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.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
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.
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I've always found the Pylos account a bit odd because of the way Thucydides introduces it, suggesting that the Athenians kind of stumbled blindly into a piece of good fortune, while the Spartans, in keeping with their overly-cautious character, seriously miscalculated and lost an opportunity to avoid the whole debacle. We'll look at the episode in Thucydides first. But I'm also considering getting deeper into the episode through Aristophanes' play the Knights, which is a merciless attack on Cleon. Cleon's victory at Pylos, which made his reputation in Athens (at least according to Thucydides' account), actually becomes one of the main points of attack for Aristophanes on his character.
ReplyDeleteThe war financing issue is obviously complex, and we can certainly talk more about it. I will just note that we will also get a chance to look at it at the micro-level when we get to Xenophon's Anabasis, which has a wealth of detail about how a victorious army converts its loot into cash.
Thucydides information on war financing is frustratingly sparse. The longest sustained discussion is in Pericles' speech at the beginning of the war at II.13. But there are scattered remarks throughout the rest of the work that are sometimes unclear as to whether they present a picture of financial stability or financial strain, as for example, 3.17 and 3.19.
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