Sparta came as a liberator. That too called for money and ships, but the Spartans had neither accumulated reserves like Athens nor a proper fleet. Persia was a possible source for both, but assistance from Persia might compromise Spartan “liberation theology.” This was especially true if Sparta set foot in Anatolia, where there were Greeks with as much desire for liberation (whether from Athens or Persia or both: some communities paid tribute in both directions) as their mainland counterparts. A further difficulty lay in the kind of regime Sparta itself could be expected to impose if successful. One revealing reason for the failure of the big colony at Heraclea founded in 426, a project with a strongly anti-Ionian and propagandist element, was the harsh and positively unjust behaviour of the Spartan governors, who frightened people away. Was the Spartan stick, or bakteria, too much in use by violent Spartan officers with too little self-control?
Again a few qualifications are in order. Money could be obtained from more-acceptable sources than Persia—from the western Dorians, for instance. And subsidized piracy, of which one hears a little in the 420s, was another solution to the naval problem. Against harsh governors like those at Heraclea one has to balance Brasidas, who was as good a fighter in the battle for the hearts and minds as in the conventional sense.
Sparta’s invasion of Attica set the tone of the first half of the Archidamian War (431–421), named after the Spartan king Archidamus II, unfairly in view of the wariness he is said to have expressed at the outset. Athens moved its flocks from Attica across to Euboea, whose economic importance was thus raised further still. As if in recognition that this was a war brought about at the instance of Corinth, much early Athenian naval activity was devoted to stripping Corinth of assets in the northwest—of Sollium, Astacus, and Cephellenia. Yet there was also an Athenian raid on Methone in Messenia (the later Venetian strong point of Modon), foiled by Brasidas; a morale-boosting raid on the Megarid (such raids were repeated twice a year until 424); and some successful diplomacy in the north, where the Odrysian Thracians were won over.
At the end of this first campaigning year, Pericles delivered an austere but moving speech honouring the fallen men, which has become known as the funeral oration of Pericles. This famous oration, however, is largely the work of Thucydides himself; it is a timeless personal tribute to Athenian power and institutional strength but not, as has been argued, a key to unlock Athenian civic ideology. The speech, as preserved, is not peculiarly enthusiastic about democracy as such and has perhaps been over-interpreted in the light of Athens’s later cultural fame. In particular, the Thucydidean Pericles is usually taken to have said that Athens was an education to Greece, but in context he says merely that other Greeks would do well to profit from its political example. Continuing strife
The second year of the war, 430, began with another invasion of Attica. Thucydides, having scarcely brought the Peloponnesians into Attica, switches styles dramatically to record the outbreak of a dreadful plague at Athens. Although it cannot be securely identified with any known disease, that plague carried off one-third of the 14,000 hoplites and cavalry (there was a recurrence in 427). Pericles himself came down with the disease and died in 429, not, however, before leading a ravaging expedition against Epidaurus and other Peloponnesian places and defending himself against his critics. The speech Thucydides gives him for this occasion is as fine as the funeral speech, which has received so much more attention. It hints loftily at expansion to east and west of the kind that Pericles’ initial strategy had appeared to rule out. It is possible that this speech is historical and that the purpose of attacking Epidaurus was to bar Corinth’s eastern sea-lanes completely; Aegina had already been evacuated and repopulated by cleruchs in 430, perhaps as an initial step toward that end. In the north, Potidaea surrendered, and a cleruchy was installed there too, a further Corinthian setback.
Peloponnesian pressure on Plataea was stepped up in 429. A large expedition in the northwest under the Spartan Cnemus, who used barbarian as well as Greek forces in an effort to win back some of Corinth’s losses, showed that there were adventurous thinkers before the northern operations of Brasidas later in the decade. It was, however, a failure, as was a Peloponnesian embassy to Persia asking for money and alliance. Intercepted by the king of the Odrysians, the ambassadors were handed over to Athens, where they were put to death with no pretense at trial. The Odrysians feature prominently at this time (but perhaps Thucydides’ own family interests in Thrace have distorted the picture): the mass mobilization of a large Odrysian force, ostensibly in the Athenian interest, soon afterward caused general terror in Greece, but it came to nothing. There was more-concrete encouragement for Athens in some naval successes of the great commander Phormion in the Gulf of Corinth. Mytilene and Plataea
It is perhaps surprising that it was only in 428 that a revolt within the Athenian empire gave Sparta the opportunity to implement its basic war aim of liberating Greece. This was the revolt of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, to which Athens reacted with a prompt blockade. It was a shrewd Spartan move to summon the Mytileneans and other injured Greeks to the Olympic Games at this point, thus emphasizing that one aspect of the war was the tension between Dorians and Ionians. (Athens was hardly formally excluded from the solemnities, but Olympia always had a Dorian flavour.) Alcidas, the Spartan commander sent to assist the Mytileneans, failed, however, to do anything for them. On its surrender (427) the city narrowly escaped the wholesale executions and enslavements Cleon had recommended, but only as a result of second thoughts on the part of the Assembly (those events and decisions form the context of the famous “Mytilene debate”). It is to the Athenians’ credit that some of them were moved by the thought that their original decision was bloodthirsty.
There were no such doubters among the Spartans who supervised the final phase of Plataean 5th-century history. When the remaining Plataeans surrendered (some had already broken out to Athens), they were put to death to a man, after the “brief question” had been put to them, “Have you done anything for Sparta during the war?” It was a question that the Plataeans, despite some moving pleas, could answer only negatively. At least Cleomenes I in the 6th century and Agesilaus II in the 4th, both of whom applied much the same criterion as this in international affairs, made no pretense of being liberators of Greece. It is impossible for the modern reader to reflect on those two fully reported incidents at Mytilene and Plataea without coming to some general conclusions about Spartan behaviour; and Thucydides too was prompted to generalize in this fashion. His thoughts are attached to an account of civil strife at Corcyra, in the west, in 427. After a bloodbath, the democratic pro-Athenian faction prevailed over the oligarchical pro-Spartan party, with the Athenian commander Eurymedon making no attempt to stop it. Speculation and unease
About this time the Athenians speculatively pursued their western interests, sending at first an expedition of 20 ships under Laches and Charoeades (c. 427) and then 40 more under Sophocles (not the tragedian), Pythodorus, and Eurymedon (426–425). This was a large force in total, given Athens’s other commitments, but its goals are difficult to assess; both radical and conservative motives are given, such as the desire to give the sailors practice (not a ridiculous motive, but an inadequate one), to cut off grain shipments to the Peloponnese (by which Corinth is presumably meant), or even to see if the whole island of Sicily could be brought under control, whatever exactly that might entail. (In 424, after mostly halfhearted warfare, the Sicilians put aside their internal differences at a conference in Gela, of which the Pan-Sicilian Hermocrates was the hero. The Athenian commanders returned home to an undeserved disgrace: their mandate for outright conquest had hardly been clear, nor were their resources sufficient.) The attempt by the Athenian general Nicias to take Megara by military means (427) had more immediate promise of success.