Athens vs. Sparta: The Peloponnesian War
The story of the regional Greek war that ended the Golden Age of Athens.
The Peloponnesian War, fought from 431 to 404 BC, was a cataclysmic struggle between Athens and Sparta for dominance over mainland Greece.
The post-Persian world
After repulsing the Persian invasion of Europe, the Greek alliance between Athens and Sparta almost immediately began to splinter.
Athens and Sparta became more antagonistic against one another. The Spartans demanded that Athens not rebuild its fortifications. Fortifications were an impregnable defense against hoplite warfare, which had been longer mastered by the warlike Spartans. The Athenians knew this, and refused to oblige. They didn’t want the Spartans to invade them. This is because, 20 years before, Sparta had invaded the newly formed democracy of Athens. The Spartans had attempted a regime change, and the Athenians remembered this. Athens sent Themistocles to Sparta as a diplomat, but it was really a ruse to rebuild the fortifications. The Spartans were angry, but they did not do much to retaliate.
Athens continued to build up its own defenses. Sparta did little to react. This changed when, after a huge earthquake in 464 BC, the helots rose up against their Spartan overlords. Because Athens and Sparta were still allied, the Athenians sent a general named Kimon to help Sparta put down the revolt in 462 BC. By this point, tensions were already high between the two powers. Rumors held that Sparta was planning a surprise attack on Attica. Kimon, an acclaimed veteran of the Persian Wars, led a large army into Sparta to assist them. The Spartans were outraged, and they accused him of spreading anti-Spartan propaganda.
Sparta blamed Athens’ political ideas for inciting the revolt of the helots. Back in Athens, the disgraced Kimon was sent into exile for ten years. But it was not enough to relieve the growing rivalry between Athens and Sparta.
Delian League
In 478 BC, Athens founded its own military alliance, called the Delian League, which was founded at the city of Delos. The league fell under the command of Athenian leaders, and continued the war against Persia, even as Sparta and its allies dropped out.
Sparta did not want to join the league, because it had a large slave population of helots, which they feared would revolt against their Spartan oppressors. Sparta returned to its austere isolation, while Athens continued to leverage its naval power against the defeated Persians.
Based on tribute lists, the league probably had between 150 to 330 members. These were usually smaller city-states, who contributed ships or money for Athens’ war against Persia. In principle, the members of the Delian League were all equals. In practice, Athens was its leader. Athens saw it as a permanent partnership, and forbade the other cities from leaving the alliance.
In 454 BC, the treasury was moved from Delos into Athens itself, where the Athenians embezzled funds for their own city projects. That was how the Parthenon and Acropolis were financed. Most of the money was funneled into Athens’ navy.
In the eyes of the other Greeks, Athens went from being a symbol of hope and liberation, to becoming an oppressor itself. Athens refused to allow the other states to secede from the alliance, and fought in a series of regime change wars. In just a couple of decades, the dynamics between Athens and the other Greeks had become almost unrecognizable.
Causes of the war
Thucydides suggested that the war between Athens and Sparta came about as a result of fear. Sparta feared Athens’ rise, and so preemptively invaded. Sparta was further influenced by its own allies, Thebes and Corinth. Those two powers didn’t like Athens. Athens tried to expand westward, angering Thebes. Corinth was a trade competitor with Athens.
The Peloponnesian War
The Peloponnesian War was not a single conflict, but a loose collection not of minor wars. They are all grouped together, for the sake of convenience.
Athens and Sparta came into military conflict through a proxy war over Boeotia. Sparta helped Thebes win the Battle of Tanagra in 457, but Athens crushed their Theban enemies at the Battle of Oenophyta later that year. Athens seized most of Boeotia, establishing their hegemony there. Athens’ conquest of Boeotia was very telling. It showed the expansive growth of Athens’ naval empire.
The Athens were also fighting against the Persians, particularly in Egypt. In 454 BC, the Athenians sent an expeditionary force to aid a revolt in Egypt. Despite losing this force, the massive Athenian empire was still able to continue their conflict against Boeotia. The Boeotians revolted, and won at the Battle of Koroneia in 447.
The Spartans took advantage of the Boeotian revolt, and invaded Attica. Pericles, the democratic leader of Athens, bribed the Spartan king to leave Attica. Once the Spartans, Athens was able to crush a revolt in nearby Euboea. Athens was able to defend its home territories. The militarist, non-economic Sparta began to realize the incredible power of money for swaying the conflict in Athens’ favor.
After 445 BC, Athens largely honored their agreements with Sparta, and did not seize any additional territory. They renounced their ambitions of building a land empire, and stuck to the coasts and islands. But the Athenians saved up money reserves for triemes, alarming the Spartans.
Sparta’s strategy was to invade Attica and rampage through the farmland, as a way of strangling Athens’ economy. The Athenians avoided open battle behind the Long Walls. They launched raids into the Peloponnese, attacking Sparta’s allies. This became the core of Athens’ counter-strategy, led by Pericles. Pericles’ strategy was successful but unsustainable for more than a few years.
The war intensifies
Everything changed with the outbreak of the Athenian Plague, which ravaged a third of Athens’ population. Athens’ population was no longer able to sustain the war. They had to start thinking more strategically about how to neutralize Sparta.
After the first few years, a new generation of leaders in Athens began pushing for a more aggressive strategy. The Athenians set up a fort at Pylos, inciting the helots to revolt against their Spartan overlords. This led to the Battle of Sphacteria in 425 BC. The Spartans countered with an invasion of the Chersonese peninsula, resulting in the fall of Amphipolis.
Peace of Nicias
Athens and Sparta agreed to a truce in 421 BC. But both powers did little to uphold the terms of the agreement, partly because Sparta’s allies were fiercely opposed to it.
In 418 BC, a thousand Athenian hoplites fought against the Spartans at the Argives. This was not considered a violation of the peace treaty, but tensions were reaching a boiling point.
War resumes
Finally, in 415 BC, Athens sent a large expedition to Sicily in order to collect some money and forge some alliances. They were determined to carve out a new empire in the Greek West. This was not something that the Western Greeks wanted. In retaliation, Athens led a heavily reinforced assault on Syracuse.
The Spartans resumed war by fortifying their positions in Attica, while receiving Persian funding to build up a naval fleet. Despite being weakened by internal strife, the Athenians still managed to subdue their Spartan enemies at sea. Over the course of the war, Athens grew more exhausted. The funds always dried up. Their ships were obsolete. Athens no longer had the ability to endure major defeats.
In 405 BC, the Athenian fleet were caught off guard by the Spartan commander Lysander. After a lengthy siege, Athens was forced to surrender in 404 BC. Sparta had won.
A defeated Athens
Having won the protracted war, Sparta refused to completely wipe out Athens, its former ally. Instead, the Spartans simply imposed an oligarchy, and tore down the Long Walls. Instead of giving freedom to the other Greeks, Sparta simply replaced Athens’ empire with their own rule. All of Sparta’s promises of liberation had proved void and hypocritical. And this was all done with funding from the Persians, the mortal enemy of the Greek people. Sparta’s allies were deeply disturbed by this turn of events.
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