The Peloponnesian War, Essay Example

The Peloponnesian War is a crucial moment in not only the history of Ancient Greece, but also of the Occident, for arguably the following main reasons: 1) the conflict was essentially a civil war within Greece, which prevented the emergence of a unified Greece, 2) the war fought between coalitions led by Athens and Sparta respectively was an ideological war about democracy and the nature of rule and empire, and 3) the fractured Greece meant that the locus of power in the West would develop outside of Greece, that is, the emergence of the Roman Empire.

The military goals of the respective sides in the conflict directly inform all three of these reasons for the Peloponnesian War’s historical importance. Athens, largely because of its naval power, was a city-state with a tremendous influence in the region, and wished to expand its empire. At the same time, this expansion was consistent with Athens’ democratic vision of politics. Namely, the democratic model conflicted with the oligarchic model proposed by Sparta. The oligarchic model, by definition, favored multiple centers of political power, each with their own autonomy. The democratic model of Athens, however, was a universalist system, without a clear center of power. This influenced the military goals of Athens in two fundamental senses. Firstly, Athens had to dispose the competitive political system of oligarchy to assert the hegemony of democracy. Secondly, the very nature of democracy as a non-localized center of power, such as in oligarchy, meant that Athens had to expand. Sparta’s military goals, accordingly, were directly informed by Athenian expansion. Namely, Sparta assembled its allies in the Peloponnesian League so as to combat Athens’ aggressive policy. The nature of oligarchy entails decentralized sites of power, each city-state with a degree of autonomy. The growth of Athens as an empire would mean the loss of this autonomy for particular city-states. Accordingly, the military goal of Sparta was to stop Athens’ expansion, before Athens would become entirely hegemonic in the region.

In this context of conflicting political ideologies and military goals, the civil war in Greece known as the Peloponnesian War turned into an extended conflict ranging for three decades between Sparta and her allies and Athens and her allies. Arguably, however, the very nature of the Athenian conception of politics led to Athens’ failure in the war and Sparta’s victory. Namely, Athens’ entire political and military strategy was based on an aggressive expansionism, whereas Sparta’s political and military strategy was primarily defined by gathering oligarchic states together in an alliance to defeat Athens’ ambitions for empire. Athens’ ambitions for empire was the undoing of Athens: the most prominent example of this is the ill-fated campaign to Sicily, which marked a decisive turning point in the war. Despite the fighting in Greece, Athens nevertheless decided to send a massive military expedition to Sicily, feeling that victory in this critical strategic location would ensure Athenian dominance. This opening of a new front in the war proved disastrous however, as Athens aggressive military policy and its defeat in Sicily left the city-state subsequently weaker from the perspective of military strength. The Athenians’ desired growth of empire over-extended their capabilities and ultimately led to the victory of Sparta and the Peloponnesian League.

The effects of the war bear a profound significance. Greece was engaged in a brutal thirty year civil war. The strongest actor in Greece, Athens, was now defeated. If Greece had avoided civil war, it could have unified and become a new empire, much like when the Greek city-states unified during the Persian war. Instead, this fractious civil war logically led to political hegemony in the region shifting to other locations. Accordingly, the rise of Rome can be directly correlated to the failure of Greece to unify: the Roman dominated course of Western history could easily have been different, for example, if Athens had won the Peloponnesian war or if the war could have been entirely avoided.

References

Hunt, L. et al. (2010). Making of the West: A Concise History, 4th., Vol. I. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s.