Chapter IV—
Athens and Sparta

Spartan-Athenian relations began in 511/10 B.C. as they ended in 404, with Athens conquered and placed in the hands of a clique of rich friends of Sparta. The inauspicious beginning presaged the travail of a century, and it is very hard to doubt that the initial brutality, as the Athenians could not but consider it, left its mark, made all the more indelible by Cleomenes' intervention c. 508/7. The Lacedaemonians accepted the repulse of Cleomenes; but had they been capable of predicting the future, the king of Sparta and the Lacedaemonians would have exerted themselves to the very limit to stifle the militant young democracy.

Sparta marched on Athens in 511/10 in order to put an end to Hippias's rule.^[1] Although Spartan attention to the problem of Athenian tyranny may have been concentrated by the repeated injunctions of Delphi (Hdt. 6.123) requiring that the Lacedaemonians take this action,^[2] it is plain that the liberation fully consorted with the Spartan policy of extirpating tyranny whenever opportunity allowed. The reason was the exact reverse of that which made Peisistratus well-remembered by the people of Athens. To Sparta, as the leading city-

state of aristocratic Greece, any regime repressive of the upper class was its natural enemy; in archaic times it was the tyranny, in later, democracy, and in the sixth century the Lacedaemonians vigorously prosecuted this policy.^[3] A century later, it is true, the Lacedaemonians were "not quick to go to war" unless their interests were directly threatened. The judgment is Thucydides', and it should be taken at face value as an accurate statement of Spartan psychology as it developed by the mid fifth century.^[4] But if Thucydides intended to memorialize an eternal verity, he was mistaken. The Lacedaemonians display an active foreign policy in the sixth century, which, after the war against Argos, resulted in the solidification of the Peloponnesian League; the alliance with the Lydian Croesus is not intrinsically suspicious, though it has been doubted, and it is certain that the Lacedaemonians involved themselves in Samian affairs in 524.^[5] Even the disposition of Plataea in 519/18 attests the reach of their arm (Hdt. 6.108.2). If they declined to take Plataea under their own protection, it was but the sensible thing to do.^[6] Indeed, though we may regard their opposition to Xerxes as inevitable regardless of their "policy," it is notable that Pausanias continued to prosecute the war in Ionia until he was removed by a conspiracy of the Athenians and the Ionians in 478/7 while Leotychides engaged, in Greece, in a Thessalian campaign (Plut. Moral. 859c). Herodotus informs us (9.35.2) that the Lacedaemonians fought two great battles, one in Tegea, the other in Dipaia, between the time of Plataea and

Tanagra. Although we do not know the details,^[7] the inference that the Lacedaemonians were "not quick to go to war" during this time is gratuitous. A major shift in Spartan policy occurred, no doubt, after the great Helot Revolt of 464; fear of the helots together with a decline in manpower were vital factors in the evolution of the conservative Sparta Thucydides seems to have taken for granted.

If the aborted invasion of c. 506 is historical (Hdt. 5.89ff.), the Lacedaemonians made one further effort to dislodge the young democracy before accepting its existence as an accomplished fact. It is considerably more likely, however, that the entire episode is the invention of a later age that credulously piled up precedent upon precedent for the great clash of 431. This affair, in the first place, is set into the wrong context. In all probability, Athens's war with Aegina, to which the alleged invasion is tied, actually began about twenty years later, in the eighties.^[8] Moreover, the motivation ascribed to the Lacedaemonians seems anachronistic. They allegedly were induced to initiate the campaign because of oracles taken from the acropolis of Athens by Cleomenes, which convinced them that "the Athenians were growing in power and no longer willing to obey them; they understood that if the Attic race remained free, it would become a force countervalent to their own" (Hdt. 5.91.1). Third, Sparta is supposed to have intended to reinstate Hippias, the son of Peisistratus, the tyrant who had been driven out by Cleomenes in 511/10—a turnabout involving too many internal contradictions to be taken seriously. Finally, the invasion never took place.

In the face of all these considerations, the Herodotean story should be rejected as a tendentious invention told him by the Athenians. In any event, accommodation between Athens and Sparta was reached at that time or shortly thereafter: the Lacedaemonians supported Athens against Aegina in the flare-up of 491 and came (though belatedly) to her assistance in 490, when the Athenians faced both the Persians at Marathon and the prospect of the return of Hippias (Hdt. 6.120).^[9] If, therefore, the absence of information can legitimate conjecture, we may assume that Sparta, without the benefit of hindsight, viewed events

imperturbably. Cleomenes had made an effort to shore up the regime of Isagoras, who was his friend, and it had failed. But since the Cleisthenic politeia continued traditional practice, constituted no dangerous threat to Dorian superiority,^[10] and was, if possible, even more antityrannist than the Lacedaemonians, there is no reason to suppose that Sparta greatly cared one way or the other. Surely, the Lacedaemonians could not have perceived with the clarity of Herodotus that Athens, now free, would become a counterpoise to Spartan hegemony.

Xerxes' invasion brought the two city-states into close contact without evident friction. The Themistoclean fleet may have vexed Aegina, and Themistocles Adeimantos of Corinth; but the emphasis placed by Herodotus on the rivalries of the Athenians, Corinthians, and Lacedaemonians presupposes the conditions of his own times, which he retrojected back into the Great War.^[11] Unfortunately, little else exists to permit a ssessment of their relations.^[12] The subordination to the Spartans necessitated by that crisis may well have grated, especially when the Athenians were compelled to suffer the devastation of their city while their enormous and newly acquired fleet^[13] retrieved Greek fortunes at Salamis (Hdt. 8.40ff.). But they must have recognized at the time, as Herodotus failed later to see, that their fate was a consequence of strategic necessity, Boeotia being in Persian hands with the barbarian fleet still strong.^[14] Artemision was not tenable after the capture of Thermopylae, and whether or not the Themistocles Decree is "historical,"^[15] the decision to pull back to Salamis (and sacrifice Athens) was the only option open to the allied forces. More revealing, perhaps,

of the mentality operating after the conclusion of the Great War is the remarkable reception given to the Athenian Themistocles by the Lacedaemonians. Themistocles apparently received more honor in Sparta than any other foreigner to visit the city (Thuc. 1.74.1, a speech).

The same individual, Themistocles, was actively involved in what tradition remembered as the first postwar rebuff of Sparta by the Athenians. The date of the episode is 479, when the Persians withdrew from Greece, probably before the winter; the Athenians and their Ionian and Hellespontine allies were laying siege to Sestos,^[16] while the Athenians at home decided to rebuild their city walls.

The Lacedaemonians, perceiving what was intended, sent an embassy, in part because they would be happier to see neither the Athenians nor anyone else in possession of walls, but mainly because their allies urged them to do so, since they feared both the size of the Athenian fleet, which had not existed before, and that audacity of theirs, which had come into existence for the war against the Mede. (Thuc. 1.90.1)^[17]

The ruse of Themistocles (1.90.3–92) that enabled the Athenians to build their wall in opposition to Sparta is a famous story, which became a central feature of the Themistocles legend, testifying at once to his fiery patriotism and his masterly ability to extemporize and deceive. This account, moreover, came to figure importantly in later reconstructions of the status of Athenian-Lacedaemonian antipathy and continues today to captivate modern students.^[18]

The story, however, invites caution. Themistocles was the very type of early Athenian about whom exaggerative stories were bound to accumulate as a matter of course, for he became greatly admired, not merely for the fertility of his wit or the manner of his death, but for his role as the founder of the "modern" city-state of Athens.^[19] That Themistocles became a cult-hero of the Pericleans is evident from the extraordinary interest he excited in Thucydides;^[20] it may be inferred, as well, from the fact that his adventure, like the others, became a topos in later writers like Andocides (3.38; cf Plato Gorgias 455d). Certainly Themistocles' reputation cannot have been redeemed until a generation or so after his death at the earliest; and the obvious explanation, apart from his charismatic life, is the singular correlation between Themistoclean and Periclean policy.^[21] This, of course, does not make the story into a fable. But it does suggest that we need to be cautious in assessing an anecdote forming an important part of the larger legend. Suspicion intensifies when we recollect that, from a later perspective, the construction of the walls could be regarded by the Athenians as the vital step in the creation of imperial Athens.^[22] It might have followed, then, that a decision of such fateful significance would inevitably have been opposed by Sparta. If this were all, reverence for a Thucydidean tradition might dictate the suppression of our doubts. But there is something more: the speedy pace of the wall-building could be inferred, and exaggerated, because of the conglomerate nature of the material used—the ruins of the devastated city—while this in turn easily can have suggested that the wall had been hastily constructed in order to repel an imminent attack (1.93). This story has all the features we associate with aetiological fictions.

In the light of that possibility, let us consider the implication of Thucydides' attribution of the potentially anachronistic motive not to Sparta but to her allies. The detail is intriguing and suggests that Thu-

cydides himself had certain difficulties with the story. Obviously, he could not know what was in the minds of the Lacedaemonians in 479, yet he felt it necessary to split hairs and distinguish them from their allies in this particular. The reason must lie in the fact that he did not consider this motivation yet appropriate to the Spartans (for reasons he provides in 1.95.7). So he compromised by imputing to a third party or parties what may, in general terms, have seemed just plausible enough—viz., that Athens's new seapower would render her dangerous if it was accompanied by city walls. But whether he had the Corinthians or the Aeginetans in mind—if, indeed, he isolated anyone in particular when he wrote these words—makes little difference. The telling observation is that Thucydides' account bears the signs of an attempt to accommodate the legend to historical reality by transferring the motive to a secondary political actor because it was implausible to assign it to the Spartans.

Thucydides' recourse to a third party helps us to appreciate his subtlety but undermines the story as insufficiently grounded in historical likelihood. For, as we have observed, the basic presupposition of the episode is that the Athenians tricked Sparta and accelerated the building of their walls in anticipation of a Spartan invasion.^[23] Are we prepared to believe that the history of 431 repeated itself in 479, and that the Lacedaemonians, "who simply preferred that every city be unfortified," to paraphrase Thucydides, nevertheless contemplated an invasion of Attica at the behest of others because they predicted the consequences of that activity? The presumption does not suit the requirement of the historical moment. Thucydides' report of the Spartan demand and contemplation of war will not square with the approval given shortly thereafter by the Lacedaemonians of Athens's assumption of the hegemony of the Delian League (Thuc. 1.95.7).^[24] It was the acquisition of the league, not her possession of a fleet in 479/8, much less her city walls, that permitted Athens to become, eventually, a formidable threat. In fact, the fleet was not even then—in the seventies—a serious menace to the Greeks of the mainland; that development awaited the construction of the Long Walls, which made the city immune to invasion and secure in its navy. The psychology attributed to the allies of the Lacedaemonians is anachronistic and the policy imputed to the Lacedaemonians on their behalf is absurd.

In the form in which it it presented, therefore, the episode should be rejected. Its origin may lie in the fact that the Lacedaemonians indeed urged Athens to refrain from fortifying the city. They would have liked, no doubt, to see the Athenians vulnerable, if only because the cardinal principle of Spartan policy was to preserve and enhance Sparta's hegemony over the Greeks. Even so, the Lacedaemonians probably meant what they said. The return of a new Persian expedition was a distinct possibility, insofar as this could be known, and if such a thing occurred, Sparta would place the final line of defense at the Isthmus, making Athens expendable once again. The existence of walls at Athens, on the other hand, might complicate this strategy by requiring the defense of Athens. Granting the request, we may also grant the dispatch of Themistocles to Sparta in order to justify the Athenian decision to press on with the fortifications. It is at this time, in all probability, that Themistocles was lionized at Sparta. On this foundation was erected a fabulous structure, which came to include some of the standard features of the Themistocles legend—for instance, his resort to bribery.^[25] By the time of Thucydides, the unsophisticated considered the event a precursor of Spartan-Athenian enmity, leading still later writers to "correct" the tradition about Athens's acquisition of the leadership in the Ionian war against Persia. Thus Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 23.2), who inferred that the Lacedaemonians must have been "unwilling" when Athens supplanted Sparta because of the Pausanias affair.^[26] Thucydides himself made a compromise allowing him to save a tradition at odds with his own theory of the development of Spartan fear.

If we have concentrated our attention on the historicity of this episode, it is chiefly because of the importance it attained in the post-Thucydidean tradition, where it becomes the justification of an elabo-

rate and fictitious reconstruction of immediately subsequent events. As has been noted, Aristotle considered it necessary to insist (against Thucydides) that the Lacedaemonians were hostile to the transfer of the hegemony of the naval league to Athens. Now here we must be careful to separate the historical question from a historiographical one. That some Lacedaemonians possessed the vision to back Pausanias and desired to maintain a presence in the east is entirely credible,^[27] and it is confirmed by the dispatch of Dorcis after Pausanias's recall (Thuc. 1.95.6). The question, however, is whether a tradition existed unknown to Thucydides or silently rejected by him, which was accessible to the fourth century, to the effect that this issue prompted division in Sparta such that, if not in 479, then five years later, debate raged as to the desirability of wresting back the hegemony from the Athenians by force.

Diodorus 11.50.2, under the year 475/4, reports precisely such a tradition, in reliance on Ephorus, the fourth-century historian who served as his primary source for the period. According to Diodorus-Ephorus:

The younger men and most of the others were zealous in their desire to regain the hegemony in the belief that, if they made it their own, they would enjoy the benefit of much revenue and, in general, make Sparta great and more powerful. Meanwhile, the homes of private individuals would acquire a great enhancement of their prosperity.

They alluded to the old oracle forbidding them to allow their hegemony to become "lame," pointing out that this would occur if they renounced "the other of the two hegemonies" (11.50.4). But Hetoimaridas, a member of the gerousia (who takes the role played by Archidamus in 431), dissuaded them from going to war with "surprising arguments," which, alas, Diodorus does not provide. And so the threat died.

This tradition, which, incidentally, was quite unknown to Xenophon (Hellenica 6.5.34), is a logical development of the situation inherent in the episode of the walls, and it stands or falls together with it.^[28] Let us not forget, moreover, that this tradition (which also implies the obsolescence of the Lycurgan reform and the increase of wealth brought

Sparta by Lysander at the end of the century) obfuscates the distinction pressed by Thucydides. Here the Spartans, not the allies, are the farseeing proponents of a preemptive war. Indeed, they read the future so well that they apparently predicted the transformation of the "league" into an "empire" as the basis on which Sparta was lamed and the houses of private Athenians filled with riches.

The story of Hetoimaridas is one of the most transparent fictions of fifth-century history, and its acceptance by Kagan and de Ste. Croix, among others, seems surprising. What is presupposed, after all, is a fifth-century historical account, later available to Ephorus, providing an analysis of Spartan-Athenian relations in the Thucydidean vein, in rich detail but in counterpoint to Thucydides' own. Such an account would in the first place be a historiographical anomaly, for the putative source of Ephorus (if we wished seriously to pursue this will-o'-the-wisp) must be (at least) the contemporary of Thucydides and the author of a full-dress history of Spartan-Athenian relations during the Pentacontaetia. More important, Thucydides' sketch is explicitly incompatible with any such development as that postulated by Diodorus. According to Thucydides, when the Spartans received their check in the matter of the Athenian wall-building, they were "secretly vexed" (1.92) though still "friendly" at the time of the transfer of the hegemony (1.95.7).^[29] When the Thasians rebelled in 465, the alleged Spartan promise to come to their aid was kept a "secret" (1.101), and the "secret" had obviously not come out by the time Cimon persuaded the Athenians to send a force to Sparta's assistance after the great earth-quake precipitated the Third Messenian War. It was only then, when, in that curious volte face of the Lacedaemonians, they dismissed Cimon's forces, that the first sign of "open enmity" appeared (1.102.3; cf. 1.18.3).

The story about Hetoimaridas presupposes events of later occurrence that Thucydides provides to explain the development of hostility between the Spartans and the Athenians. It is not, therefore, a mere

argument from silence—a conclusion from Thucydides' "omission" of the episode—to insist that Hetoimaridas's alleged suasion of the Spartans comes at the wrong end of a psychological progression carefully charted by Thucydides. If the Lacedaemonians had been on the point of declaring war in 475 (and on this Thucydides 1.118.2, already mentioned, is a useful commentary) or the possibility had been even raised in public debate, Thucydides incomprehensibly distorted the historical record by suggesting that Spartan fear of Athens, the kind that would be capable of leading to war, required time and a prehistory of suspicion for its development.

What Ephorus has done is clear. His own perfect understanding of the importance of Athens's acquisition of the leadership of the naval league made it obvious to him that all the world must have shared his perception of its significance at the very time it occurred. The error of judgment at least had the advantage of permitting him, more suo, to improve rhetorically the more arid stretches of early fifth-century history and, no small gain, to let loose a broadside against the Spartans.

None of this should be taken to suggest, however, that the Lacedaemonians were unconcerned about Athenian behavior, at least by the late seventies, though the cause for displeasure was located on the home front, not across the Aegean. Unfortunately, it is one of the most serious gaps in our chain of evidence that we are unable to reconstruct the inner politics of Athens in the decade of the seventies so as to be able to speak with any confidence about Themistocles' activities during this period.^[30] Themistocles had been archon in 493; a decade later he carried the proposal to create an Athenian navy;^[31] in 480 he was the general most responsible for the victory at Salamis; after 478/7 he rendered himself obnoxious to the new allies because of his rapacity (Plut. Them. 21.3–4). As stated earlier in chapter 2,^[32] there can be little doubt that his patriotism took the form of antagonism to the Lacedaemonians. He was old enough to remember Cleomenes' invasion c. 508/7 and may well have been a follower of Cleisthenes, whose allegiance to the demos excluded admiration for the Spartan aristocracy. If we may infer so much from Thucydides' admiration of this figure, he was a fierce proponent of Athens's autonomous position in Greece—one of those, in

other words, who regarded the claim of Sparta to be hegemon of the larger Hellenic symmachy against the Mede (Thuc. 1.102.4) as a supererogation, insisting, instead, on Athenian equality and independence.

For we must bear in mind that ideas like "independence" and "equality" are subjective terms as well as objective descriptions of the legal status of states and people. That Athens was not the "inferior" of Sparta but its independent equal is a correct statement in theory. It does not, however, even remotely do justice to the realities of the situation. It was a part of the nature of things that the Spartans were the ultimate arbiters of Greek affairs; indeed, their authority was so unquestioned that armed interference was a rarity.^[33] Together with their position of military supremacy, they also possessed what most Greeks considered to be the finest system of government in the land, and they represented, in addition, the flower of the Dorian aristocracy, then the ruling element in Greece. Such authority as derived from the Spartan preeminence was ultimately extralegal, however much it was validated and objectified by the Spartans' leadership of the Peloponnesian League, and they retained the superiority it implied throughout the fifth century, when it was recognized even by many upper-class Athenians.^[34] The point is important, for one of the main causes of the antagonism between these powers is that Sparta could no more contemplate Athens's real equality than Athens could accept any limitation on her ability to act in pursuit of her own interests.

Themistocles, we infer—not the allies of the Spartans in 479 or the Spartans themselves in 475—was endowed with the prescience to understand the latent incompatibility of the two cultures and labored in the seventies to isolate and diminish Spartan authority in Greece itself. That, at least, is the only assumption that seems sufficient to explain the otherwise puzzling report of the activities he pursued in the Peloponnesus between the period of his ostracism and the date of his banishment on the charge of Medism, which latter we very tentatively set in the year 471/70.^[35] The implication that he was vexatious to Sparta

when he lived at Argos after the ostracism is the core of what we actually know; the rest is speculation. We do not know on what issue his ostracism turned, and we are in no position to confirm or deny that his banishment for Medis as justifiable. The presumption should be that it was. If Pausanias trafficked with the Great King, Themistocles may also have done so, as the Athenians believed.^[36] It was a line of approach taken earlier by Cleisthenes and, eventually, by Pericles. It need hardly be said, moreover, that any power in Greece that could become the representative of the Great King might well rule the destiny of Hellas. The idea is not inconceivable, therefore, that Themistocles urged accommodation with Persia on the basis of the status quo in the late seventies, and that the issue not only brought him squarely against Cimon but gave color to the charge the Lacedaemonians later raised against him (Thuc. 1.135.2). But conjecture of this kind is ultimately self-defeating. We are supposed to be writing history, "what Alcibiades actually did," not tragedy,^[37] and for that we need corroborative detail.

That the Athenians were as yet unprepared to risk opposing Sparta in Greece, and still preferred to follow the traditionalist leadership of men like Cimon is a reasonable inference from the data preserved by Thucydides concerning the ostracism and the exile. Cimon was undoubtedly a central figure in this context. As Athens's greatest military commander, he was an avowed imperialist to whom (one supposes) the extension of Athenian power must have been life's greatest glory. But his instincts were conservative and he knew the value of half a loaf. Sharing the common attitude of his class towards Sparta, he could only deplore Themistocles' anti-Spartan policies. If we may believe Cimon, as he expressed himself at a later time, there was no necessity why Athens and Sparta, yoked together as equals, should not exercise dominance over Greece without mutual hostility (Plut. Cim. 16.10). Such acceptance of a "dyarchy" would also have had inner political ramifications, for the radical wing of the Athenian demos, of which we presume Themistocles to have been the leader, nurtured or began to nurture certain views about the Athenian politeia that would have been

abhorrent to the Spartanophiles and disruptive of the establishment over which they presided. Cimon's alignment with Sparta and against Themistocles therefore represents a distinct and coherent position unifying foreign and domestic policy, in which each corroborated the other.^[38]

That policy, however, was irreparably impaired in consequence of a natural disaster, the great earthquake at Sparta in 464. The revolt of the helots triggered the Spartan request for assistance from Athens. Cimon, by endorsing it, and even while providing it, undermined his political support at home.^[39] The "First Peloponnesian War" soon followed.

The psychology prevailing at Sparta between 465, when Thasos rebelled, and 461, when Cimon was ostracized, is as open to dispute as is the interpretation of the factual record. It may be doubted, for example, whether the Lacedaemonians actually granted the "secret promise" to remove pressure from the Thasians by invading Attica, a promise that, according to Thucydides, failed of implementation only because the great rebellion of the helots diverted Spartan attention from it (1.101.2). For it is difficult to believe that the Spartans were sufficiently frightened of Athenian power to contemplate invasion of Attica for the sake of Thasos, and virtually at the same time trusting enough to introduce the Athenians in force into their desolated country. Therefore, since it is a "non-event," and, what is more, a secret unfulfilled promise, skepticism is permissible, particularly when one considers the freedom with which propaganda will have been invented at the time, or shortly after it, to justify anti-Spartan behavior.

A more complicated problem is posed by the apparently inconsequential actions of the Spartans. Having invited Cimon into their country, they insulted him and Athens by abruptly dismissing his army, though they kept their other allies at hand (Thuc. 1.102). To those who are prepared to impute any absurdity to the Spartans, provided that it is sufficiently stupid or insensitive,^[40] Thucydides' narrative may present no difficulties whatever. Let us, however, consider what is involved. Deeply mired in crisis, the Spartans begged assistance of the Athenians

(Pericleidas, as Aristophanes burlesqued it, sitting as a suppliant at Athenian altars, "pale in his dark red cloak").^[41] At such a pass, when the consequences could be dangerous, they would not have incited the Athenians capriciously. Moreover, it was no secret that Cimon had staked his political future on rendering aid to Sparta, knowing full well the unpopularity of his proposal. His speech was a famous one; his contemporary Ion of Chios even recorded it.^[42] Thus the Spartan insult would have fallen most heavily on Cimon, the friendly leader of a potentially hostile Athens—and this at a time when friends were greatly needed. Some better explanation seems required for Spartan behavior than the reason Thucydides gives us in 1.102.3 for Cimon's dismissal:

When the Lacedaemonians did not take the place by storm, fearing the daring and revolutionary spirit of the Athenians, and at the same time considering that they were of an alien race, they worried that if they remained at hand they might be persuaded by the helots in Ithome to start trouble. So they sent them away.

Now it will be noticed that the Lacedaemonians did not discover in 462 that the Athenians possessed a "daring and revolutionary spirit" or learn for the first time that they stemmed from an alien race. These facts were known before they requested assistance and Cimon was called in. Therefore, they provide no cogent explanation for his astonishing dismissal. Unless we assume that Cimon's troops actually conspired with the Messenians in 462 (and that notion is inadmissible), the real explanation of this otherwise gratuitous humiliation must be sought not in Lacedaemonia but in Athens.

The revolution in Athens explains the abrupt about-face.^[43] Not only was it the concrete manifestation of the "daring and revolutionary spirit" to which Thucydides vaguely refers, which was (as the event proved) explicitly anti-Spartan, but it involved a sudden new approach to foreign policy that cannot but have frightened the Lacedaemonians. Thucydides (1.102.4) reports that, after Cimon's dismissal, the Athenians, "taking this [insult] dreadfully and not deeming it acceptable to suffer such treatment at the hands of the Lacedaemonians, immediately after [Cimon's] withdrawal, having renounced the offensive and defensive alliance with them that was formed against the Mede, became the allies of the Argives, who were the enemies of the Lacedaemonians."

They further concluded still another alliance, this one with the Thessalians.^[44]

One wonders whether Thucydides was intentionally opaque, and even whether he may perhaps have been misled by the "imprecise" Hellanicus, so that the sequence of events he reports may be in error. But we have no warrant to rewrite the tradition to suit ourselves, and, in any case, the alliance with Argos presupposes the dispatch of embassies before it was ratified: nothing prohibits the assumption that the news of Ephialtes' revolution, combined with the tidings of a reversal in foreign policy, gave Sparta no choice but to send Cimon away.^[45] Cimon underwent ostracism shortly after his return to Athens, and a new chapter in Athenian-Spartan relations, one of "open enmity," was soon initiated under the leadership of Pericles.

The genie was out of the bottle. Athens aggressively pursued her own interests (or Spartan discomfiture)^[46] in Greece while, at the same time, extending her power far eastward, even into Egypt. Megara was brought into the Athenian alliance and the Athenians commenced full-scale war against the Peloponnesian states of Corinth, Epidaurus, and, above all, Aegina, "the eye-sore of the Peiraeus," while Pericles commenced the building of the Long Walls (Thuc. 1.107.1).^[47] The walls ran west-southwest and southwest, connecting Athens with both the Peiraeus (the "northern wall") and Phalerum, Athens's old harbor, making the entire area a self-contained triangle, with Athens at the apex, enclosed by walls but open to the sea. This labor, more than any other,

provides a reliable indication of Athenian aims at this time, signifying the adoption of an ambitious, well-calculated policy. The magnitude of the operation and the importance attached to it make it indubitable that it was conceived for the long term. The program marks the acknowledgement and implementation of Pericles' strategy of ensuring Athens's control of the sea, whatever she might experience on land. That in turn implies that the empire was henceforth regarded as permanent.^[48]

The crucial importance of the new policy making an island out of the city by the construction of the Long Walls and, later, the Middle Wall,^[49] is reflected in the attention Thucydides paid to the stages of their construction. He alludes to the first stage of building in 1.107.1 and inserts a reference to their completion in 1.108.3, between his allusion to the conquest of Boeotia and the capitulation of Aegina. His scrupulous precision, conjoined with the fact that his account of the entire sequence of events is brief and limited to essentials, emphasizes the critical nature of this development,^[50] and it is further corroborated by the information that, before the battle of Tanagra, some Athenians attempted to induce the Lacedaemonians to advance on Athens, hoping "to put an end to the demos and the construction of the Long Walls" (Thuc. 1.107.4).

Thucydides' emphasis concisely reflects the centrality of the policy. In the same vein, it is relevant to observe that the Corinthians, just before the declaration of war in 431, in their "friendly criticism" of the Lacedaemonians, accused Sparta of complacency in regard to two matters of epochal importance (as they/Thucydides viewed it: 1.69.1): the toleration by Sparta of the Themistoclean walls "and, later, the Athenian erection of the Long Walls"; and though the first example is one

in which the importance was, as we have seen, acquired retrospectively, the second speaks for itself. This new policy, perhaps because it was vigorously opposed by the Athenian ultraconservatives (the implication of Thuc. 1.107.4), subsequently became a test of loyalty to the demos. That is why later conservatives tried to appropriate some of the credit for it. Thus Andocides (3.5) speaks of the fortifications as a good thing and improperly associates them with Cimon, who, at the time, was out of Athens, ostracized and living in the Chersonesus;^[51] Aeschines, the opponent of Demosthenes, parrots the same version in 2.173. By this route, probably, Plutarch in Cimon 13.6 gives Cimon the false credit of laying the foundations of the walls (but not of building them)—an inefficacious compromise. The explanation for this liberty taken in the literary tradition is simple enough. The walls became the symbol as well as the safeguard of the democracy and its imperial appanage, and conservatives were anxious to prove that their forebears were good democrats in the decisive middle fifties (cf. Plato Gorgias 518c–519a) and so they invented the notion (followed by some moderns) of still another "union of hearts" on Cimon's return from ostracism,^[52] evoking the pleasant picture of a new establishment presided over by Pericles and including the new representatives of the Old Guard.^[53]

A clearer view of the issue can be gained by consideration of what the Old Oligarch has to tell us, in somewhat general terms, in 2.14–16.^[54] Though the passage is somewhat lengthy, all of it deserves to be translated:

The Athenians lack one thing. For if the Athenians inhabited an island and controlled the sea, they would have the ability to inflict harm, if they wished, but not to suffer it, as long as they controlled the sea; their land would not be open to ravagement nor would they need to confront their enemies. As it stands now, the farmers and the rich are disproportionately open to the enemy, while the demos, since it well knows that the enemy will neither burn nor ravage anything it possesses, lives without concern and without shrinking from them. [2.15] Furthermore, the Athenians would be released from another fear, if they lived on an island—that the city would ever be betrayed by a small group of

men, or the city gates be opened wide, or the enemy pour in. For how could these things happen if they inhabited an island? Nor, again, would they fear revolution against the demos if they lived on an island. For, you see, as things are, if they should rise in rebellion, they would do so by placing their hopes in the enemy in the belief that they could bring them in by land. But if they lived on an island, this too would be no problem. [2.16] Therefore, since they have never dwelt on an island, they do this: they place their property in the islands trusting to their control of the sea, and they tolerate the ravagement of Attica in the knowledge that if they feel pity for the land they will deprive themselves of other benefits that are greater still.

The premise of this argument, which appears to glance at Tanagra and the invasion of Pleistoanax of 446, is the (recent) fortification, and the inference is clear that the Old Oligarch echoes the kind of rhetoric used by Pericles when he advocated the program. Since this was the consistent policy of Pericles, moreover, it does not surprise us to hear the strategy reconfirmed in Thucydides 2.13.2, where the historian reports the substance of Pericles' advice to the Athenians on the eve of the war of 431:

As to the needs of the present, he urged them, precisely in the same way as previously, to prepare themselves for the war and to bring in their property from the fields; not to go forth in battle, but to guard the city from inside it; to maintain the fleet, the source of their power, in a state of readiness; and to keep the allies in hand, pointing out that Athenian strength derived from the revenue provided from the resources of the allies, and that in war, for the most part, intelligent decision and superabundant resources bring victory.^[55]

Thus we perceive a clear line of development from the revolution of Ephialtes and the ostracism of Cimon to the engagement in war with Aegina and the other Peloponnesians, the conquest of Boeotia and the completion of the walls to the Peiraeus and Phalerum. The sequence marks a break with the past and signals the emergence of Athenian militancy under the leadership of Pericles. The goal of the polis was not merely to maintain control over the subject-allies but, without evident concern for the consequences, to acquire mastery over (at least) contiguous territories, one of them Dorian. This policy implies, somewhat problematically, little regard for possible Lacedaemonian reprisal. Yet it seems apparent that, other things being equal, the Athenians would have been reluctant to risk general war with the Peloponnesians unless

they possessed some reasonable expectation that the Spartans would be incapable of supporting their allies in a major way. Indeed, as we know, their contribution was nil until 446/5, some fifteen years later. These facts mutually illuminate each other: the explanation of Athenian aggression and Spartan inactivity is to be sought in the life-and-death struggle Sparta faced with the helots between 464 and 455 B.C.

According to Thucydides (1.103.1), the Messenian War lasted ten years. Other considerations based ultimately, but not exclusively, on Thucydides' order of events yields 464 as the date of the war's commencement.^[56] This chronology easily explains what otherwise would have been unpardonable remissness on Sparta's part when her allies came under Athenian attack. For although it is possible to explain Sparta's failure to invade Attica by the Athenian possession of the Megarid and control of the Geraneian Heights,^[57] the fact remains that Sparta made no attempt to wrest back the Megarid; nor did she join with her allies in any of the fighting, even the siege of Aegina, which narrowly concerned her and her league, except for the battle of Tanagra, a very special case, indeed, to which we shall come shortly.

Many scholars, however, adopt a different view of the chronology and wish to make Thucydides' decade-long war into one of four years' duration^[58] or otherwise alter the dates—for example, by assigning the commencement of the Messenian War to 469, where Diodorus placed it (11.63).^[59] For the opinion is prevalent that in this Pentacontaetia, Thucydides never varies his procedure of presenting events in strict rel-

ative order, a policy he explicitly announces (2.1, 5.26) he will follow in his account of the Peloponnesian War itself.^[60] If so, the "First Peloponnesian War" (1.103.4ff) must have begun when the Messenian War (1.103.3) came to an end. Secondly, it is also a common opinion that the battle of Tanagra, fought by the Spartans and the Athenians c. 457, presupposes that the Lacedaemonians had already been released from the pressure of the helot rebellion, and therefore confirms the orthodox view of the chronology.^[61]

The conviction that, because he usually places events in strict relative order, Thucydides intended his reader to understand that the conclusion of the Messenian War antedated the adhesion of Megara to Athens c. 460 postulates the existence of an implicit methodology that he expected his readers automatically to know and to apply, though he makes no such claim for his account of the Pentacontaetia, only for the Great War (2.1). The presumption that events are retailed in relative order is, of course, a natural one in any linear sequence, and the predisposition of the reader to assume that one event in a list follows another temporally is in fact automatic unless some signpost, some counterindication, is provided by the writer to warn of a disruption of the sequence. That is the significance of the absolute chronological datum Thucydides provides, for it informs the reader of the continuity of one episode that, unlike the others that are listed, was ongoing for a period of time.

If, therefore, Thucydides had let the matter rest in 103.1 without adding the information that Ithome capitulated "in the tenth year," the matter would stand differently. We would assume strict relative placement. But that is why Thucydides, contrary to his custom, presents us with an absolute interval of time, confronted, as he was, with the serious narrative difficulty of relating events that commenced after the earthquake struck but before the rebellion was terminated. Thucydides could not have known that the particulars of his account, even when contextually unambiguous, would come to be arranged according to principles mechanically extrapolated from his method in general—as Diodorus and Ephorus seem to have done. Since he was resuming his discussion of the Messenian affair (after detailing the Athenian reaction

to the dismissal of Cimon) and finishing with it in 1.103 by conveying the information that it continued for ten years, a flexible reader might suppose that the pluperfective aorist in 103.4 () marked resumption of the relative order he had momentarily left. There is no reason to believe that it ever occurred to Thucydides, when he wrote "in the tenth year," that the reader would in spite of that datum assume strict relative placement between the end of the revolt and the next event in the series Thasos-earthquake-Megara. If Thucydides' datum is sound, the procedure he followed is not intrinsically difficult to understand.

The proof, moreover, that the view of the chronology presented here is the right one follows from consideration of Thucydides' account of Tanagra and certain conclusions we are compelled to deduce from it. According to the usual conception, this great contest is supposed to have been the outcome of a premeditated invasion by the Spartans, which thus implies an end to the period of their greatest stress.^[62] In view of the pains taken by Thucydides to set forth the sequence of events leading to Tanagra in the correct perspective, this interpretation of the affair is baffling—or would be baffling were it not for the lamentable intrusion, once more, of Ephorus. For when one reads Diodorus 11.81.1–4 (derived from Ephorus), the point of central interest, and the apparent motivation inducing the collision at Tanagra, is collusion between the Boeotians and the Spartans, as if the Spartans had intended to rearrange Boeotian affairs when they commenced their expedition. Thus Kagan, for example, who writes of "Sparta's strange willingness to take a large army out of the Peloponnese to reestablish Theban supremacy in Boeotia at the same time that it was unwilling or unable to invade Attica."^[63] In fact, the sequence of events leading to the battle of Tanagra requires a radically different set of assumptions.

Thucydides provides the motivation of the Spartan expedition crisply and distinctly in 1.107.2: "The Phocians made an attack against Doris, the ancestral home of the Lacedaemonians . . . and the Lacedaemonians . . . came to its assistance." Never were cause and effect more clearly conjoined.

Once assistance had been rendered, Thucydides informs us, the Lacedaemonians attempted to return home the way they had come, through the Corinthian Gulf. They discovered, however, that their pas-

sage was blocked by an Athenian fleet. The Athenians showed that they would use force to prevent the return of the Spartan expedition, Thucydides says, and the Spartans and their allies were at this point unwilling to try to force the Geraneia and the Megarid, observing that the Athenians intended to bar their passage by that route as well. As a result, according to Thucydides, "they resolved to stay in Boeotia and devise a way to get back safely."

Far from attempting to reestablish Theban supremacy in Boeotia, the Spartans thus found themselves trapped by the Athenians in central Greece after a campaign narrowly restricted to Doris, and one they must have considered obligatory (for it was their "mother city" and had appealed for assistance) as well as susceptible of speedy and safe fulfillment. At this stage in his narrative, it is true, Thucydides inserts what has been taken as a secondary motivation for the Lacedaemonian presence in Boeotia, the fact that certain Athenians had invited them to march on their city. Thucydides is somewhat mysterious at this juncture of his narrative, perhaps because he is fusing together two disparate traditions (see below), and he leaves it unclear whether the Lacedaemonians, when they "resolved to remain in Boeotia to consider the safest means to depart" (107.4), also had in mind a sudden move against Athens because they were "led on" by Athenian traitors or whether, instead, it was the presence of the Lacedaemonians in Boeotia that induced the traitors to take advantage of the situation if they could. But surely it is patent that this detail is irrelevant to the Spartan predicament, though it was (mis)remembered later, and mentioned by the Corinthians (1.69.1) as a telling example of Lacedaemonian lethargy.^[64] In 431, no doubt, the Lacedaemonians and their allies counted over their missed opportunities and allowed themselves to forget the conditions under which the Spartan army labored at Tanagra; Thucydides apparently combined this topos with his account of the battle. As his own report attests, however, the Lacedaemonians had been cornered; and they were forced, at Tanagra, to fight their way out of Boeotia,

their only route being through an Athenian army and across the Isthmus. In that impasse, it is unlikely that they gave serious consideration to the Athenian oligarchs or to pressing home their victory instead of taking a straight course homeward.^[65]

The choice before us is clear. Either Thucydides was naive in supposing that the Phocian attack on the Dorian metropolis was sufficient explanation for the Lacedaemonian campaign, when in fact it was really a "cover" for a highly complex operation, planned in sophisticated anticipation of Athenian movements, or Ephorus has as usual falsified the picture by becoming exclusively concerned with the battle itself, as if the battle were a natural and predictable culmination of the Spartan expedition. Since Ephorus's alternative deserves no credit, it follows that the battle was ultimately induced by the Athenians, who thus attempted to cripple Sparta at a stroke by hemming in her army. That the battle of Tanagra (or a battle of that type in some other locale) was initially anticipated by the Athenians probably should not be assumed, for it is likely enough that the Athenians were content to wait on developments. But they intentionally trapped a Spartan army by refusing it free passage home and they eventually met it in battle. These are the salient facts, and their relevance to the psychology of the Athenians in c. 457 is as obvious as the conclusion to be drawn from the Spartan avoidance of battle until it became inevitable. The Messenian War, it follows, was still in progress and the army could not be risked.^[66]

Even after the defeat they had suffered at Tanagra, and though they were occupied in Egypt (Thuc. 1.104,109), the Athenians continued to take advantage of Sparta's preoccupation with her own affairs by attacking her allies with great effect. Two months after the battle of Tanagra had been fought, Myronides advanced into Boeotia and subjugated the Boeotians and the Phocians after winning a great victory at Oenophyta (1.108.2–3). The capitulation of Aegina followed (108.4), and after that, abandoning all reserve, the Athenians, under Tolmides, sailed in force around the Peloponnesus (456/5).^[67] They set fire to the Lacedaemonian dockyards at Gythion, surely a greater insult than injury, captured a Corinthian city, presumably razing it to the ground, and defeated the Sicyonians in a pitched battle (Thuc. 1.108.5, schol.

Aesch. 2.31). Then they invaded Thessaly, though without successful issue, defeated the Sicyonians a second time, and advanced to Oiniadai in Acarnania, putting the town to siege (Thuc. 1.111).

Three "empty" years passed (Thuc. 1.112.1), during which the Lacedaemonians did nothing to retrieve the situation. As for the Athenians, their previous highly aggressive record suggests that it is incorrect to assume that their lack of recorded enterprise was due to the Egyptian disaster (454) and an outbreak of allied rebellion putatively connected with it.^[68] The only proper gauge of Athenian "exhaustion" would be the degree to which their enemies attempted to win back their own, and such attempts, evidently, were not forthcoming.^[69] A compelling indication of Athenian intent (or expectations) is their continuance of the work of fortifying Athens against an invasion that might cut them off from the sea. Around this time, they began the construction of the so-called "middle" or "south" wall. This defense connected with the Long Wall to the Peiraeus, running south from it to enclose the harbor of Munichium. If the wall to Phalerum should be taken, the new southern projection would ensure the safety of Munichium and the Peiraeus. Pericles personally argued for the measure (Plato Gorgias 455e), and delay in its construction apparently vexed the Athenians.^[70]

A five-year peace was concluded in 451 with Cimon's help. After his ostracism in 461, Cimon had returned to Athens in 452, though a tradition was either invented or preserved by Theopompus (FGrHist 115 F 88) to the effect that "the demos recalled Cimon when five years [of his ostracism] had not yet elapsed because of his proxenia (public friendship with the Spartans). When he was present in the city he ended the war."^[71] However, this tradition should be rejected. What is alleged

of Cimon c. 457 ("ending the war") did not take place c. 457, while Thucydides coordinates the peace of 451 with Cimon's campaign to Cyprus (1.112.1). The inference is that Cimon returned at the regular time (452); Theopompus's adjustment of the tradition is part and parcel of the manipulation of the record to secure Cimon's collaboration with Pericles in the erection of the Long Walls; it is a combination of Cimon's alleged patriotic presence at Tanagra and the actual peace of 451 telescoped together.

The five-year peace marks a staggering victory for the Athenians. They had gained Aegina and Megara, with its connecting ports, and were also in control of Boeotia. Though Thucydides in effect disparages the significance of the achievement, probably because most of the gains slipped away within a short five years, it would be an error for us to adopt his perspective in assessing the accomplishment. By pledging this peace the Lacedaemonians gave formal recognition to the status quo; for the first time in living memory, they had been forced to acknowledge a bruising defeat to their alliance, as well as the demonstrated potency of the upstart Ionian democracy.

But Athens's reach exceeded its grasp. Boeotia broke away, probably in 448, and Tolmides and his army met with disaster at Coronea.^[72] Not long after the Athenian renunciation of Boeotia, Euboea rebelled, and Pericles was no sooner there than word was brought him that the Megarians had risen and a Peloponnesian army was on the way to Athens. Under the leadership of Pleistoanax, son of Pausanias, this army advanced to Eleusis and Thria, ravaged the country, and then withdrew, having achieved its probable purpose, to prevent Pericles from advancing to Megara and recapturing it. (Shortly thereafter, the Spartans supposed Pleistoanax to have been too timid; they persuaded themselves that he and his lieutenant had been bribed away from Athens by Pericles.) Pericles, crossing over to Euboea for a second time, subjugated the island, expelling the Hestiaeans and appropriating their land, and making treaties with the other city-states on terms very adverse for them. A portion of one of those treaties has survived in the Chalcis Decree.^[73] In the following spring, 445 B.C. , a peace of thirty years was concluded between "the Lacedaemonians and their allies" and "the Athenians and their allies," thereby legitimizing the Athenian empire as an established fixture in the international relations of the Hellenic

world. Among other conditions, the allies of one side were precluded from joining the other, though neutrals could enter whatever alliance they chose.^[74]

The peace of 446/5 can be regarded as a realistic version of the one concluded five or six years before, which had been as difficult for the Peloponnesians to accept as it was for the Athenians to maintain. Athens had not the power to retain mastery of Boeotia, while the line of communications from Megara to Corinth and Epidaurus rendered Megara so assailable, if the population became hostile to Athens, that a disproportionate presence would have been required to hold it. That, however, ran counter to Athens's general strategy of drawing within herself, like a tortoise, in the event of a general war. In this respect, Athens was well rid of Boeotia and Megara, though, obviously, this is not a view most Athenians would have shared; if they accepted, they must also have regretted, this diminution of their sway. But the central fact is unambiguous. Athens had been placed in the greatest jeopardy in the year before the peace, menaced on all sides by the Euboeans, Megarians, and a Peloponnesian army, and had as a result been deprived of Boeotia and Megara. That she kept Aegina and was able to conclude a peace seems a major triumph.

Fourteen years later, the Peloponnesian War broke out.^[75] The causes of that great struggle are as much discussed as any subject connected with the ancient world.^[76] One can study the "causes" from the perspective of the outbreak itself and of its immediate antecedents, on the assumption that the peace of 446/5 stabilized relations and initiated a new epoch comprehensible in its own terms, or one can take a longer view by regarding the general tendencies of Athens and Sparta, but especially of Athens, as continuously displayed from a more remote time. The latter procedure has been followed here, not in formal deference to Thucydides but because, with unexcelled historical vision, he recognized the extent to which the concrete "causes" of the war of 431

were accidental to its truest cause—the development of Athens into a militant and powerful city-state, which eventually became too dangerous a threat to the Lacedaemonians and their allies to be allowed to continue unchecked. As the Lacedaemonians viewed it, not unreasonably, the alternative to full-scale war was the further isolation and encirclement of the Peloponnesus, to Sparta's ultimate destruction as a political power.

Thucydides himself seems to have reached this opinion comparatively late. Every indication suggests that he began, in 431, by stressing the "proximate" causes or, rather, that when he started to write his history, his concept of causation was conventional and circumscribed by attention to the immediate antecedents of the war.^[77] That is why, probably, his account of the Corcyraean and Potidaean episodes is so extensive and detailed. That his sense of proportion had not fully matured may also be inferred from his exhaustive investigation of the Plataean episode,^[78] a matchless piece of historical writing but, in relation to what follows, excessively detailed. One may observe that the richness of the fabric is unequaled later, though historical events arise of far greater importance. Eventually, Thucydides seems to have adjusted his perspective. Indeed, the assumption^[79] is plausible that Thucydides initially intended to attribute to Corinth a larger importance in bringing the war about, but as time passed was increasingly dominated by the idea of opposition on all levels between Sparta and Athens. Thus he came to take a sweeping view of the more distant past, regarding each city-state as the natural opponent of the other, a conception reflected in his designation of Lacedaemonian "fear" in the all-important passage, 1.23.5–6, as the "truest cause" of the Peloponnesian War:

The Athenians and the Peloponnesians began the war after having renounced the thirty-year peace they made after the conquest of Euboea. As to the reason why they renounced it, I have written down in advance of what follows, first of all, the grounds of complaint [aitiai ] and the differences [diaphorai ] in order to prevent anyone from ever needing to make inquiry into the matter out of which so great a war came about among the Greeks. For in my opinion the truest cause [] but the one least manifest in open discussion, is that the Athenians, because they were in process of becoming

great and were making the Lacedaemonians afraid, compelled the Lacedaemonians to go to war.

Now although there is a voluminous literature that takes another view, G. E. M. de Ste. Croix is entirely correct (in our opinion) to insist that Thucydides "does not try to distinguish, either here or anywhere else in his work, between immediate or significant and underlying or profound causes."^[80] Thucydides distinguishes in 1.23.5–6 between the allegations raised and the actual cause, as he saw it, of the war.^[81] The use of the superlative, "truest cause" (which seems to have "attracted" the following superlative, "least manifest," into its orbit) is emphatic and does not imply that "the grounds of complaint" and the "differences" were "less true" as grounds of complaint and differences; it merely states that, in Thucydides' opinion, they were not the real cause of the war. It does not follow, however, that modern discussions of "proximate" and "immediate" or "ultimate" or "underlying" causes are invalidated by Thucydides' preference for an antithesis between "allegation" and "cause." For Thucydides' "allegations" and "grounds of complaint" are precisely what we mean by "proximate causes," while his "truest cause" is exactly what we express by "ultimate" or "underlying cause." De Ste. Croix makes things a little too easy for himself when he dismisses these aitiai and diaphorai as pretexts cooked up by the Spartans, just as Thucydides made things altogether too easy for himself by implicitly understating the importance of such proximate causes. In brushing aside the Megarian Decree (by concentrating his specific attention on Corcyra and Potidaea) and by minimizing the other allegations of wrongdoing, Athens's responsibility for the great war was proportionately reduced.

It should not be necessary, in the twentieth century, after we have been instructed by the study of two millenia of wars, to subject the Thucydidean "grounds of complaint" to microscopic analysis; and it

seems idle to seek to prove that one side or the other "started" the war. Such causes ramify endlessly and they are complex in proportion to the number of the combatants and the scale of the war itself. Even a border war between two states cannot be explained simply in terms of the legal ownership of disputed territory. Such a piece of land will have had a history of ownership itself determined by claims, counterclaims, and the issue of prior battle. Adjudication of disputes being possible at all times, the question why it is willingly accepted at one time and resisted at another is not susceptible to "scientific" resolution. Fear, detestation, ambition, miscalculation, and any number of other considerations play their part in the genesis of wars. Without them general conflicts would probably never come about.

Certainly all of these seem to have contributed to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War; and it seems labor misspent to attempt to assign responsibility with reference to the conditions set down in the peace treaty of 446/5, since even the participants held conflicting views about whether its terms had or had not been truly abrogated. Aegina, for instance, insisted (in secret) that she was not being treated as an autonomous state, though the peace required it (Thuc. 1.67.2). An assertion of this kind, since it is unverifiable, cannot be properly assessed. Megara complained that her "exclusion from the harbors of the Athenian empire and from the agora of Athens was contrary to the treaty" (1.57.4).^[82] How is this to be judged? We should probably not suppose that "free trade" had been a stipulation of the treaty, as if something like the Megarian Decree had been anticipated—though the presence of a clause to the effect that "allies of both sides shall be permitted to sail wherever they wish without hindrance, though not in ships of war" is not unthinkable.^[83] But if such an exclusionary measure as the Megarian Decree was not precluded by the terms of the peace, it was nevertheless contrary to its general intent, the matrix of understandings forming the general context of the specific language of the treaty. No peace treaty will survive if its signatories take the attitude that they may do as they please to parties of the other side so long as what they do is

not specifically prohibited. Potidaea's situation is also unclear. This city was a tributary ally ordered by the Athenians to tear down a wall, surrender hostages, and expel Corinthian demiourgoi, magistrates of the city, because Athens feared a rebellion. We may decide that it was a private matter between Athens and Potidaea, since Potidaea was Athens's "ally." But the Potidaeans were also a Corinthian colony and believed that their deprecation of such measures was reasonable (Thuc. 1.58), and the Lacedaemonians concurred. We do not know enough about the general understandings of people in that time to be dogmatic about the rights and wrongs of particular cases. Indeed, the grayness of this whole area is well indicated by some of the argumentation presented by Thucydides in the Corcyraean Debate (1.32ff.)

The legal situation is murky, since a problem of the type presented by the Corcyraean bid for an Athenian alliance had obviously not been envisaged in 446/5. Corcyra was at war with Corinth when she appealed for assistance from the Athenians and received it; the predictable result was that Athens was led to do battle with a signatory of the peace. It is clear from the debate, however, that no one understood the "legal" implications of what was contemplated.^[84] The Corcyraeans pointed out that, technically, the proposed alliance was not an infraction of the treaty (1.35.1). But they also made the argument that any Athenians who were fearful that the alliance would break the treaty should recognize that the real issue was to secure as much support as possible for a contingency that was no longer in doubt: the war was all but upon them (36.1).^[85] The Corinthians, for their part, maintained that the neutrality clause in the treaty was assuredly not inserted so that alliance with a neutral power would contribute to the injury of a signatory (40.2). Finally, the Athenians themselves made their decision, after prolonged consideration, making their choice, as it were, with their fingers crossed. They formed a purely defensive alliance, perhaps justifying this bond by their avoidance of one even closer, an offensive-defensive alliance. But the basis of their decision was not that it was consistent with

the treaty or juridically proper but that the war was coming anyhow and Corcyra was too good an ally to lose (44.2). The legal aspect of this transaction, in fact, was so very unclear that the Corinthians did not know, after the battle of Sybota, whether or not the peace had been violated because of their combat with the Athenians (52.3), though they assumed the worst (53.1).

The Athenian conviction, in the summer of 433, that war was inevitable is probably the best explanation for its having occurred. When a city-state or nation decides that war is unavoidable (and winnable), there is a natural disinclination to pursue "sweet reasonableness" in the spirit of compromise and a corresponding tendency to unqualifiedly aggressive behavior that becomes provocative in its own right. Though the border dispute with Megara and the death of the herald Anthemocritus,^[86] for example, were inciteful incidents, the Athenians intemperately and extravagantly made a great issue of them. The retaliation against Megara was out of all proportion to the affront (of which we hear only one side). But if that was the aitia for Athens's retaliative action, surely the "truest cause" of it was Athenian detestation and hatred of this neighboring state. We tend to regard such measures with the presumption that behavior of this type served a rational and logical purpose, though it is hard to discover it here, and in spite of the fact that the premise of rationality is constantly belied by the phenomena of our daily world. Megara and Athens had been neighbors at war with each other off and on for centuries. They were of different ethnic stock, possessed mutually antipathetic governments and were trading competitors. It requires no demonstration that, historically, near neighbors acquire intense mutual animosity if they compete against each other. Was Periclean Athens then incapable of a spiteful act? If war were coming anyhow, such hostility might easily be indulged—and become provocative of the coming war.

The most interesting question, therefore, is why the Athenians believed in the war's inevitability. The explanation that best suits is precisely the one Thucydides assigns as the cause of the war: Spartan fear of Athenian expansion. Pericles recognized, or believed, that a parlous future lay in store for Athens. It was not merely that Athens was surrounded by ancestral enemies on all sides or that her hold on the empire had to be maintained in the face of the "reactionaries" in Greece

and elsewhere, who were only waiting for Athens to display a sign of weakness before actively promoting revolts. These difficulties the Athenians could meet—if they were prepared to rest satisfied with the status quo; and, as Thucydides notes, they possessed in the Spartans a convenient enemy, unimaginative and slow to attack. But the Athenians, if they have been characterized correctly, were unwilling and unable to remain confined, as they felt they were, by the terms of the peace of 446/5, or rather by those terms in logical extension. Now that the Athenians had pushed their way to the eastern frontier, it was time for them to consider possibilities in the west. The Corcyraeans' allusion to the excellence of their island as a springboard to Italy and Sicily (Thuc. 1.44.3) is as revelatory of Athenian aims as is the framework of alliances Athens had begun to build in 433/2 with Rhegion and Leontinoi.^[87] That the Athenians contemplated the expansion of their power into the west is intrinsically likely and thoroughly in character. The unrelenting opposition of Corinth would follow as a matter of course. But Spartan fear and malevolence were equally certain. The Lacedaemonians would inevitably have felt threatened by such encirclement and would have had to oppose it by force if only to maintain their own alliance intact. Pushed to the wall, they would have had to invade Attica when their allies or the allies of their allies, Syracuse, for example, fell under Athenian attack. Athens, therefore, must either reconcile herself to the status quo of 446 or prepare for the eventual outbreak of war with the Spartans. In Pericles' opinion, Athens would never be better equipped, relatively to the Spartans and their allies, to wage such a war effectively (Thuc. 1.140–44). In that conviction, though not bellicose in the extreme, Pericles pursued a policy that implied no compromise, and he proceeded to alliance with Corcyra and the repression of Potidaea, essentially leaving it to the Lacedaemonians to determine whether such acts qualified as causes of war. To Sparta, meanwhile, it had become obvious that the Peloponnesian League would not survive further pressure and peacetime attrition. The Spartans, too, looked to the future and were afraid of the consequences if the Athenians were allowed to continue unchecked. The "inevitable" result was the Peloponnesian War.