On , Thucydides and war guilt
J. Enoch Powell
Origins of the Peloponnesian War G. E. M. de Ste Croix (Duckworth £6.75) This is a very large book to be written about the 'war guilt' of the war which broke out in 431 BC between Athens and her empire (or ' allies ') and Sparta and her confederacy (or ' allies '). The period from that outbreak until the destruction of Athens in 404 BC has been given retrospective unity by the fact that one Thucydides made it his theme, though he died before he could cover the last seven years. In later classical times it came to be designated 'the Peloponnesian War '; but one could with equal reason speak of three Peloponnesian wars between Athens and Sparta: 1. 4460-454 BC; II. 431-421 BC; and III. 412-404 BC.
War guilt is distinctly out of fashion since World War II, and it is difficult to recall today how intense was the preoccupation with it in the years between the First and Second World Wars. Hitler and Pearl Harbour together have sentenced to a long, but not necessarily permanent, banishment the former insatiable curiosity as to the causes of wars and who was to blame for them. That preoccupation coloured the study and interpretation of classical history, and of no period so much as that of the Peloponnesian War.
There were two reasons for this. The Peloponnesian War provided in minature numerous analogies to the Great War. There was the devasting heritage of demoralisation, the impression that the war represented a downward turning-point in the story of a civilisation. There was the similarity, viewed from the British side, of a struggle to the death between a land empire and a sea empire. There was the interaction between war on the one hand and internal politics, internecine conflict and bloody revolution on the other. The second reason was that the Peloponnesian War, of all the wars of antiquity, had been recorded and immortalised by the supreme philosophic historian, cold yet passionate, patriotic yet uninvolved. The motives and reasoning of the parties and the combatants appeared to be laid bare in those extraordinary ' speeches,' true in all but the most literal sense, in which his main characters interpreted events as they acted them.
The verdict laid the ' war guilt ' overwhelmingly upon Athens. It was a verdict at which historians and scholars
arrived against their inclination. Athens had glittering claims on partisanship. Was her name not almost synonymous with, democracy itself, a description that could hardly be applied to Sparta? Was she not, in this very age and the preceding generation, the home and nourisher of the highest flights of the poetic, literary ancl,, visual achievement of the Greek people' For the British there was the tempting identification with themselves — a sniall nation, mighty by reason of its shiPs' bidding defiance to superior antagonists behind her 'wooden walls.' (If only the tutelary deities had made Athens herself an island, like Britain!) Nevertheless, it seemed the Athenian! must in the end be judged to have brougn` their destruction on themselves and t0 have courted war which humbled thee'. Was not their empire, still passed off as alliance,' a usurpation enforced by the principle of ' divide-and-rule ' upon those weaker than themselves bY the instrurnent of their invincible sea-power, and cruellY, vindicated against the hapless challengers; Surely this had been the meaning of On: brutally Machiavellian dialogue betWee" the Athenians and the Melians Whd Thucydides inserted before the sack an, destruction of Melos? In any case, it sit believed that Thucydides had in so words declared that Athens under Pericle' had ' forced ' the Spartans into war
' pre-emptive ' war, we should now call both by a series of provocative action' and by the growing menace of her povver: In that — upon the whole, reluctant ., verdict the bulk of history has, ofte" tacitly, agreed.
Mr de Ste Croix, a fellow of Ne:re College, Oxford, dissents. His verdict is t`'e opposite: Sparta was the true aggressn'r' and in that sense the ' cause ' of the vits' To establish this conclusion he re-r1 Thucyd,ides — there is, indeed, very litt'„, else to be re-read — without suppositions. Certainly he has no difficvt'o in establishing voluminously the extent,,,,t which his predecessors have found 07/1 they expected to find. Thucydides saYs, :5 fact, that the true cause of the war "the growth in power of the Athenlai,ne and the fear with which this inspired t,l'e Spartans," and that this "forced use Spartans into war "; and with this ca r, he contrasts the " complaints and clniaor rels " which were made the occasion
" breaking the peace." The author is no doubt right in claiming that by "forced the Spartans" Thucydides means no moral judgement against the Athenians or in favour of the Spartans, but simply that an inner necessity for Sparta was created. His famous statement that the Spartans were "slow to go to war unless compelled to do so" is less a certificate of peaceability than a description of Spartan policy in the light of her domestic circumstances.
An examination of the "complaints and quarrels" in detail does not justify the assumption of Athenian war guilt; neither the alliance with Corcyra, the ex-colony of Corinth, nor the coercion of Potidaea, a Corinthian colony within the Athenian empire, is ever stated to have been on Athens's part a breach of the peace (of 454 BC). What is clear is that for Sparta the sensitive point was the Isthmus of Corinth, the stopper in the neck of the bottle of the Peloponnese. As in the earlier war of 460 BC, so in the run-up to 431 BC, Sparta was not prepared to risk any loss of the control over the Isthmus. This was what gave Corinth her leverage over Sparta and made Spartan policy susceptible to Corinthian pressure. It also accounts for the role which the celebrated but obscure Megarian Decree played in the outbreak of war. The author establishes successfully that a series of misunderstandings — and particularly the mistake of treating Aristophanic farce as sober fact — have built up the Megarian Decree into a sentence of economic death passed by Athens upon her neighbour at the Isthmus, which left Megara's allies with no alternative to war. He demonstrates that it Was a ban on Megarians, and not on their exports, and that the Athenians offered to remove it if the Spartans would remove their similar ban on the Athenians and their allies.
On the negative side Mr de Ste Croix seems to me to prove his case: the 'war guilt' of the Athenians is neither asserted by Thucydides nor deducible from his narrative. The positive side of his argument, the reason for Sparta's readiness to undertake hostilities, is not so convincingly made out. The author's thesis is that the oppression of the helots in Messenia presented Sparta with a constant threat of overthrow for the state itself in the event of military failure: Sparta must at all times be able to bar entry into the Peloponnese to an invader and must be able to overawe any nations Within the Peloponnese which were not its confederates. There is no doubt about the existence of the helot danger; but the evidence that it was the fulcrum of Spartan policy at the paint of decision in 432-1 BC is just not there. It seems surprising that Thucydides himself, though he elsewhere notes the potential disaffection of the helots, should make no reference at all to it in just the part of his narrative where it is supposed to be crucial. "The Helot danger was the curse Sparta had brought upon herself, an admirable illustration of the maxim that a People which oppresses another cannot Itself be free ": it is a resounding conclusion, but so far as the causation of the Peloponnesian war is concerned, one that must be regarded as not proven.
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