From Solon to Socrates by Ehrenberg V.;

Author:Ehrenberg, V.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1694384
Publisher: Routledge

VII

THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

The period from 431 – with the preliminaries of 433–432 – till 404, though divided into several periods of war and peace, was first recognized as a unity by the great contemporary historian of the war, Thucydides son of Olorus. He is by far our most important source. His theme is the war, and the war only, though we get a few glimpses of the social, economic, and spiritual background; naturally the description of the war is as much a piece of political as of military history; in fact, Thucydides was chiefly interested in the nature of political and military leadership. His work, ending in 411, was continued in the Hellenika of several writers, of which only Xenophon’s book survives. Other sources come into their own, above all inscriptions, but also comedy and tragedy, and the earliest extant prose book, the so-called ‘Old Oligarch’, a pamphlet on The State of Athens, preserved among the writings of Xenophon, but probably written in the early years of the war.1 In addition there are several speeches by orators such as Antiphon, Andocides, and Lysias.

Thucydides (1,1) calls his subject, which he considers the greatest war ever fought by Greeks or even non-Greeks, ‘the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians’, or that ‘of the Athenians and Peloponnesians’ (2,1); with slight variations this remained for a long time the name given to the war. Seen from the Athenian side, it was ‘the war against the Peloponnesians’ (e.g. Ar. Ach. 620, 623. AP 27, 2), while the other side could speak of the ‘Attic war’ (Thuc. 5, 31,3.5), and the Argives (5,28,2) discussed the approaching ‘war of the Lacedaemonians’. These and other examples show that there was no fixed name, until much later it became the ‘Peloponnesian war’.1a The one remarkable thing about these variations is that, with two exceptions,2 the war was never named after Sparta, rather after the Peloponnesian League, and this in spite of the fact that later some Peloponnesians actually fought on the Athenian side. It seems obvious that it was never a ‘Spartan war, whereas nobody was ever in doubt that, seen from the Peloponnesian side, it was an Athenian war. In this contrast, the differing characters of the Peloponnesian League and the Athenian rule are clearly reflected, and indirecdy the role of Corinth and other allies of Sparta is indicated.

It is an outcome of later ancient scholarship that the ‘Peloponnesian war’ became the usual name for the war from 431 to 404. We cannot say how and why that happened, though it reveals the predominance of the Athenian point of view. It is surprising that modern historians accepted the name without questioning or doubt.3 Now, of course, it is established for all time.

In a famous chapter Thucydides (1, 23, 5) distinguishes ‘the truest cause’ of the war from the more immediate ‘grievances and conflicts’.4 The former, as already mentioned, is Sparta’s fear of the growing power of Athens, a fear to some extent deliberately fostered by Athens herself. To the other reasons we now turn.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.