The climactic event of the classical Greek world was the great war between Athens and Sparta (the so-called ‘Peloponnesian War’) that dominated the final third of the 5th century BC. Following on from fifty years of tense relations and open rivalry, war broke out in 431, resulting in 404 and the complete defeat of Athens. This was, according to the historian Thucydides, a contemporary observer, ‘the greatest upheaval’ to affect the Greek world to date. Nothing was ever again to be the same for the Greeks.
The course will not dwell on the detailed military history of the conflict between Athens and Sparta. Rather, it will explore the very different cultures and societies at the heart of democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta, setting them on their collision course. How did the Athenians acquire and exploit the maritime empire that the Spartans saw as such a threat to their domination of southern Greece? What was the process whereby the Spartans developed their totalitarian regime, focused on the production of top-class soldiers, dedicated to serving the state? How did the Athenians reconcile their democracy with extensive chattel slavery? Why did the Spartans claim to be fighting for the freedom of the Greeks when their distinctive lifestyle depended on the rigorous exploitation of fellow-Greeks in the form of the helots, a semi-servile workforce?
In our attempts to answer these questions, we are fortunate in possessing the great history of the Atheno-Spartan conflict, written by the Athenian Thucydides. Part of the course will suggest strategies for approaching Thucydides’ account, so as to penetrate past his own, distinctive perspective on events. Is the recent eulogizing of Thucydides by Neo-conservatives and Neo-realists in any way justified? Coming under close scrutiny will be Thucydides’ overwhelmingly positive view of the Athenian politician, Pericles. A key issue to be addressed is the apparent dominance of Pericles over what was ostensibly a democracy.
Essential in reaching a balanced assessment is the collection of biographies of famous Greeks by the later Roman author Plutarch; not just of Pericles, but of the Athenians Alcibiades and Nicias, and the victorious Spartan commander Lysander. Reference will also be made to contemporary comic plays by Aristophanes and the later thoughts of the theorists Plato and Aristotle. Apart from this literary testimony, consideration will be given to the range of surviving inscriptions on stone by which the Athenians habitually recorded their public affairs.
Concerning the Spartans, the course will try to penetrate past the mirage that they created about themselves, reinforced by Athenian admirers of Sparta, notably Xenophon. It will be suggested that the Spartan victory over the Athenians, complete though it was, paradoxically contained the seeds of their own destruction as a major power just a few decades later, early in the 4th century BC.
