Athens in crisis: The Peloponnesian War and its

aftermath (431-399BCE)QUESTIONS:

1. How did Athens establish its leadership on the Aegean after the Persian Wars?

2. What were the main reasons behind the Peloponnesian wars (2)?

3. What main problem did the Athenians face during the siege of their city by

Sparta?

4. Describe the war strategies used by BOTH Athens AND Sparta.

5. What factors (2) led to the Athenian debacle in Sicily.

6. What city ultimately prevailed?

7. During his trial, what charges were brought against Socrates?

8. On what issue(s) did Socrates and his fellow Athenians disagree?

The Creation of the Delian League and Athenian Dominance

Athens had imposed its leadership over the Aegean world after the Persian Wars. The

city was still, despite the damage inflicted by the Persians, the largest polis in Greece. And the

Athenians could claim the right to lead the Greeks given the fact that they were the ones who

stopped the Persians at both Marathon and Salamis. Furthermore, they could also claim a

blood tie to the Greeks of Asia Minor since in origins they were all Ionian people. But in

reality there was a better reason why Athens wanted the leadership: food. By securing control

of the Aegean the Athenians would be able to control trade routes which were essential to feed

the enormous population of the city.

Two years after the Battle of Salamis, in 478 BCE, a number of delegates from the

Aegean islands and Ionia met with the Athenians on the island of Delos. There, they agreed to

a supposedly equal partnership to create a united navy to defend themselves from Persian

aggression. They called this the Delian League, after the island of Delos. Every state agreed

to contribute ships or money to create this navy, and the money was to be stored in a treasury

on Delos. Most of the islands could not afford to maintain and supply a navy and so they

contributed money. Athens would then take the money, build ships, hire rowers, and construct

an enormous fleet. With this massive fleet, they began to dominate the members of the Delian

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League, forcing them to pay yearly contributions whether they wanted to or not. Any island

that dared resist was crushed. The Delian League soon became an Athenian Empire. The

island of Melos refused to submit to Athenian rule and so the Athenians slaughtered every

single male of war age. The women and children were all sold into slavery. Of course, the

amazing thing in all this is that the Athenians claimed they were doing this to keep the Greeks

free from Persian rule… As Athens expanded in power through its sea power, its archrival

Sparta was starting to take a close look at the Delian League.

The Spartan Possibility

Most of the Greek states now believed that Sparta should assume the leadership against

a new Persian threat.  Why trust the Spartans? Spartans were conservative people who had

little interest in conquering the Aegean or creating any great empire. Their focus was their own

homeland, managing their own affairs, keeping the helots down, and security. This is why

many Greek states wanted the Spartans to take the leadership against the Persians. Most Greeks

felt (unless you lived in the Peloponnesus) that since the Spartans wanted nothing, had no

dreams of empire, that they could be trusted. This is when the Spartans decided to step up and

take charge.

The causes of the war

Conflict between the states flared up again in 465 BC, when a helot revolt broke out in

Sparta. The Spartans summoned forces from all their allies, including Athens, to help them

suppress the revolt. Athens sent out a sizable contingent, but upon its arrival, this force was

dismissed by the Spartans, while those of all the other allies were

permitted to remain. According to Thucydides, the Spartans acted in this

way out of fear that the Athenians would switch sides and support the

helots; the offended Athenians repudiated their alliance with Sparta.

When the rebellious helots were finally forced to surrender and

permitted to evacuate the country, the Athenians helped them to settle on

the strategic Corinthian Gulf.

Later on, the underlying causes of the war would be 1) Pericles’

desire to eliminate its last rival and 2) Sparta's fear of the growth of the power of Athens within

the Delian League. The whole history of the rise and power of Athens in the 50 years

preceding justifies this view. The very food supply of the Peloponnese and Sparta from Sicily

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was endangered by Athens’ monopoly on seaborne trade. To this extent, the Peloponnesian

War was a trade war. Let’s take a look at the strategies of both sides.

The strategies

Pericles’ strategy was simple. Since the Spartans

were such strong warriors, the idea was to avoid a

land battle. Instead, the Athenians’ goal was to take

advantage of their navy by building high, long walls

linking the Port of Athens (Piraeus) to Athens. This

way, the Athenians would be able to still get their

supplies in food and water from the sea in case of a

Spartan siege of the city. At the same time, the

Athenians would use their navy to raid the coast of the Peloponnese, and attack Sparta and its

allies. As foreseen by Pericles, Sparta used its military strength to launch repeated invasions of

Attica. The Spartan strategy was to invade and destroy the land surrounding Athens. While

this invasion deprived Athens of the productive land around their city, Athens itself was able to

maintain access to the sea, and did not suffer much. Many of the citizens of Attica abandoned

their farms and moved inside the long walls, which connected Athens to its port of Piraeus.

The Spartans also occupied Attica for periods of only three weeks at a time; in the tradition of

earlier hoplite warfare the soldiers expected to go home to participate in the harvest. Moreover,

Spartan helots needed to be kept under control, and could not be left unsupervised for long

periods of time. The longest Spartan invasion, in 430 BC, lasted just forty days.

The Athenian fleet, the most dominant in Greece, went on the offensive, winning

victories. In 430, however, an outbreak of a plague hit Athens. The plague ravaged the densely

packed city, and in the long run, was a significant cause of its final defeat. The plague wiped

out over 30,000 citizens, sailors and soldiers and even poor Pericles and his sons! Roughly one

quarter of the Athenian population died. The situation became so bad that even foreign

mercenaries refused to hire themselves out to a city riddled with plague. The Spartans

themselves decided to abandon their invasion of Attica by fear of the disease.

After the death of Pericles, the Athenians turned somewhat against his conservative,

defensive strategy and to the more aggressive strategy of bringing the war to Sparta and its

allies. Rising to particular importance in Athenian democracy at this time was Cleon, a leader

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of the hawkish elements of the Athenian democracy. The Athenians managed some successes

as they continued their naval raids on the Peloponnese, forcing Sparta to the signing of a truce:

the Peace of Nicias in 421 BCE.

Sicilian Expedition

This treaty, however, was soon undermined by more

fighting in the Peloponnese. In the 17th year of the war, word came to

Athens that one of their distant allies in Sicily was under attack

from Syracuse. The people of Syracuse were ethnically Dorian (as

were the Spartans), while the Athenians, and their ally in Sicilia,

were Ionian. The Athenians felt obliged to assist their ally.

The Athenians did not act solely from altruism: rallied on by

Alcibiades, the leader of the expedition, they held visions of conquering all of Sicily. Syracuse,

the principal city of Sicily, was not much smaller than Athens, and conquering all of Sicily

would have brought Athens an immense amount of resources. They also wanted to weaken

Sparta by disrupting the flow of resources and supplies coming from Sicily. In the final stages

of the preparations for departure, the religious statues of Athens were mutilated by unknown

persons, and Alcibiades was charged with religious crimes.

Alcibiades demanded that he be put on trial at once, so that he may defend himself

before the expedition. The Athenians however allowed him to go on the expedition without

being tried (many believed in order to better plot against him). After arriving in Sicily, he was

recalled back to Athens for trial. Fearing that he would be unjustly condemned, Alcibiades

defected to Sparta. After his defection, Alcibiades informed the Spartans that the Athenians

planned to use Sicily as a springboard for the conquest of all of Italy, and to use the resources

and soldiers from these new conquests to conquer all of the Peloponnese.

The Athenian force consisted of over 100 ships and some 5,000 infantry and light-

armored troops. Cavalry was limited to about 30 horses, which proved to be no match for the

large and highly trained Syracusan cavalry. Upon landing in Sicily, several cities immediately

joined the Athenian cause. Instead of attacking at once, the Athenians procrastinated and the

campaigning season of 415 BC ended with Syracuse scarcely damaged. With winter

approaching, the Athenians were then forced to withdraw into their quarters, and they spent the

winter gathering allies and preparing to destroy Syracuse. The delay allowed the Syracusans to

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send for help from Sparta, who sent reinforcements that defeated the Athenian forces, and

prevented them from invading the city. After additional setbacks, the Athenians decided to

retreat until a bad omen, in the form of a lunar eclipse, delayed any withdrawal. The delay was

costly and forced the Athenians into a major sea battle in the Great Harbor of Syracuse. The

Athenians were thoroughly defeated, and then marched inland in search of friendly allies. The

Syracusan cavalry rode them down mercilessly, eventually killing or enslaving all who were

left of the mighty Athenian fleet.

The loss

This ushered in the final phase of the war, generally referred to either as the Ionian

War. In this phase, Sparta, now receiving support from Persia, supported rebellions in Athens'

subject states in the Aegean Sea and Ionia, undermining Athens' empire, and, eventually,

depriving the city of naval supremacy. The destruction of Athens' fleet effectively ended the

war, and Athens surrendered in the following year.

The loss rattled Athenian confidence in their democracy. In 411 and 404 BCE,

aristocratic elements in Athens had overthrown the democracy with Spartan help, set up

dictatorships, and launched a reign of terror. Athens, the strongest city-state in Greece prior to

the war's beginning, was reduced to a state of near-complete subjection, while Sparta was

established as the leading power of Greece. The economic costs of the war were felt all across

Greece; poverty became widespread in the Peloponnese. The losses of population, the ravages of

epidemic disease, and the financial damage caused by the war created ongoing problems for the

Athenians. Not even the amnesty that accompanied the restoration of Athenian democracy in 403

B.C. could quench all the social and political hatreds that the war and the rule of the Thirty Tyrants

had enflamed. Socrates, the famous philosopher, became the most prominent casualty of this

divisive bitterness.

The trial of SocratesIt is in this context of deep crisis that the Athenians started to be on the lookout for

someone to blame for their loss. Socrates became that scapegoat. In 401 BC, only two years

before Socrates’ trial, aristocrats had tried again to set up dictatorships. The ringleaders were

later killed in battle, but considering the two former takeovers, Athens was with good reason

jittery. Socrates, because of his relationship with some of these aristocrats (some like

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Alcibiades had been his students) and his known anti-democratic sympathies, was now no

longer just an eccentric but a threat to the city.

In 399 BCE, he was charged with neglecting the gods of the state, introducing new

gods, and corrupting the morals of the youth of Athens. No other trial, except that of Jesus, has

left so vivid an impression on the imagination of Westerners as that of Socrates. The two trials

have much in common. There is no independent contemporary account of either. We have no

transcripts, no court records. We do not hear the prosecution. We know the story only as told

later by loving disciples. Both Jesus and Socrates achieved immortality through martyrdom.

Socrates, like Jesus, left no writings of his own. What we know of him is from scraps of his

disciples and friends. His greatest follower, Plato, left the most adoring portrait, though others

were either not so kind, or were simply being honest.

He was convicted, refused to ask the court for mercy but instead lectured them on their

stupidity, and was sentenced to death. Socrates can be viewed as someone who pushed his

motto (the “unexamined life is not worth living”) too far, especially when he started to

question the democratic government of Athens itself. Politics in Athens was always a battle

between different factions, but no side disagreed that the city should be self-ruled. The

aristocrats might want to restrict voting to the bluebloods and the wealthy to the wealthy, but

no one was against voting. To oppose self-government was not only antidemocratic, it became

unpatriotic. And that’s the way more people saw Socrates. His ideal, as shown in the writings

of Xenophon and Plato, was not rule by the few or by the many, but rule by the “one who

knows”, the one truly capable of Reason. To his fellow citizens, this must have looked like a

kingship. And in fifth-century Athens, the idea of a kingship was so out of date, no one could

even seriously worry about the idea. Socrates would have argued that he was proposing not

kingship, but a new kind of one-man rule, the basis of an ideal and rational government, a view

shared by Plato in the Republic.

The jury could have just fined him, or exiled him temporarily, but once again Socrates

sought the death penalty. When asked by the jury what penalty he thought was appropriate for

his crimes, Socrates responded that he felt he deserved a statue in his honor and free food for

the rest of his life. That didn’t win votes. Then he proposed a fine of one mina, a ridiculously

low sum, like saying one dollar. The court was not amused and he raised the sum to 35 minas.

The jury was looking for a way to punish Socrates without killing him, even giving him the

opportunity to choose his punishment. But the first jokes did not win sympathy. The vote for

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the death penalty was 360-140. Socrates did not try to win acquittal through argument, but

antagonized the jury, pushing for the harshest penalty.

He died with hemlock, a poison paralyzing the nervous system. Many recall him in

history as being the first martyr in Western civilization, a new type of hero willing to die

instead of compromising his core beliefs in Reason and the pursuit of Truth, as painful or

unpopular as this Truth might be. For Plato, the trial was the beginning of his whole personal

intellectual pursuit of wisdom, and pays the greatest tribute to his teacher. Socrates’ trial and

death can also be seen as the end of a long process that started in the Archaic Age with the rise

of trade, philosophy and democracy; a process during which rationalism became the main

virtue in Athenian society. However, Socrates’ death shows that there are limits to everything,

and exposed the limits of Athenian belief in rationalism, freedom and tolerance. It is in this

context of political and social crisis that the city started its downfall and never recovered from

it.

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