His son, Xerxes, succeeded him in B. A few years after Darius died, Xerxes decided to lead a second invasion of Greece.
Herodotus quoted a long speech Xerxes made to the Persian nobles, stating his reasons and intentions. This speech, like others that Herodotus quoted in The Histories, probably never took place.
Persians, I am not about to introduce a new custom to you, instead I shall follow the tradition handed down to me. I was struck by the realization that we could gain glory; take possession of lands fully as extensive, productive, and fertile as those which we have now; and at the same time obtain vengeance and retribution, too.
He also assembled a navy that consisted of war ships from subject states. As the massive army and navy moved toward Athens, Spartans held a key pass in the mountains at Thermopylae. Xerxes asked an exiled Spartan if his countrymen would fight the overwhelming Persian army. For though they are free, they are not free in all respects, for they are actually ruled by a lord and master: law is that master, and it is the law that they inwardly fear—much more so than your men fear you.
They do whatever it commands, which is always the same: It forbids them to flee from battle, and no matter how many men they are fighting, it orders them to remain in their rank or perish. Xerxes laughed at this, wrote Herodotus, but was stunned when the Spartans repelled three assaults by his army. The Spartans were defeated only after a Greek betrayed them by showing the Persians a concealed path through the mountains. The Athenian leader Themistocles persuaded the others that this meant the Athenians should fight at sea with their wooden ships.
The Athenian navy destroyed the Persian fleet as Xerxes looked on in horror. The Spartans went on to win a great land victory over the Persian army, forcing it to march back across the pontoon bridge to Persia, never to return. After the defeat of Xerxes, many Greek city-states joined a league, headed by Athens with its superior navy, to defend Greece from any further Persian invasions.
Athens, however, began to demand tribute—money, soldiers, or warships—from league members. In addition, Athens forced other city-states to join the league and prevented any member from leaving it.
It also pressured league cities to adopt a democratic government like its own. The combination of tribute and expanded trade created a wealthy Athenian Empire. This, in turn, enabled Pericles, the leader of the Athenian democracy, to launch a major building program in the city.
One of his projects included the famous Parthenon, a temple to the goddess Athena. Pericles admitted that the Athenian Empire was a tyranny but argued the benefits it brought to Athens outweighed its evils.
Meanwhile, the Spartans with their dominant land army withdrew to their homeland of Peloponnesus, a wide peninsula connected to the Greek mainland by a narrow strip of land. Sparta differed greatly from Athens. It was a regimented, militaristic society.
All Spartan males, ages 20—60, were soldiers. Women and slaves performed most other tasks in Sparta. Its government was an oligarchy, drawn from the professional warrior class.
As Athens gathered more Greek city-states into its empire, the Spartans began to view the Athenians as a threat. Sparta formed its own defensive league, and before long sporadic fighting broke out with Athens and its allies. A peace treaty between Athens and Sparta did not last long, and in B.
Fighting in Greece continued for most of the next 27 years. Herodotus was still alive at the start of the Peloponnesian War, but another Greek, Thucydides , would write its history. Thucydides was born into a wealthy Athenian family about B. Little else is known about the first 30 years of his life. Assigned to command a fleet off the coast of Thrace, he failed to prevent the Spartans from capturing an Athenian colony.
As was the custom, Athens punished Thucydides by exiling him from Athens for 20 years. With lots of time on his hands, Thucydides decided to write a prose account of the war as it happened, almost like a modern news reporter. He traveled extensively into the war zones, observed battles, interviewed Athenian and Spartan military and political leaders, and read documents relating to the war.
He was the first to analyze human behavior in wartime. He concluded that war was rooted in human nature and would be repeated in the future. Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides rejected telling crowd-pleasing stories and concentrated on the facts of important events. He avoided writing about myths, oracles, and superstitions. He recognized that even eyewitnesses could not always be reliable sources.
In general, he tried hard to be accurate, fair, and unbiased. Like Herodotus, Thucydides quoted speeches, but these actually took place. Thucydides heard some of them himself. Typically slow to act, Sparta finally agreed to lead the fight against Athens, demanding that it restore independence to the Greek cities under its control.
Thucydides wrote that only an honest leader like Pericles could make Athenian democracy work. Thucydides was interested in how both soldiers and civilians behaved in wartime. Athens quickly crushed the revolt, and the people of the city slaughtered the rebel faction. This incident prompted Thucydides to comment on the evils of revolution:.
The sufferings that revolution entailed upon cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same.
The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition. As the war resumed, Athenian leaders argued for a major military expedition to Sicily.
The expedition failed to attack Syracuse immediately, allowing the city to prepare strong defenses and get help from Sparta. I also believe the History is intended as a vicarious political education for citizens, soldiers, and statesmen, communicated through the medium of the case study of a single, cataclysmic war — for war itself, as Thucydides says, is a violent teacher. In the spirit of encouraging a deeper engagement with the History , I want to offer an introduction for how serious political people, military and civilian, might approach Thucydides profitably.
It goes without saying that some will disagree with the below remarks, for one thing that manifestly characterizes the study of Thucydides is vigorous disagreement. Thucydides was an Athenian citizen, a younger contemporary of Socrates, a military man, a political exile and a profoundly astute observer of human events.
His book, now known as the History of the Peloponnesian War , is arguably the greatest extant prose work from the great fifth century BCE flourishing in Greece, a masterpiece of Greek political thought, and a revealing study of the first democracy at war. Thucydides is also generally understood to be the first scholar of international relations avant la lettre : Thucydides, paleorealist or ur-realist.
There is a cottage industry of articles about precisely what kind of realist Thucydides truly is, matched only by similar industries involving Machiavelli and Hobbes.
What was the Peloponnesian War? It was a long war, spanning the years to BCE, and an enormously destructive one. On the basis of internal textual references, Thucydides is believed to have died somewhere between BCE.
In 5th Century Greece, Sparta was the preeminent land power, the leader of the Peloponnesian League — a primarily defensive alliance of mainly oligarchical cities. Athens, by contrast, was the preeminent naval power, a democracy, the first democracy, in fact, and the possessor of a great empire.
Athenian democracy, however, was not a representative one like those today but rather a direct democracy, something closer to an illiberal democracy. Athens was then a naval empire, and she dominated the islands of the Aegean while also harboring a thirst for imperial expansion. In addition to the comparative material advantages of the sides — their hard power, as we would now call it — the cities also had deeply opposing characters. Whereas Spartan power was long-standing and Sparta a deeply conservative or maintaining power, Athenian power was relatively new and Athens was a progressive, acquisitive city — a daring, expansionistic power.
Why did he write about it in the first place? According to Thucydides, there is some bright thread of human nature which runs through the differences characterizing different historical moments. History as a singular chain of events will not repeat itself, of course. Nonetheless, certain episodes of the History are intended to disclose universal phenomena.
Think of a fable by way of example: The story and the lesson are virtually inseparable. How does one know Thucydides endorses the view in question — such as that of the Athenian ambassadors at Melos — and, relatedly, how does one separate the meaning of a single line from the political situation in which it is embedded?
In , he was given command of a fleet, but was then exiled for failing to reach the city of Amphipolis in time to prevent its capture by the Spartans. Observe he did. During 20 years of exile, he worked on his history—collecting information, writing and revising. Sparta, located in the Peloponnese the southern peninsula of mainland Greece , was most powerful as a land force. Its system of government favored austere militarism and adherence to tradition. The initial 10 years of the conflict saw annual Spartan land raids countered by Athenian sea attacks.
In , the Athenians under their leader Cleon made an unsuccessful attempt to retake Amphipolis. Both Cleon and the Spartan general Brasidas died in the battle, pushing the war-weary sides to negotiate a treaty. An uneasy peace followed, but six years later Athens launched a seaborne expedition against Syracuse, an ally of Sparta in distant Sicily.
This proved disastrous, and the Athenians were driven from the island in by the combined Sicilian and Spartan forces. Athens surrendered to Sparta in Thucydides is careful to note that at times he records only the gist of what was said, or what he thinks should have been said.
At other times the speeches form dialogues, as stronger and weaker parties debate the ethics of war. The Melian dialogue, from just a few years later, records the leaders of a neutral island pleading with Athens for their survival. Thucydides, unlike Herodotus , makes very little reference to the Greek gods as active agents in history, preferring to understand events in terms of their human causes.
It took several generations for Thucydides to attain his now-unassailed place as one of the greatest historians of all time. Aristotle , who lived a few decades later and wrote about the same era, never mentions him.
By the first century B. Over the next centuries, numerous copies were made of the work, ensuring its survival past the dark ages. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
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