides, or Mme de Romilly’s Thucydide et l’impérialisme athénien, not to mention many other important monographs and articles. It therefore seems desirable to treat the question once again in a thorough and detailed manner, taking account of the new epigraphical evidence and the great mass of modern scholarship.
Each generation needs to write its history for itself. Our questions are likely to differ from our fathers’ and grandfathers’. Constant reappraisal can only be beneficial for the discovery of the past and its meaning, for over the years only the permanently illuminating questions will remain vital. I should be less than candid if I did not admit yet another purpose in writing this history. I agree with Thucydides that useful truths about human behavior in political situations can be learned from a careful and accurate study of the past. I believe some truths of great relevance to our modern predicament may arise from an investigation of how the Greek states came to fight a terrible war that destroyed the vitality of a great civilization.
The origin of the Peloponnesian War is a problem in diplomatic history, and I am convinced that diplomacy cannot, without serious distortion, be treated in isolation from the internal history of the states involved. As a result, I have tried, where the evidence permits, to trace the connection between domestic politics, constitutional organization, and foreign affairs. It is clear, of course, that questions of a social and economic nature may also have a great effect on foreign affairs, though a rather smaller one in antiquity than they seem to have now. Our evidence, however, does not allow us to see any certain or even probable influence, except in the most indirect way. Our ancient sources view the problem chiefly in political terms. My own conviction is that they do not seriously mislead us.
Some remarks about method are in order. It seems to me that anyone who works with Thucydides must make patent his judgment on two basic questions: the history of the composition of the work, and the authenticity of the speeches in it. I shall discuss these questions in greater detail in connection with my interpretation of particular events, but the reader deserves to know in advance my general opinion. On the question of composition it is essentially unitarian, and very close to that of John Finley, who assumes that the work as we have it is not too far from what Thucydides ultimately intended:
That is not to say that early passages may not exist in the History; it is inconceivable that Thucydides did not take notes or that he failed to use them when he wrote his final work. It is merely to say that the work which we have should not be regarded as an agglomeration of passages written at widely different times and imperfectly blended together by reason of the author’s premature death, but rather as composed primarily at one time with the help of earlier notes and, if broken at the end, incomplete perhaps in several places, yet possessing after all the unity which might be expected to result from a period of more or less sustained composition. 1
Assuming the essential unity of composition, I have avoided using the excuse that Thucydides had no time to fill in the gaps or to reconcile his later opinions with earlier ones as a means of explaining difficult passages.
The problem of the speeches is old and persistent. Opinions range from one extreme, that they are fictions completely invented by Thucydides, to the other, that they are close to verbatim reports of what the speakers said. The truth is clearly in between, but I am persuaded that it is far closer to the latter view. A great deal of the debate has surrounded the admitted ambiguity of the words ὡς δ’ ἃν ἐδόκουν ἐμοί ἔκαστοι περὶ τῶν ἀεὶ παρόντων τὰ δέοντα μάλιστ’ εἰπεῖν, which Richard Crawley translates, “what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions.” Far too little attention has been given to the unequivocal force of the words that follow: ἐχομένῳ ὃτιἐγύτατα τῆς ξυμπάσης γνώμης τῶν ἀληθῶς λεχθέντων, οὕτως εἴρηται, 2 which Crawley translates, “of course adhering as closely as possible to what they really said.” My own judgment is the same as that of F. E. Adcock:
We are told, indeed, that, in composing his speeches, the historian kept as closely as possible to “the overall purport or purpose of what was actually said,” written in such a way as to coincide with his opinion of what the several speakers would most likely have presented to their hearers as being “what the situation required.” The reference to his own opinion represents a limiting factor in one way, as his reference to the “overall purport or purpose of what was actually said” is a limiting factor in another way. Thus when the procedure has been applied, the reader will know something at least of what was actually said. Thucydides limits his knowledge in terms of the difficulty (or even impossibility) of remembering precisely what was said. 3
Thucydides’ statement, of course, precludes the possibility that he invented any of the speeches he reports. As long ago as 1889, Nissen dismissed Grote’s treatment of the Peloponnesian War, expressing astonishment that “he even treats the speeches as contemporary documents.” 4 The reader will find me guilty of the same naïveté.
A word is necessary, too, about the use of ancient literary sources other than Thucydides, chiefly Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus. The Lives of Plutarch are based on a wide variety of sources, some good and some bad, some going back to the fifth century and some much later. For the period with which we are concerned, Diodorus depended chiefly on Ephorus when he was not following Herodotus or Thucydides. Ephorus wrote in the fourth century and is not to be compared with Thucydides either as a source or as a historian, but he did include some material omitted by Thucydides, as did Plutarch. As far as I have discovered, there is rarely any reason to prefer either Plutarch or Diodorus to Thucydides where they contradict him. The problem is what to do when they merely supply additional material. The recent tendency has been to be rather severe in judging the value of their data. We may all agree that their chronology is usually untrustworthy and that they do not deserve the authority of Thucydides’ reports, but it seems to me that criticism has gone too far. My own approach is somewhat more trusting. Plutarch is like Herodotus, for he compares the various reports he has (written, to be sure, unlike the oral accounts received by Herodotus); he often cites his authorities; and he is prepared to reject lies and absurdities. Whatever the merits of his own judgment, there is no doubt that he preserves much that is valuable. Ephorus is less useful, but does not deserve to be ignored. I have applied the same criteria to the information supplied by Plutarch and Diodorus as I have to other ancient sources. I believe it to be true unless it is demonstrably self-contradictory, absurd, or false. Employing these canons, I have made more than a little use of their work.
It remains to speak of a device that the reader will from time to time encounter. I have often drawn historical analogies between situations in the fifth century B.C. and modern events. I am fully conscious of the danger in such analogies. I hope that I have used them appropriately and with due caution, but in any case, I think it better to show openly what was in my mind when I arrived at my conclusions and generalizations. As a historian, I naturally think of events and situations that seem similar to the ones I am studying. My judgments about historical events are based on my own experience, what I have learned of the events of my own time, extended by what I have learned of previous ages. As M. I. Finley has put it, “historians generalize all the time at the beginning and in the course of every study they make, and the more conscious they are of this, the more control they will have over their generalizations.” 5 I have tried to make the sources of my own generalizations more explicit by means of the analogies I have drawn. The reader will find that a large number of them come from the period preceding the First World War. This is not accidental, for I have been much impressed by the illumination a close study of the origins of that war, so copiously documented, can provide for an understanding of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. The reader can judge for himself whether that impression is justified.
I should like to thank Bernard Knox, B. D. Meritt, and my colleague Walter LaFeber, who read this book in typescript and helped me to avoid many errors. I am grat