1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Sonderdruck aus Georg Rechenauer / Vassiliki Pothou (eds.) Thucydides – a violent teacher? History and its representations V&R unipress ISBN 978-3-89971-613-9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Contents Georg Rechenauer and Vassiliki Pothou Prologos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Peter J. Rhodes Biaios Didaskalos? Thucydides and his Lessons for his Readers . . . . . . 17 Hans-Peter Stahl War in Thucydides: Veneer Remover – Veneer Fabricator . . . . . . . . . 29 Antonios Rengakos Narrative and History : the Case of Thucydides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Suzanne Said Reading Thucydides’ Archaeology against the Background of Herodotus’ Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Jonathan J. Price Josephus’ Reading of Thucydides: A Test Case in the Bellum Iudaicum . . 79 Jeffrey Rusten Four Ways to hate Corcyra: Thucydides I 24 – 55 against the Background of Odyssey 13, Herodotus III 48 – 53, and VII 168 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Paula Debnar Rhetoric and Character in the Corcyra Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 June W. Allison Thucydides on Delium: War without Borders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 6 Contents Thomas Poschenrieder Material Constraints in Thucydides’ Representation of History . . . . . . 145 Roberto Nicolai Logos Didaskalos: Direct Speech as a Critical Tool in Thucydides . . . . . 159 Antonis Tsakmakis and Yannis Kostopoulos Cleon’s Imposition on his Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Nino Luraghi Thucydides and Spartan Power in the Archaeology and beyond . . . . . . 185 Darien Shanske Thucydides and Lawfulness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Emmanuel Golfin Reflections on the Causes of Evil in Thucydides’ Work . . . . . . . . . . 213 Georg Rechenauer Polis nosousa: Politics and Disease in Thucydides – the Case of the Plague . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Vassiliki Pothou Paralogos Polemos: Irrationality and War in Thucydides Bibliography . . . . . . . . . 261 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 Index of Passages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 Index of Names and Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329 Nino Luraghi Thucydides and Spartan Power in the Archaeology and beyond* Even though, unlike Herodotus, Thucydides did not approach Sparta as an ethnographic case-study, nor spent most of his adult life among the Spartans like Xenophon, his work is clearly one of the richest sources for various aspects of Spartan history and institutions. A recent survey by Paula Debnar and Paul Cartledge offers an impressive overview of the many ways in which Sparta features in Thucydides’ work, a subject “almost coextensive with the History as such”, as they observe. Towards the end of their contribution, Debnar and Cartledge approach cautiously the problem of how we should characterize Thucydides’ attitude to Sparta (Cartledge & Debnar [2006] 585 – 587). In a book that boasts the most successful title a book on Sparta ever carried, FranÅois Ollier called Thucydides a “laconisant”, numbering him among those Athenian intellectuals who, while perhaps not believing like the Old Oligarch that Sparta was the place where society actually worked the way it is supposed to, still harbored a deep admiration for Athens’ valiant rival.1 In 1943, in Belgium occupied by the Germans, Paul Cloch! took it upon himself to revise Ollier’s conclusions. After considering the Thucydidean passages which implied a positive judgment of Sparta, Cloch! mustered an impressive collection of examples of reproachable behavior on the part of single Spartiates or of the polis as a whole. His conclusion was that Thucydides, by all impartiality, could not really admire the city that had destroyed the Athenian Empire, the creation of the political leaders he most idealized. Furthermore, the brilliant and cultivated Athenian could not like a city * This is a slightly revised and annotated version of the paper presented at the Regensburg conference. I wish to thank very warmly the organizers Vassiliki Pothou and Georg Rechenauer for inviting me to participate to what seemed to me a most pleasant and successful event, and Jeff Rusten for generously accepting to read and comment upon various versions of this paper. 1 See Ollier (1933) 149 – 159. Ollier however saw Thucydides not as a true “Spartanophile” like Cimon; rather, he calls him a “liberal aristocrat”, whose dream was a peaceful cohabitation of Sparta and Athens. In other words, Ollier does not align Thucydides with Xenophon and Critias, as Cartledge & Debnar (2006) 585 imply. 186 Nino Luraghi that stood for narrow-minded backwardness (Cloch! [1943] 112 – 113). Debnar and Cartledge, while also qualifying Ollier’s position, take a nuanced approach. They recognize that in some cases Thucydides may have ended up under the spell of the Spartan mirage, intentionally or unintentionally conveying a positive image of the Spartiates that was in part a product of their own propaganda and in part a result of the admiration for Sparta of certain Athenians.2 However, as they point out (Cartledge & Debnar [2006] 568 and 585 – 586), Thucydides also tried hard to penetrate beyond the surface, aiming at a more precise understanding of Spartan power, and complaining that Spartan state-implemented secrecy posed an obstacle to his endeavor. In the present paper, I will try and develop this observation. After considering a passage in which the question of Thucydides’ attitude to the Spartan mirage comes to the fore in a particularly direct and striking way, I will move on to look at the role of Spartan power in Thucydides’ reconstruction of early Greek history, and finally to some observations on his take on a particularly telling moment, the crisis of the Peloponnesian League after the Peace of Nicias. My aim is to offer an admittedly modest contribution to an assessment of Thucydides’ understanding and interpretation of the historical phenomenon of Spartan hegemony and of its foundations. Keeping in mind that any selection may be regarded as misleading, we will start our discussion with a passage that is perhaps less often cited than others – although it did not escape Ollier’s and Cloch!’s painstaking investigation.3 In Book VIII, when Chios has finally decided to secede from Athens and an Athenian force is ravaging the island, Thucydides observes that the wealth of the island derived from the fact that, since the Persian Wars, it had never been invaded. He then formulates the following statement (Thuc. VIII 24): “For among those I have had knowledge of, the Chians are the only ones, after the Lacedaemonians, who have preserved moderation (syvqos¼mg) in prosperity, and in proportion as their city has gained in power have gained also in the stability of their government. In this revolt they may seem to have shown a want of prudence, yet they did not venture upon it until many brave allies were ready to share the peril with them, and until the Athenians themselves seemed to confess that after their calamity in Sicily the state of their affairs was hopelessly bad. And, if they were deceived through the uncertainty of human things, this error of judgment was common to many who, like them, believed that the Athenian power would speedily be overthrown.” (Transl. B. Jowett) Of course, this is not a direct judgment on Sparta, and it needs careful unraveling. On one level, it is an appreciation of the stunning resilience of the 2 Cartledge & Debnar (2006) 585, ending up more or less on the same line as Ollier (1933) 158. 3 See Ollier (1933) 158 and Cloch! (1943) 83. Interestingly, Ollier remarks that Thucydides’ praise of Sparta in this passage sounds excessive. Thucydides and Spartan Power in the Archaeology and beyond 187 Athenians, who, against all odds and expectations, went on fighting for a decade after the disaster in Sicily. Chios’ revolt was perhaps a mistake, but not a careless blunder, and it did not diminish Thucydides’ positive assessment of their character, which seems to derive essentially from their ability to avoid overreaching in consequence of success. The Chians had been able to turn their power and prosperity into a stabilizing factor, and in this consists their syvqos¼mg, the category in which they came in a close second after the Spartans.4 Sparta’s excellence in dealing with success resonates with the words of king Archidamos in his famous speech in Book I. Here, the praise of the Spartan character refers precisely to their syvqos¼mg, which is among other things the foundation of their ability to face victory and defeat with the same equanimity (I 84).5 Of course, the striking point is that in the passage we have been looking at the same praise, that we would be inclined to classify as an expression of Laconizing rhetoric, is pronounced by the author in his own voice. Has Thucydides suddenly turned into a Spartan propagandist? Or is he just echoing the selfimage of the Spartans without much thought? Neither of these conclusions seems particularly attractive: Thucydides is not Xenophon after all. Perhaps the views that underpin this passage were just commonsensical in late-fifth century Greece. But what exactly would this imply for his understanding of Spartan power? Arguably the crucial passage in this respect is a famous aside from the Archaeology, embedded in a sentence in which Thucydides is ostensibly explaining the disappearance of tyranny from mainland Greece. The Spartans, on the strength of their four hundred years of good laws, were never subject to tyranny, and were able to take upon themselves the task of putting down tyrants in the other cities (I 18, 1). Even though in this passage Thucydides’ silence on the name of the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus may be taken as a sign of cautious skepticism,6 by and large this aside reflects the Spartans’ own image of their distant past. Especially the idea that Spartan eqmol¸a had been preceded by a very long period of political chaos and had come about all at once in the very distant past, clearly mirrors the collective memory of a society that banned 4 On the relations between Chios and Athens before and during the Peloponnesian War, see Quinn (1981) 39 – 49, Barron (1986) and Pi!rart (1995) 262 – 267. The other resemblance between Chios and Sparta that Thucydides points out has to do with the very high number of slaves in both poleis, on which I may be allowed to refer to Luraghi (2009) 268 – 270. The comparison between Sparta and Chios is discussed in Leppin (1999) 170 – 179. 5 On Archidamos’ speech (Thuc. I 80 – 85), see especially Crane (1998) 199 – 211 and Debnar (2001) 66 – 69. 6 As suggested by Cartledge & Debnar (2006) 585; for a different explanation, pointing to the general absence of individuals in the post-mythic part of the Archaeology, see Paradiso (1994 – 1995) 155 – 156. 188 Nino Luraghi social and political change as a bringer of disaster.7 We find a very similar picture in a passage of Herodotus (I 65), and it is clear that both historians reproduce the same Spartan views of history : the insistence on the extreme political disorder that preceded the reform is clearly a cautionary tale about the dangers of departing from total obedience to the present order.8 For Thucydides, however, constitutional stability turns out to be the secret of Spartan power, that which makes it possible for the Spartans to intervene in other cities and regulate their political situation, or, as Thucydides more explicitly puts it in another passage a few lines further, to make sure that their allies would be ruled by oligarchies in the interest of the Spartans (I 19). This all sounds quite straightforward, until we turn to the broader context in which this passage appears, that is, Thucydides’ reconstruction of the growth of wealth and power in early Greece in the Archaeology. The Archaeology famously starts as an explanation of why in the past no concentration of power could have arisen in the Greek world that could in turn have brought about a war of the magnitude of the Peloponnesian War, which was therefore, as Thucydides claimed, the most noteworthy war ever seen by the Greeks. As Jacqueline de Romilly’s classic analysis shows, Thucydides at the same time lays out in general terms the foundations for the emergence of hegemony itself. Economic growth, fuelled mainly by land and sea trade, brings to the accumulation of wealth, which in turn makes it possible to acquire a fleet. A necessary presupposition for this mechanism is stability, both in terms of security of trade, and therefore elimination or containment of piracy, and in terms of protection for the city itself, which is guaranteed by fortification walls, which are in their turn a product of the accumulation of wealth. The availability of wealth, a fleet, and fortification walls make a city strong and allow it to gather other cities around itself, offering them protection. This is the mechanism that creates power, the domination of one political community over another.9 As de Romilly (1956a) herself points out (p. 366), this theory is geared towards explaining the emergence of the Athenian empire. When Sparta suddenly pops up in the chapter we are looking at, new factors and mechanisms are brought into play, whose origins and nature had not been introduced in the previous part of the Archaeology. Spartan ascendancy appears as a foreign object in Thucydides’ anthropology of power, and the reader has not been prepared to understand 7 The Spartans’ collective memory belonged to the cold kind of Jan Assmann’s typology ; see Assmann (1992) 68 – 70. 8 For a detailed discussion of Thuc. I 18 and its relationship to Herodotus and to Spartan collective memory, see Paradiso (1994 – 1995) 151 – 156 and (1995). 9 On the Archaeology in general, see de Romilly (1956a) 240 – 298; on the mechanisms that generate power, see esp. 260 – 273, and the brilliant analysis of Kallet-Marx (1993) 21 – 35. Thucydides and Spartan Power in the Archaeology and beyond 189 it.10 Cartledge and Debnar conclude that here Thucydides bought into the Spartan mirage, to the point of repeating an image of social and constitutional immutability that he himself would have been in a position to challenge based on his own knowledge of Spartan history (Cartledge & Debnar [2006] 585). And yet, much as the seductive power of the Spartan mirage can hardly be overestimated, there may be an alternative to concluding that here Thucydides is, perhaps unwittingly, departing from the very logic of his reconstruction. Such a possible alternative is actually pointed to by Cartledge and Debnar themselves, where they observe how surprisingly often the Spartans are depicted by Thucydides as receiving more or less unsolicited advice from their allies, or as caving in to their requests: as they put it, “the Spartans’ vulnerability to pressure from their allies” (Cartledge & Debnar [2006] 563). Thucydides may have had a more realistic view of the foundations and limits of Spartan power than we might have thought at first sight. As a line of approach, we may consider the series of snapshots of Athens and Sparta included in chapters 18 and 19. For Thucydides, tyrants were a factor of political weakness because they needed to concentrate their energies on preserving their own position and therefore could not promote the growth of the power of their cities (I 17).11 Athens appears to be dominated by such a regime, and it is Sparta that puts an end to it, thanks to its superior political arrangement (I 18, 1). Clearly, at this point Sparta is far more powerful than Athens. Sparta is still the most powerful of Greek cities at the time of the Second Persian War, or the Great Expedition as Thucydides calls it, and therefore it is the Spartans who lead the Greek alliance (I 18, 2). Soon thereafter, however, we learn that Sparta and Athens were the two most powerful Greek cities after the Persian Wars, the former dominating on land, the latter at sea (I 18, 2 – 3). Obviously, Athenian power has grown, since we have no reason to believe that Spartan power has shrunk. Finally, in a famously difficult sentence, Thucydides may be saying that on the eve of the Peloponnesian War Athens alone was more powerful than the whole anti-Persian coalition had been back then (I 19).12 Even leaving aside this last sentence, the picture we have is one of rather stable Spartan might, very high from early on, and of exponential growth of Athens, by way of the mechanisms 10 See especially de Romilly (1956a) 281 – 283, emphasizing how the growth of Spartan power is not really explained, and appears extraneous to the mechanisms Thucydides has been discussing up to that point; as she puts it (p. 281), “… the existence of Sparta is revealed suddenly in a parenthesis.” Similarly Kallet-Marx (1993) 32: “Sparta, however, does not fit into the same historical pattern”, the pattern being the way that growth of financial resources fuels naval power. 11 For an analysis of this chapter, see Täubler (1927) 81. 12 This how Hornblower I (1991) 56 takes the passage. For a lucid and even-handed discussion of the possible ways of understanding this sentence, see Jowett (1881) 24 – 25, complemented by Gomme I (1945) 133 – 134. 190 Nino Luraghi that Thucydides explained in general terms in the previous part of the Archaeology.13 Interestingly, this image chimes with a ‘Leitmotif ’ of Book I, that is, the idea that the war finally broke out because the Spartans convinced themselves that this was the last occasion to confront Athens on more or less equal footing, and if they waited any longer, then their competitors would grow too powerful. The notion is articulated forcefully by Thucydides in a famous passage at the very end of the proem (I 23, 5) and the insistence of the Corinthians, in their speeches to the Spartans (I 68 – 71), on the speed that characterizes the Athenians, contrasted with the dangerous slowness of the Spartans, reinforces the point.14 The implication could be that for Thucydides the difference in nature between Spartan and Athenian power ran so deep that it made no sense to try and work out a comprehensive explanation for the emergence of both. It is just possible to surmise that, in his view, Spartan power was not capable of growing indefinitely, since its goal was stability, not expansion. At the outbreak of the war, Sparta had more or less reached its peak, while the military capability of the Athenians kept expanding with the inflow of the tribute. Therefore, the process depicted in the Archaeology does indeed demonstrate what it is meant to demonstrate, in spite of focusing unilaterally on the mechanisms that explained the rise of Athens, because it was Athens’ combination of fleet and tribute, not Sparta’s indirect control of its recalcitrant allies,15 that made possible a concentration of resources capable of unleashing the greatest war ever waged by the Greeks. The recurrent difficulties that the Spartans have during the war in leading their allies in the direction they desire underline this fundamental difference. In order to beat Athens, as foreshadowed in king Archidamos’ speech (I 82), Sparta would need to generate the same sort of structures that underpinned Athenian sea-power, first of all a steady influx of resources, without which the upkeep of a large fleet was impossible. As for how realistic Archidamos’ prospects would have been – without Persian support, that is – a certain amount of skepticism seems in order. Thucydides may have thought, as many modern scholars do, that the Spartans in the end had to give up their very nature, concluding a veritable pact with the devil in order to find the resources they needed to defeat Athens. The corollary of this conclusion would be that Thucydides’ observations on Sparta in the Archaeology should not be seen as simply a way of including the Spartan mirage in his overview of early Greek history. Rather, the historian would be showing a sustained effort to understand and explain the specific 13 As Virginia Hunter (1981) aptly put it, “[b]rief as he is in chapter 19, Thucydides makes it clear that it is not the Lakedaimonians but the Athenians … who will attain a true arche …” (p. 30). 14 See especially Thuc. I 70 and the analysis of this speech in Debnar (2001) 35 – 47. 15 Note in I 19 the oxymoron BcoOmto … ¢eqape¼omter, pointed out to me by Jeff Rusten. Thucydides and Spartan Power in the Archaeology and beyond 191 nature of Spartan power and its implications in terms of growth and expansion, and his remarks on the Spartan eqmol¸a, formulaic as they may sound, would be part of an articulate and consistent assessment of the power of the Spartans and its limits, an assessment that runs through the whole of his work. One possible way of preliminarily testing this conclusion is to look at how Thucydides depicts the moment that arguably constituted the high point of the crisis of Spartan power, the years immediately after the Peace of Nicias and before the Athenian expedition to Sicily. Even the quickest summary of the intricate complex of diplomacy and war in Thucydides’ narrative of these years would require a paper in its own right.16 Dissatisfaction among many of the allies of Sparta for the conditions of the peace, combined with the prospect of the Argives becoming again an active factor in Peloponnesian power politics, triggered a series of highly unexpected developments, including a defensive alliance between Sparta and Athens and the Corinthians’ attempt at creating a network of alliances in the Peloponnese alternative to the one led by the Spartans. The Peloponnesian War as we knew it from the first four books seems to be over, and instead one has the impression of waking up in one of the central books of Xenophon’s Hellenica. This situation was the ultimate consequence of a complex of events, largely independent of one another, that had quickly converged in undermining the cohesion of the Peloponnesian League, that highly sophisticated system of alliances that formed the foundation of Spartan supremacy.17 In Thucydides’ rather laconic narrative, the center of the stage is initially occupied by the Corinthians, unhappy with the Peace of Nicias because Sparta had failed to press for their interests in the negotiations with Athens (V 30, 2). With a striking about-face, on their way back from Sparta, where they had refused to sign the peace treaty (V 22, 1), Corinthian ambassadors went straight to Argos (V 27, 1) and try to convince the Argives to spearhead an anti-Spartan alliance, especially since the thirty-year peace they had concluded with Sparta in 16 Seager (1976) is the standard reference on this. Hornblower III (2008) 41 – 215 offers illuminating discussions of many points and updated bibliography. 17 From the vantage point of the enormously increased understating of especially Elis and Arcadia made possible by the works of J. Roy and T. H. Nielsen, a reappraisal of the Peloponnesian League is an urgent desideratum. Recent attempts at down-dating aspects of it or reducing its importance, such as Yates (2005) and Bolmarcich (2005) and (2008), seem to me to fly in the face of the obvious success of Spartan politics in the fifth century. For all its bias and the fact that it probably exaggerates Spartan domination over the allies, de Ste. Croix’ discussion (1972) 101 – 124 is still preferable. Note that Bolmarcich (2008) discusses the date of the oath “to have the same friends and the same enemies as the Lacedaemonians and to follow the Lacedaemonians whithersoever they might lead” without considering the actual meaning of this formula (cf. de Ste. Croix [1972] 108 – 112), which seriously undermines her argument. 192 Nino Luraghi 451 BCE was about to expire. Meanwhile, Sparta’s other major ally, the Boeotians, elated by their crushing victory at Delion in 424 BCE, did not think that that was a good moment to interrupt hostilities against Athens. As far as they were concerned, Athens was a defeated enemy, and therefore they were not prepared to make concessions, as the Spartans asked them to. Consequently, the Boeotians signed a ten-day truce with Athens and kept renewing it, without joining the peace (V 26, 2). However, it soon becomes clear that there were problems of a different sort that created tensions between Sparta and some of its allies for reasons quite independent of the war with Athens. Shortly before the peace, with a spectacularly ill-advised move the Spartans had succeeded in alienating Elis, one of the key members of the Peloponnesian League and one of the most powerful poleis of the Peloponnese. For unclear reasons, the Spartans had intruded in the region that would later become Triphylia, a highly sensitive border area between the Eleians and their natural enemies the Arkadians, subtracting from Eleian control the polis of Lepreon. The Eleians reacted exploiting their control over the sanctuary of Olympia and meting out on the Spartans a fine of two thousand minae, payable to Olympian Zeus, for violating the sacred truce.18 Modern scholars have explained the Spartan initiative as a product of anxiety over the protection of the northern border of their territory, in connection with the destabilizing presence in Pylos of the Athenians and the Messenians of Naupaktos, or as a reaction to Elis’ strengthening its presence along the Spartan border by fortifying Phyrkos, probably located immediately to the north of the river Neda.19 Another aspect of the matter that should be considered is that Sparta’s prestige in the Peloponnese derived also from the fact that the Spartans were the natural port of call for smaller poleis in the region that were being threatened by more powerful neighbors. The Spartans’ strange attachment to Lepreon could be yet another example of a phenomenon clearly documented by the cases of Epidauros, Arkadian Orchomenos, and Phleious.20 And of course, 18 The story is told in Thuc. V 31, 2 – 5, in the context of the negotiations between Corinth, Elis and Argos in 421 BCE; see also V 34, 1. Further developments, including the Eleians’ accusation against the Spartans, are narrated in Thuc. V 49 – 50, summer of 420. For Elis’ manipulation of its control over Olympia in these circumstances, see Roy (1998) and Paradiso in Paradiso & Roy (2008) 27 – 29. For the resulting expulsion of the Spartans from the Olympic games and its actual duration, see Hornblower (2000). On how Lepreon had gone from participating in the Second Persian War as an independent polis to being under Elis’ rule, see Nielsen (2005) 60 – 74. 19 The first explanation is advanced by Falkner (1999), the second by Roy in Paradiso & Roy (2008) 31 – 34, who points to the illuminating parallel with Sparta’s intervention in Parrhasia, see below. Cf. however Roy (2009) 40: “… why Sparta became willing to help undermine Elis’ domination of its perioikoi is not clear …” 20 Both Phleious and Epidauros were drawn to Sparta by the threat of their powerful neighbor the Argives, and both proved extraordinarily loyal to Sparta, even in the crisis after Leuktra; see Pi!rart (2004a) 613 – 614 [Phleious] and (2004b) 27 – 30 [Epidauros]. Orchomenos was in Thucydides and Spartan Power in the Archaeology and beyond 193 in the historical circumstances of 421 there was another and even more obvious example, that of Mantineia and its neighbors. During the Archidamian War, the two most powerful Arkadian poleis, Tegea and Mantineia, had been developing their own local hegemonies within Arkadia at the expense of minor poleis and smaller ethnic federations like the Parrhasians and the Mainalians.21 For them, peace potentially meant the risk that their victims could turn to Sparta for help. The danger seemed particularly immediate to the Mantineians, also because – Thucydides points out – they were democratic and accordingly did not expect sympathy from the Spartans (V 29, 1). Interestingly, as soon as Mantineia joined the anti-Spartan coalition that was gathering around Corinth, and already included Argos and Elis, the Tegeans decided that it was in their best interest to remain with Sparta (V 32, 3 – 4). Their decision seemed to pay off once king Pleistoanax invaded Parrhasia and restored its independence from Mantineia (V 33, 1). These events offer precious evidence for the delicate balance of power that held together the Peloponnesian League, evidence that is comparable in terms of quantity and detail only to what we find in Xenophon’s narrative of the first decades of the fourth century. Thucydides’ summary depiction of the Spartan alliance as some sort of oligarchic international elsewhere in his work does not seem to account for what we see.22 Along the way, Mantineia at least had become democratic, not to mention Elis, which the sources suggest must have been a democracy from the first half of the century.23 Sparta’s ability to keep under one a similar position vis-"-vis Mantineia, and accordingly also particularly loyal to Sparta; see Nielsen (2002) 391 – 392. 21 For the regional hegemonies of Mantineia and Tegea, see Nielsen (2002) 366 – 372. On Mantineia’s expansionist aspirations in these years, as documented by its coin types, see Prezler (2009) 97 – 98. On the relations between Sparta and Mantineia, Funke (2009) 9 – 11. Note the indecisive battle between Mantineia and Tegea, with their respective allies, in 423 BCE, Thuc. IV 134, 1 – 2. 22 Thuc. I 19. The support of local oligarchies, which then supposedly became dependent on Spartan backing, is seen as a key factor by de Ste. Croix (1972) 98 – 99, who underestimates a priori the extension of democracy within the League. Yates (2005) 72 – 73 sees the support of friendly oligarchies as the main purpose of the proto-Peloponnesian League, i. e. of the Spartan alliances in existence before 451 BCE, while Bolmarcich (2005) thinks that the Spartans imposed oligarchies only on the poleis that became their allies following a defeat in war (but her translation of Thuc. I 19 is misleading, to»r null²wour is object of BcoOmto). The high chronology for the treaty between Sparta and Tegea, crucial to both Yates and Bolmarcich, continues to seem to me unlikely in the light of Polyaen. II 10, 3 (Nielsen [2002] 393 – 395; both Nielsen and Polyaenus escaped Yates and Bolmarcich, as did Moretti [1962] 46 – 49, who already made a strong case for the later date). 23 On the constitution of Elis during the fifth century, see Gehrke (1985) 52 – 53 and 366 – 367. In the end, Elis’ behavior, and especially the refusal of the Eleians to join the Mantineia campaign (Thuc. V 62), was dictated more by regional interests than by political affinities, which may explain Thucydides’ silence on the latter. Still, the fact that Elis was a democracy would 194 Nino Luraghi single flag poleis that were divided by obvious conflicts of interest and were often traditional enemies was nothing short of a diplomatic masterpiece. Elements of this masterpiece included making sure that the powerful Arkadian cities, whose hoplites in the fourth century formed something like one-fifth of the army of the League24, kept squabbling against each other and turning to Sparta for arbitration, rather than coalesce into a potentially anti-Spartan front as they finally did, if for a short while, at the time of Leuktra. With Corinth, the symbiosis was based on Sparta providing a disproportionate land army to the polis that for a long time represented the League’s arm at sea. As for Elis, the main item on the agenda was guaranteeing the Eleians unquestioned control over their perioikoi and keeping Arkadian encroachment at bay.25 Then there were smaller poleis like Sikyon, Phleious, or Epidauros, for whom the Spartans were an insurance against the expansive tendencies of Argos, and potentially also of Corinth. This conglomeration of particular interests made it possible for a very long time to dispense with the need of bringing Achaia stably into the Peloponnesian League – one could almost say that Achaia was more useful to Sparta outside the League than within it.26 In Thucydides’ narrative of the outbreak of the Archidamian War, the allies of Sparta mostly appeared as an undifferentiated whole, with only Corinth stepping forward to perform the very important function of bringing home to the Spartans the danger of Athenian expansionism. But with the Peace of Nicias it is as if suddenly the whole machine of the Peloponnesian League were cracked open and we could see its mechanisms. Thucydides provides an impressive amount of very detailed information. The question is, what is he trying to do with it, and how does he actually understand its implications. In terms of what they do and do not provide, the chapters that go from the beginning of Book V to the Melian Dialogue are peculiar in a number of respects. There are no speeches to speak of, but the highest density of documents reported verbatim anywhere in Thucydides, and possibly anywhere in any extant work of Greek historiography.27 Here we get one of the rare glimpses into a phenomenon 24 25 26 27 have complicated in an interesting way the issue of Sparta’s preference for oligarchies among its allies. Diod. XV 31, 2 (= 377/376 BCE). The Spartans were half as many, the Eleians likewise. On the perioikoi of Elis and their relationship to the Eleians, see Roy (1997) 282 – 299. On the relations between Achaia and Sparta, see Freitag (2009) 15 – 17. Apart from Pellene, which was already a member of the Peloponnesian League at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, the Achaeans appear to have joined the League only in 417 BCE. These peculiarities have been explained as signs that Thucydides could not give the finishing touches to this part of his work, or as intentional devices that convey his understanding of these events; in the state of the evidence, both approaches are in the end arbitrary. See the discussion of Rood (1998) 83 – 108, arguing for the latter approach but offering also comprehensive references, from Wilamowitz onwards, to scholarship that favors the former. Thucydides and Spartan Power in the Archaeology and beyond 195 many historians tend to postulate, the role of internal political arrangements for the foreign alignment of the single poleis: we learn that the alliance between Mantineia and Argos was cemented also by the fact that both were democratic (V 29, 1), and this in turn made the Thebans and the Megarians suspicious and was a factor in preventing them from joining the new alliance (V 31, 6). And yet, this train of thought is not pursued in a systematic fashion, and we hear nothing of the constitutional situation of Elis, which the sources suggest must have been a democracy at this point. Overall, the motives of the many actors that suddenly crowd the stage of Greek international politics are given desultory attention, with the result that in some cases, most notably that of Corinth, scholars are at a loss in reconstructing such motives in a convincing way.28 These chapters also provide striking insights in Spartan policy-making and military organization. We learn about the duplicitous diplomacy of the warlike ephors of 420/419, Kleoboulos and Xenares, and the Spartan war machine is shown at its best. Thucydides’ famous complaint against Spartan state-implemented secrecy (V 68, 2) paradoxically underscores the extensive discussion of tactical matters and military maneuvers that characterizes his narrative of king Agis’ invasion of the Argolis and then of the battle of Mantineia, both in 418/ 417 BCE. Lest we did not realize, the historian makes it absolutely clear that here he is describing the most significant land operations of the whole war. After the unexpected truce that saved the Argives from a desperate situation, the army led by king Agis is described as the finest Greek army ever seen (V 60, 3) – and here we may want to recall Ron Stroud’s attractive suggestion (1994: 291 – 292) that Thucydides may be speaking from first-hand experience. The battle of Mantineia on the other hand is said to have been by far the greatest of battles among Greeks which had taken place for a long time (V 74, 2). The greatest land battle in the greatest war the Greek world had ever seen! From a modern reader’s viewpoint, Thucydides’ insistence on the greatness of these events seems perfectly justifiable. Even though the historian does not remark explicitly upon this, at the battle of Mantineia the Spartans arguably came closer to a final defeat than on any other occasion during the whole war. If their army, supplemented by their remaining Arkadian allies, had been overcome by the Mantineians, Argives, and Athenians, the position of the Spartans would have become highly critical, maybe desperate. And yet, contrary to what we might think, Thucydides’ insistence on the magnitude of the campaign of 418/417 seems to be intended to convey, not the acute danger that Sparta was 28 For discussions of Corinthian motivations in the aftermath of the peace of Nicias, cf. Seager (1976) 254 – 255 (note especially “Corinth’s conduct is curious”, at 254) and Salmon (1984) 325 – 326, with further references. Note also Stroud (1994) 287 – 289, with interesting observations on Thucydides’ perspective on these events. 196 Nino Luraghi exposed to on that occasion, but the power of the Spartan war machine. The campaign shows what the Peloponnesian armies were capable of. Even though Thucydides here exposes the potential fragility of the Peloponnesian League, he does not appear to be really interested in pursuing the question of how it could have been possible for Athens to defeat Sparta by exploiting this fragility. In spite of the precision of his description, one cannot escape the impression that Thucydides thought that breaking apart the Peloponnesian League and hitting Sparta on her very turf was not a productive course of action for the Athenians. As an impressive confirmation of this, we may observe how Alcibiades’ plans in the Peloponnese are explained by Thucydides mostly in terms of (inappropriate) personal animosity at the Spartans, who had slighted him because of his young age (V 43, 2 – 3). Later, when Thucydides has Alcibiades boasting of the Mantineia campaign as his personal success, which had brought the Spartans to the brink and, in spite of their ultimate victory, made them permanently insecure (VI 16, 6), the historian makes it clear to the reader that he finds this claim preposterous.29 In Thucydides’ view, it seems, undermining Sparta’s hold over the Peloponnese was a futile course of action, the key point being that Athenian power grew by its very nature and Spartan power did not, so that ultimately for Athens the only thing that was necessary in order to win the war was to outlast Sparta. This was precisely Pericles’ strategy, which Thucydides explicitly approves of (II 65, 6 – 7), and this is why throughout his work he devotes so much space to discussing what was necessary for Athens to survive and what could bring Athens down, but not what would have been necessary for Athens to cut down Sparta. For him, the answer to this latter question was simple: Athens just needed to continue growing in power, as was in its nature. The growth of Athenian power followed the mechanism outlined in the Archaeology. To the extent that conclusions by implication can be trusted at all, it does seem that Thucydides’ approach to the Peloponnesian League in Book V confirms the observations on the place of Sparta in the Archaeology. The conflict between Athens and Sparta was one between a power that grew by its own nature, and ultimately could not survive without growing, and a power geared towards stability and unable to grow beyond a certain geographical boundary which it had already reached in the aftermath of the Persian Wars. There was no need for Athens to become Sparta in order to defeat Sparta, that is to say, there was no point in trying to turn Sparta’s system of alliances against the Spartans themselves or to mobilize the Argives, of whom Thucydides, as Simon Hornblower recently noticed (2006: 625 – 628), does not seem to have had a high opinion anyway. 29 See Hornblower III (2008) 347 – 348, who helpfully points to Thuc. V 75, 3, where Thucydides says in his own voice that the battle of Mantineia had actually restored Spartan confidence. Thucydides and Spartan Power in the Archaeology and beyond 197 Anybody who is familiar with modern scholarship on the Peloponnesian War can immediately notice the consequences of Thucydides’ approach in the comparative lack of attention precisely to those factors he did not consider important. Our problems with Corinth stem largely from there. As so often, Thucydides’ views, written into the narrative itself, have cast their spell on modern readers: it is striking that Argos’ role in the events after the Peace of Nicias, and during the fifth century more in general, has started being taken seriously only quite recently. 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