Lack of Communication/Assumptions Lead to War

Aside from the disastrous and questionable Syracuse Expedition, something that caught my eye was how the fragile peace that was the Fifty Year Peace came to an abrupt end because of the assumption of several city-states (not to mention their lack of communication). Sure the Spartans kind of messed up by not being able to immediately meet their side of the peace treaty, and sure they panicked and rushed into an alliance with Boeotia(who are just really really crappy people), but wow do things spiral out of control really fast. Then the Argives assumed it was about to go down and just sent things into a spiral. However, it seems like this always happens. Look at World War I. Or the Cold War. Look at how assumptions and lack of communication turned both those conflicts deadly (and in the case of the Cold War, nearly thermonuclear). Is this just human nature?

Why did Athens care so much about Sicily?

It seems like Athens was pouring resources into a war in Sicily that was far from a guaranteed win.  (I believe Thucydides said they sent 80 ships to it.)  At first glance this just seemed stupid to me.  Why, when you are already fighting a multiple front war and you know that you may have to start fighting on several more fronts very soon, would you add another front.  The humanitarian cause of helping one of your colonies that isn't even that integrated into your empire might make sense in peace time, but it clearly doesn't make sense when you fighting Corinth and other states in main land Greece.  The idea of expanding the empire was the only thing that made sense to me, but there are much better times to expand your empire especially when you have to maintain a long sea based supply line passing by waters right by states you are warring against.  This still didn't make sense to me, then I remembered Rome's servile wars.  The first two were both in Sicily.  They were put down fairly easily, but I'm pretty sure they were important for 2 reasons: 1) Rome doesn't want the slave revolt expanding as it ended up doing in the 3rd servile war and 2) I'm pretty sure Sicily was a major grain producer.  Rome (the city and empire) was essentially dependent upon Sicily and Northern Africa (including Egypt) for its massive grain consumption.  I think that Athens wanted to secure a grain supply that was independent of mainland Greece and wasn't going to be easily tampered with by the Persians who controlled Egypt and could have cut off any grain supply from the black sea region by conquering the land on both sides of either of straits going into the black sea.  The only remaining grain sources were Sicily and the land around Carthage.  It couldn't take Carthage and Carthage could probably charge through the roof for its grain when trading with Athens.  That just left Sicily.  That is the only reason I can think of for why they devote so much of its resources to fighting in Sicily when they weren't entirely secure in mainland Greece.

Something that I found interesting in the reading was the interaction between diplomats and the opposing countries. The fact that the Spartan King complained that he could not get the same answer out of two Athenian diplomats. Or the fact that when the Spartan diplomats attempted to negotiate a peace treaty in private, Cleon berated them for not wanting to negotiate in front of the entire Athenian Assembly. We started to talk about it last time we met, how because of the lack of instant communication at the time that diplomats wielded significantly more power and authority than they do today, and I think that both of these examples signifies that.

The Cost of War

Every war costs money.  (We saw the ridiculous sizes of the tributes of the Delian league.) Every war also has potential benefits, but modern wars tend to be wars of long term political or economic benefit.  Many ancient wars of conquest paid for themselves with the goods they seized.  What I'm wondering is if this war offered a real chance at immediate profit (especially for Athens) or if it was mostly a long term political and economic investment.  Eliminating any real rivals would make Athens THE powerhouse of the region and guarantee growth to its pseudo-empire, so it definitely holds long term benefits, but was there any real chance for short term financial benefits too.

Also it doesn't seem like it was that big of a risk for Athens to attack the Spartans that they were sieging, especially for Cleon.  It seems like the benefits of controlling the area would have outweighed the possible loss of a bunch of men with slings and arrows.  If the win either they kill the Spartans or the Spartans surrender.  Either way the idea of the Spartan as an invincible warrior is gone.  If they lose, they lose a bunch of soldiers that if they put out of the battle field against a Spartan lead army back in mainland Greece would have been demolished.  Then they can just continue the siege, and they have lost what honestly in the scope of this war matters very little.  It seems like it was just win or stagnate.  

Was the Athenian Plague Ebola?

The plague that Thucydides describes that hit Athens while it was besieged by Sparta sounds eerily like ebola. He says that at first victims would have "violent heats in the head", redness in the eyes, and that the internal organs such as the throat or tongue, would become bloody and start to smell. The "violent heats in the head" are presumably fevers but Thucydides states that the body was hot to the touch. The person would then start coughing and would experience nausea and violent spasms. The skin would then become reddish, livid, and covered in ulcers. The majority of people struck by the plague died on the seventh or eighth day. While these are only the general symptoms which I have stated, the rest can be found in Section 2.48. The interesting part is that Thucydides even points out that the plague originated in Africa. The plague killed off the majority of the physicians that were trying to help people yet contained itself within Athens for the most part. This shows that the disease could only be transmitted by contact with the sick. While Thucydides' descriptions are fairly vague, when I looked into the signs and symptoms that he described, it sounds a great deal like the virus that is currently making its way through west Africa. Below are links to an article about this topic from the New York Times and a description of the symptoms of ebola from the Mayo Clinic website. I'm curious if this is true or not.

http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/ebola-virus/basics/symptoms/con-20031241

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/18/weekinreview/was-the-plague-of-athens-really-ebola.html

Athens' Mercenary Military

I just wanted to bring attention to something that I thought was an interesting fact raised by Thucydides in what almost seemed like a throw away line.  He very quickly mentions that most of Athens' military power was mercenary.  I just think that it is interesting that they were able to maintain control of the Delian League as an empire without even really using its own sailors.  The fact that it not only controlled a large fleet that the other nations were paying for, but that it maintained a large fleet that was only loyal to Athens because of the money it was giving them, not because of their alliance to their city-state.  I didn't see any explanation of how they did this, but I'm guessing that there was political manipulation of some type like Athens providing the triremes, but using the Delian treasury to pay for mercenaries and making sure that all of the ships have people from a mixture of different city-states or possibly they maintained one of the largest single navies and because of that any resistance even by the much larger foreign navies would have to be well organized (although I think the previous reading said Samos had the single largest navy, so I doubt that that would be the whole explanation,) or maybe Athens' economy was simply large enough to dominate the mercenary business even if some of the states rebelled, and then it just used all of the other incomes to solidify its holdings.  The main thing that I find interesting about this is even without a huge military how did Athens rise from being some of the main leaders of this league (even the undisputed single most important state) to the leader of the this league.  How without a huge military did it rise from being first among equals to the center of an empire.

Peloponnesian War vs World War I

I just wanted to mention something that is bugging me about Thucydides. When they're discussing the conflict with Corcyra and Corinth it reminded me a lot about World War I. The entire Greek world is dragged into a conflict that only involved Corinth and a troublesome colony. While it does not exactly match up with World War I, the fact that all of these other city-states enter into this conflict due to a system of alliances seemed very similar. I also found it interesting how Corcyra believed that an Athenian-Spartan conflict was inevitable, which is the way that most historians viewed World War I.

The Comic Shiv

We got a bit of a laugh last time out of the Old Oligarch's seemingly petty complaint that the comedians only satirized the wealthy, and left alone the ignorant rabble that he felt was the true source of Athens' misfortunes.  It's like someone nowadays complaining that Jon Stewart only goes after the hypocrisy of prominent politicians.  Satire works best when aimed at the privileged and powerful.

But keep in mind the power of the theater in Athens.  It's estimated the main amphitheater had seating for 17,000, which was almost triple what the Assembly probably held -- it's likely that a majority of the voting citizenry was on hand to see the comedies at the Dionysia Festival, making it perhaps the main democratic event during the entire year.  And if you recall from reading the Apology in Western Civ., one of Socrates/Plato's points is that the jury has become biased against him by the comedies of Aristophanes (the Clouds in particular).

Not this week, but the week following, when we do the Mytilenian debate and the Athenian victory over Sparta at Pylos, I may bring in some selections from Aristophanes' Knights.  The Knights was the first comedy devoted to savaging a particular individual, in this case Cleon, who was representative of the new style of politician in post-Periclean Athens (the demagogue), and consistently advocated for a hard-line pro-war policy.  It's funny as hell, and essential reading for getting at the political and cultural mood in Athens in the 420s.

Imagining One's Own Non-Existence

I want to bring up a point that I think I mentioned in passing when we read the first part of Book I of the Peloponnesian War in Western Civ. I.  It has to do with  I.10.1-2, where Thucydides, reviewing the evidence for why the Trojan War is ultimately not comparable in magnitude to the Peloponnesian War, notes that the size and layout of a city is not necessarily the best predictor of its military power and political influence.  As a kind of thought experiment, he asks the reader to imagine Sparta or Athens desolate and abandoned, with only the temples and foundations of buildings bearing witness that there once existed a city and a people on this spot.  Future generations would never believe that such a modest locale -- in the case of Sparta -- would ever have been able to dominate the Hellenic World as they did.  He is clearly thinking of the ruins of Mycenae (which he mentions at the beginning of the passage), and those among his contemporaries who must have surveyed the palace grounds and tried to imagine the great Achaean host described in Homer commanded by such a modest state.

It's easy to skip over what Thucydides has just done here, since it has become (for the most part) a conventional way of thinking for us.  Quite simply, he has just imagined the non-existence of his own civilization.  He projects himself into a possible future where all that will remain of Athens are the crumbling columns of the Acropolis, with the living memory of the city now extinguished, leaving people to wonder what mighty civilization had erected itself on those foundations.

Thucydides' ability to entertain the death of his own civilization represents, for me, an incredible leap forward in human self-consciousness, and yet another reason why the Greeks are so fascinating.  As culturally chauvinist as the Greeks could sometimes be, they (taking Thucydides as representative for the moment) also had an incredible sense of their own contingency in the grand scheme of things.  They did not see themselves as the hinge on which the door of the universe swung.

You could make an argument that a similar sense of humility also pervades the Hebrew prophetic tradition, through which the Ancient Jews -- having elevated the divine omnipotence to such a remarkable degree, and understanding their own election as essentially a matter of divine caprice -- are constantly confronted with the possibility (or even fact) of their own precipitous downfall.  But to even the most caustic denouncements of Jewish betrayal of the Covenant there is always appended the possibility of redemption and restoration, and a future where his people will in some fashion return to the center of history.  This is especially true once we get to the Messianic tradition.

Historical memory and the historian's craft will be a constant theme as we move through the various writers of Antiquity.  Keeping all of this in mind, for our next meeting to discuss Book 1 and the first part of Book 2 think about what Thucydides sees as the purpose of history, and also the duty/obligation/method of the historian who recounts it.

Plus ça change...

The Athenian speech to the Peloponnesian allies assembled at Sparta (I.73-78) is a tour de force of Realpolitik.  We will definitely spend some time on it next class.  Since one of you is currently reading (and two of you have already read) Hobbes' Leviathan in Western Civ., I thought I would just note the almost exact correspondence between the Athenian list of reasons for pursuing empire, and Hobbes' natural causes for the State of Warre existing prior to the establishment of a sovereign power.  On Athens' side we have fear, honor and interest; on Hobbes' we have Competition, Diffidence and Glory, which aim for Gain, Safety and Reputation, respectively.