Our son's midterm paper topic (Schola Tutorials) over Christmas break was Who Should Have Won the Peloponnesian War. I confess to knowing very little about the Peloponnesian War, but the topic piqued my curiosity as I remember from some of my friends at Harvard that Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War was mandatory reading for Gov 40, the killer pregov / prelaw course (like the premeds' Organic Chem). So why should this old book be required reading?
We've been wending our way through The Baldwin Project's The Story of the Greeks and I came to realize that there is a lot to learn from this War for any citizen of a democratic country. Athens should have won. It wasted its talented leaders and could not act decisively to unite the different dissenting voices within its city states. Human vices of arrogance, greed, and cruelty, doomed much more than who would rule Greece. I was surprised to learn that most of my son's online classmates felt that the Spartans should have won the war. Certainly this could make for a good discussion or debate over the dinner table!
An excerpt from Gilbert Highet's The Classical Tradition:
"It is not always understood nowadays how noble and how widespread Greco-Roman Civilization was, how it kept Europe, the Middle East, and northern AFrica peaceful, cultured, prosperous, and happy for centuries, and how much was lost when the savages and invaders broke in upon it...We are so accustomed to contemplating the spectacle of human progress that we assume modern culture to be better than anything that preceded it. We forget also how able and how willing men are to reverse the movement of progress: how many forces of barbarism remain, like vocanoes in a cultivated island, still powerfully alive, capable not only of injuring civilization but of putting a burning desert in its place."
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For those of you interested in samples of middle school writing, here's our son's short position paper on the War:
Athens should have won the Peloponnesian War.
The Athenians' loss in the Peloponnesian War meant a loss of Greek independence and setback for the principles of democracy throughout the Western world. At the start of the war, Athens had good resources, a superior navy, and a good general in Pericles. Pericles' war strategy was to protect his population behind the Long Walls. Sparta attacked the countryside, but could not significantly harm the people or the supply lines to Athens, which were protected by their fleet. Athens was defeated mainly due to a plague that struck, killing almost one-third of the population, including Pericles.
Sparta ended up winning the war, but ruled poorly over Greece because of poor leaderships and a society that was not oriented toward government during peacetime. Spartan culture emphasized only military strength and denied its citizens individuality and free choice. As a result, Spartan culture had little in the way of the arts or philosophy. Children were taken away from their mothers at age 7 and raised by nurses with little coddling and only simple food. This culture was non-Biblical. Whereas the Bible places importance on the family and the different roles of father, mother, and child, the Spartan culture placed little importance on family, and replaced the family with the state.
As a result of Sparta winning, all the Greek city-states were weakened. As a result, it was easier for Macedonia to conquer them several decades later.
Athens should share some of the blame for losing the Peloponnesian War. Athens went to conquer Sicily and Syracuse, exhausting their navy and army, and making them more vulnerable to defeat. Also, the Athenians had a bad tradition of exiling or killing some of their greatest leaders. Many were so anxious that their leaders would gain too much power and become tyrants that they accused them of crimes that many probably did not commit. Many good leaders may have been killed, exiled, or forced to defect to another country, like Alcibiades.
The Age of Pericles was a time when politics, philosophy, and the arts flourished in Greece. Pericles also created a large number of public works projects that made living easier for the Athenians. If Athens had won the Peloponnesian War, perhaps that age would have continued.
A War Like No Other - NRO
The Plague of Athens
Peloponnesian War Picture
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