In foreign policy Pericles was a hawk, but he was a cautious hawk. He liked to avoid risk. He would do nothing unless he was reasonably sure in advance of the outcome. Now that he was dead, a new hawk would fly the skies who had no such inhibitions. This raptor saw that Athens had to show real aggression, even to the point of rashness, if it were to defeat the enemy. And it had to grab chances as they came; rather than eliminate luck, it would provoke it. Its name was Cleon, who succeeded Pericles as the chief man in the state.
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So far the war had been small beer, a succession of minor encounters and skirmishes by land and sea. Realizing that a strategy consisting largely of invasions of an already thoroughly ravaged Attica brought fewer returns with each passing year, the Peloponnesians decided to build a navy to win allies in western Greece and to challenge Athens’s maritime dominance in the Corinthian Gulf. One of Sparta’s chief allies, the mercantile city of Corinth, was suffering badly from what amounted to a blockade.
However, a brilliant Athenian admiral called Phormio outwitted and defeated a much larger fleet (his twenty met forty-seven Peloponnesian warships). Athenian triremes were not simply well built, they also had well-trained and experienced crews and tactically clever officers. Sparta was forced to recognize that to compete at sea required a lot more than investment in timber and canvas.
Both sides needed to recover their finances. Sparta, always short of cash, wondered whether the Great King might fund those who were fighting his bitterest enemy, Athens, and dispatched an embassy to sound him out. The very fact of doing so reveals the lengths to which Sparta was now prepared to go. Only half a century had passed since the invasion of Xerxes, and betrayal of the Greek cause to the Persians had become an acceptable policy.
The huge financial reserves of Athens were dwindling at an alarming rate. In 428 the imperial polis seems to have been maintaining at sea at one and the same time the largest number of warships that it had ever done, 250 in total. As we have seen, thousands of crew members, marines, and hoplites had to be paid at a rate of one drachma a day (or two if they had a servant). There was no sign of the war ending soon and with the disappearance of Pericles the opportunity arose for a new, leaner method of carrying on the struggle. This entailed an absolute severity in collecting league dues, additional taxes at home, and more carefully and economically designed military expeditions.
Such measures might stave off bankruptcy, but they would not win the war. So Athenian generals became more aggressive and more opportunistic. Unlike Pericles, they were not aiming for a draw, but for victory. They were nimble and sought to apply minimum (and so affordable) force to achieve a decisive objective. They were on the lookout for tightly defined risks that would bring real gains if successful and cause little real damage or expense if they failed.
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“War is a stern master,” observed Thucydides. Standards of decency were breaking down throughout the Greek world and men turned increasingly to violence and terror as routine political methods. The Spartan envoys to the Great King fell into Athenian hands and were sent back to Athens. As soon as they arrived they were executed without trial or even an opportunity to defend themselves. Their bodies were not given a proper burial, but thrown into a pit. The official justification for this criminal act was that it was retaliation for the Spartan practice of putting to death crews of Athenian merchant ships captured off the Peloponnesian coast. Indeed, at the beginning of the war the Spartans killed as enemies all whom they captured at sea, whether they were Athenians or neutrals.
The polities of Greek poleis were breaking down. The first and best example of this trend was the island of Corcyra. The class struggle there that had inadvertently set off the general war continued with vertiginous and bloodstained reversals of fortune, watched over by Peloponnesian and Athenian fleets whose maneuvers at sea pushed the pendulum on land to and fro. In the end the Corcyran democrats prevailed. Four hundred aristocrats and their supporters sought sanctuary in the temple of Hera in Corcyra town and Thucydides reported that the democrats
persuaded about fifty of them to submit to a trial. They then condemned every one of them to death. Seeing what was happening, most of the other suppliants, who had refused to be tried, killed each other there in the sanctuary of Hera; some hanged themselves on trees, and others committed suicide as they were severally able.
Some five hundred aristocrats managed to escape the carnage and established a fort in the north of the island, from which they launched raids against the democrats. A couple of years later they were defeated with help from an Athenian force. The survivors surrendered after receiving guarantees of their safety. They were then shut up in a large building, taken out in groups of twenty, and led past two lines of armed soldiers who beat them and stabbed them. Eventually, and understandably, those who were still inside refused to come out. So the democrats climbed up onto the roof, threw down tiles on the prisoners below, and shot them with arrows.
History then repeated itself. Most of the victims began to
kill themselves by thrusting into their throats the arrows shot by the enemy, and hanging themselves by cords taken from some beds that happened to be there and with strips torn from their clothing….Night fell while these horrors were taking place and most of it had passed before they were brought to a conclusion.
The civil strife in Corcyra ended for the good reason that one side in the conflict had been wiped out.
In theory the crime was the attempted overthrow of the democracy, but in practice people took the opportunity to settle private scores or grab other people’s estates or property. Death took every shape and form. There were no lengths to which the brutality did not go. Fathers killed their sons, suppliants claiming sanctuary at an altar were dragged away or even butchered on it as if they were sacrificial animals. Some were even walled up in a temple of Dionysus and died there.
What happened in Corcyra was repeated elsewhere. As time passed practically the whole of the Greek world was infected, with rival factions in every polis. As a rule, democratic leaders appealed to the Athenians for support and oligarchs or aristocrats to the Spartans. It became a natural thing for those intent on a change of government to seek external alliances. Revolutions broke out in city after city.
Thucydides notes the effect these upheavals had on language and shows how the ordinary meaning of words was transformed and debased.
Reckless aggression was now regarded as the courage of a loyal party supporter; to think of the future and wait and see was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any suggestion of moderation was a disguise for unmanliness; an ability to see all sides of a question meant that one was unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man.
The Greeks did not understand the concept of a loyal opposition. Politics was a zero-sum game in which the winner took all. Losers were either butchered or went into exile. Large numbers of banished patriots were scattered throughout the Greek world and plotted vengeance against their political opponents. Hellenic unity, always fragile, became a lost cause.
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Athens was by no means immune from this widespread coarsening of moral standards. In 428, the fourth year of the war, the polis of Mytilene and most of the rest of Lesbos, the third largest Greek island, revolted from the league. It was not a subject state but a “free ally” that contributed its own ships.