Professor Donald
Kagan: Why aren't you all home like the rest of the class? My subject today is Pericles as
general. I don't expect that it will
take up all our time. So, if you like when I'm
through I'd be glad to respond to any questions or comments
that you want to make about the Peloponnesian War.
So, if you think of any as I'm talking, I hope you'll have a
shot at it. Near the end of his
biography of Pericles, Plutarch describes this great
Athenian leader on his death bed.
The best men of Athens and his personal friends are gathered in
his room and are discussing the greatness of his virtues and the
power he held. Thinking he was asleep,
they added up his achievements and the number of his trophies,
for as general he had set up nine commemorating a victory on
behalf of the city. Now, we are inclined to
think of Pericles primarily as a great political leader,
a brilliant orator, a patron of the arts and
sciences, the man whose work in the peaceful arts shaped what is
often called the Golden Age of Athens.
So, it's useful for us to remember that the office to
which the people elected him almost every year for some
thirty years, from which he carried on all of
these activities, was that of strategos,
a general and that foremost responsibility of Athenian
generals was to lead armies and navies into battle.
From his own time until modern times, Pericles' talents as a
general have been criticized and defended.
In the first year of the Peloponnesian War,
when his strategy called for the Athenians to huddle behind
the walls of their city while the invading Peloponnesian army
ravaged their lands in Attica, Thucydides says the city was
angry with Pericles. They abused him,
because as their general he did not lead them out into battle
and they held him responsible for all they were suffering.
In the next year, after another invasion and
destruction of their crops and farms,
and after a terrible plague had struck the city,
again, Thucydides says they blamed Pericles for persuading
them to go to war and they held him responsible for their
misfortunes. At a lower level,
the poet Hermippus, one of the comic poets whose
work we don't have but occasionally we have a quotation
and here's one. Hermippus presented one of his
comedies in the spring of 430, the second year of the war,
that simply charged Pericles with cowardice.
He addresses Pericles as follows: "King of the satyrs,
why don't you ever lift a spear but instead only use dreadful
words to wage the war, assuming the character of the
cowardly Telius. But if a little knife is
sharpened on a wet stone you roar as though bitten by the
fierce Cleon." Cleon, as you know,
was his major opponent in the last years of his life and Cleon
was hawkish and an advocate of aggressive active fighting.
Now, the title of this talk, Pericles as General,
is also the name of the most vehement modern attack on
Pericles as a general. I say modern,
of course, I'm talking about the nineteenth century.
When you're an ancient historian things take on those
proportions. The author, Dr.
Julius von Pflugk-Harttung, was a veteran of the
Franco-Prussian war and an appreciative student of what he
took to be the lessons taught by the great military historian and
theorist Clausewitz. He believed that he had
acquired some useful knowledge of the science of war,
as he put it, that led him vigorously and
entirely to condemn Pericles' generalship,
and Pericles' conduct of the Peloponnesian War.
He says that we see expeditions without inner unity,
without the possibility of greater results,
and I'm quoting Pflugk-Harttung now.
"To avoid danger, Pericles regularly gave away
important advantages. Overall, we find the effort to
lose no battle but nowhere to win one.
As much as Pericles' personal courage operated in battle and
in the assembly, so little did he have of the
courage proper to a general, which boldly risks the life of
thousands at the decisive moment.
As such, he belongs to those when they say a philosophical
group which brings everything as neatly as possible into the
system and plan, instead of acting openly and
vigorously. It is a fact that Pericles,
the chief advocate of the anti-Spartan policy never
offered a single battle against the Spartans."
At the higher level of strategy, the critique of
Pericles is no less severe. "Pericles was a good minister
of war who made farsighted preparations,
but as general, he did not know how to make
good use of the existing situation."
Again I quote, "He was a great
burgermeister," this means mayor.
It was not a very friendly thing to call the great general
who led Athens. "He was a burgermeister
in the true sense of the word; there is the rich many
sidedness of his nature which was then by that which came into
play. His superiority to corruption,
everything petty and paltry, yet he lacked the prophet's
vision and the certain luck of the borne statesman.
Above all, he lacked the recklessness which is often
needed to lead what has begun to the goal.
As the leader of foreign policy he was not comparable to a
Themistocles, as a general not even
approximately to a Cimon."So,
that's the harshest of the critics of Pericles over the
years, but Pericles has been very lucky over the years in his
defenders. In antiquity,
his performance was justified and praised by Thucydides,
who was after all a contemporary,
a general himself, and the historian of the period
whose interpretations have dominated opinion ever since he
wrote. For all the objectivity of
Thucydides' styles, he tells the story very much
from Pericles' viewpoint. For instance,
when he describes the revolt against the Athenian leader in
the second year of the war, and the Athenians' unsuccessful
effort to make peace, this is how he describes the
aftermath. "Being totally at a loss as
to what to do, they -- the Athenian people --
attack Pericles, and when he saw that they were
exasperated and doing everything as he had anticipated,
he called an assembly, since he was still general;
he wanted to put confidence into them and leading them away
from their anger to restore their calm and their courage."
He reports three of Pericles, that is to say Thucydides does,
reports three of Pericles' speeches at length without
reporting any of the speeches made by his opponents on those
occasions, with the result that the reader
is made to see the situation through Pericles' eyes.
Finally, he makes his own judgment perfectly clear;
coming down firmly and powerfully on the side of
Pericles and against all of his critics.
Here's what Thucydides says, "As long as he led the
state in peace time he kept to a moderate policy and kept it
safe. It was under his leadership
that Athens reached her greatest heights, and when the war came
and it appears that he also judged its power correctly.
Pericles lived for two years and six months after the war
began, and after his death his foresight about the war was
acknowledged still more. For he had said that if the
Athenians stayed on the defensive, maintained their
navy, and did not try to expand their
empire in wartime thereby endangering the state,
they would win out. But they acted opposite to his
advice in every way, and when their efforts failed
they harmed the state's conduct of the war."
Now, in spite of his successor's departure from his
strategy and the disasters that resulted in spite of the entry
of the Persian Empire into the enemy ranks,
the Athenians held out for ten years after the disastrous
Sicilian Expedition and for twenty-seven years with
interruption altogether. Here's Thucydides final word on
this subject, "So more than abundant was
Pericles' reasons for his own predictions that Athens would
have won in a war against the Peloponnesians alone."
Thucydides makes it absolutely clear;
Pericles was right in the strategy that he had adopted,
and if the Athenians had stuck to it they would have won the
war. Plutarch accepted Thucydides'
judgment and added further defense against the charges of
cowardice and lack of enterprise that his enemies were launching
against Pericles. To Plutarch,
the actions that provoked such accusations instead revealed
prudence, moderation, and a desire to
protect the safety of Athenian soldiers.
In 454, we're back now in the first Peloponnesian War,
Pericles led a seaborne expedition into the Corinthian
Gulf. Thucydides merely reports that
he defeated the Sicyonians in battle and ravaged the territory
and besieged the important city of Oeniada,
though he failed to take it and then sailed home.
Obviously, answering later criticism, Plutarch concludes
his account of these events by saying that Pericles returned to
Athens, and now I quote him,
"Having showed himself to be formidable to the enemy but a
safe and effective commander to his fellow citizens,
for no misfortune struck the men on the expedition."
In 437, he sailed into the Black Sea on a mission of
imperial consolidation that amounted to little more than
showing the flag to the local barbarians.
An action that was too insignificant to be even noticed
by Thucydides, but Plutarch does not miss the
chance to meet the criticism that had been directed against
his hero. On this campaign,
according to Plutarch, Pericles displayed the
magnitude of his forces and the fearlessness and confident
courage with which they sailed wherever they liked and placed
the entire sea under their power.
In 446, when Boeotia was in rebellion, the bold and
ambitious General Tolmides convinced the assembly to send
him at the head of an army to put down the uprising.
Plutarch reports that Pericles tried to restrain and
to persuade him to end the assembly,
making his famous remark that if he would not listen to
Pericles he would not go wrong in waiting for time,
the wisest counselor, but Tolmides didn't listen and
he went, and the result was a disaster.
The Athenians suffered many casualties, Tolmides was killed,
and Boeotia was lost. Plutarch's comment is that this
incident brought great fame and goodwill to Pericles as a man of
prudence and patriotism. Later in the same year,
rebellion broke out in Euboea and Megara revolted opening the
road for a Peloponnesian invasion of Attica.
Pericles, on this occasion had no choice;
he led an Athenian army out to meet the invading army,
but instead of fighting a battle he convinced the Spartans
to withdraw and then to negotiate a peace.
In retrospect, no doubt, his critics accused
him of missing a chance for victory in the field.
Thucydides reports the Peloponnesian withdrawal without
comment or explanation. But Plutarch uses this action
to respond in almost poetic language to later charges that
accompany the Peloponnesian invasion in 431.
Reporting that his enemies, Pericles' enemies,
threatened and denounced him and choruses sang mocking songs
to his shame, and insulted his generalship
for its cowardice and for abandoning everything to the
enemy. The Peloponnesians,
Plutarch tells us, expected the Athenians to fight
out of anger and pride. But to Pericles,
it appeared terrible to fight a battle against 60,000
Peloponnesian and Boeotian hoplites,
for that was the number of those who made the first
invasion. I'm still quoting Plutarch,
and to stake the city itself on the outcome.
He reports Pericles' calming language to the excited
Athenians in 431 saying that trees,
though cut and lopped, grew quickly,
but if men were destroyed it was not easy to get them back
again. Here he turned to the charges
of cowardice and lack of enterprise and he turned them on
their heads and did so more fully in a passage that sums up
his view of Pericles' generalship,
and I'll read it to you. "In his generalship he was
especially famous for his caution.
He never willingly undertook a battle that involved great risk
or uncertainty, nor did he envy or emulate
those who took great risks with brilliant success and were
admired as great generals. He always said to his fellow
citizens that as far as it was in his power,
they would live forever and be immortals."
Of the many modern scholars who have been persuaded by this
view, none has argued more forcefully in favor of Pericles'
generalship than Hans Delbruck, perhaps the most renowned
military historian of his day, and still a respected figure in
that field. He and Pflugk-Harttung were
contemporaries, they lived in--well,
they did their writing on this subject in the last decades of
the nineteenth century. Annoyed by the critiques
rather, lately leveled at Pericles and especially by
Pflugk-Harttung, he wrote a thorough defense in
1890 under the title, The Generalship of Pericles
Explained Through the Generalship of Frederick the
Great. His main effort and at work
is to justify Pericles' conduct of the war that began in 431,
the subject of the greatest criticism leveled at the
Athenian general. Pericles' strategy did not aim
at defeating the Spartans in battle, but was meant to
convince them that war against Athens was futile.
His strategic goals, therefore, were entirely
defensive. He told the Athenians that if
they would remain quiet, take care of their fleet,
refrain from trying to extend their empire in wartime and so
putting their city in danger, they would prevail.
The Athenians were to reject battle on land,
abandon their fields and homes in the country to Spartan
devastation, and retreat behind their walls.
Meanwhile, their navy would launch a series of commando
raids on the coast of the Peloponnesus.
This strategy would continue until the frustrated
enemy was prepared to make peace.
The naval raids and landings were not meant to do serious
harm, but merely to annoy the enemy and to suggest how much
damage the Athenians could do, if they chose.
The strategy was not to exhaust the Peloponnesians physically or
materially, but psychologically. No such strategy had ever been
attempted in Greek history, for no state before the coming
of the Athenian imperial democracy ever had the means for
trying such a strategy. To do so was not easy.
For this unprecedented strategy ran directly across the grain,
as you know, of Greek tradition.
Willingness to fight, bravery, and steadfastness in
battle, became the essential characteristics of the free man
and the citizen. Pericles' strategy of
passivity, therefore, ran counter to the teachings of
the Greek tradition. But most Athenians were
farmers, whose lands and homes were outside the walls.
The Periclean strategy required them to look on idly while their
houses, crops, and vines, and olive trees were
damaged or entirely destroyed. In the face of these facts,
as well as of the power of tradition, and the cultural
values of the Greeks, it is hard to understand even
in retrospect how Pericles could convince the Athenians to adopt
his strategy. Delbruck keenly aware of
Athens' numerical inferiority on land was convinced of the
soundness of Pericles' approach. Here's what Delbruck wrote,
"The structure of the Peloponnesian War obliges us to
give him a position not simply among the great statesmen,
but also among the great military leaders of world
history. It is not his war plan as such
that bestows this right on him, for the fame of the commander
is gained not by word but by deed,
but rather the gigantic power of decision that accompanied it.
Not to halt with a half measure but to plunge in whole heartedly
and to give up completely what had to be sacrificed -- the
entire Attic countryside. In addition,
the strength of personal authority that was able to make
such a decision understandable to a democratic national
assembly and to gain their approval.
The execution of this decision is a strategic deed that can be
compared favorably with any victory."
Take that, critics. Delbruck was pulling no punches
and if you said he was a bum I say he was the greatest.
Delbruck tries to bolster his case by comparing Pericles with
Frederick the Great, King of Prussia in the
eighteenth century. During the Seven Years' War
Frederick applied what Delbruck calls a strategy of exhaustion;
instead of the strategy of annihilation in which one army
seeks out the other to bring it to decisive battle with the goal
of destroying its nation's ability to resist.
Such a strategy is sometimes adopted by or forced upon the
weaker side in a conflict, because no other choice
promises success. In the twentieth century,
the North Vietnamese communists used it with success against the
United States. Superior fire power brought the
Americans victory in set battles, but was not so
effective in dealing with various forms of guerilla
warfare. The communists,
therefore, usually avoided battles throughout the war.
Continuing warfare over years without a decisive result fed
division and discontent in America and ultimately exhausted
the American will to fight. In the Second Punic War,
Rome repeatedly suffered crushing defeats in battle at
the hands of Hannibal. The Romans, therefore,
chose the tactics of Quintus Fabius Maximus,
avoiding battle, harassing the enemy with
guerilla warfare, until they grew stronger and
he, far from home and cut off from
it by sea, grew weaker and was compelled to withdraw.
Pericles' strategy, however, was unlike these
strategies in many ways. Unlike the Vietnamese
communists and the Romans, he never attempted a set battle
on land. The Vietnamese wore down
America's resolve by inflicting casualties on their forces.
The Romans avoided battle only so long as they had to.
Their ultimate aim was to defeat the enemy in standard
battles, which finally they did in Italy, Spain,
and Africa. Delbruck's comparison with
Frederick's strategy seems to me no less faulty.
The Prussian Monarch was driven to it by combat losses in set
battles fought over two years and by the absence of any
alternative. He needed to avoid battle to
survive. Only good fortune,
not calculated war plans could save him.
Britain came to his aid with financial assistance and then
the most incalculable of all things happened,
the death of the Russian Empress who was a great fan,
who was hostile to Frederick broke up the coalition of his
enemies allowing him to escape from the war unbeaten;
she was succeeded by a czar who loved Frederick the Great and
thereby saved his neck. The situation confronting
Pericles was entirely different from these cases.
No helpful allies stood in the wings and no fortunate accident
came to divide his opponents. Since he avoided all fighting
on land against the Spartans, he inflicted no casualties,
as the Vietnamese and the Romans did.
They and Frederick moreover, aimed finally at fighting and
winning battles when the odds were in their favor.
The core of Pericles' plan, however, was to avoid all land
battles to show that the Peloponnesians could do Athens
no serious harm and to exhaust them psychologically,
to make them see reason and understand that their efforts
were futile and could not bring them victory.
His plan did not work. The element of chance,
the unexpected and incalculable intervened against Pericles and
against Athens in the form of the terrible plague that
ultimately killed a third of the Athenian population.
Of course, all this encouraged the
Peloponnesians who refused to be discouraged and continued to
fight. When Pericles died in 429 the
Athenian treasury was running dry, his plan lay in ruins,
and there was no prospect for victory.
Only when his successors turned to a more aggressive strategy
did the Athenians level the playing field and achieve a
position, which allowed them to hold out
for twenty-seven years, and indeed on more than one
occasion, almost brought victory.
So, it's not surprising that Pericles' strategy in the
Peloponnesian War has brought criticism that raises questions
about his capacity as a military leader,
even from sober and friendly scholars.
Georg Busolt, a very distinguished German
historian, regarded his strategy as fundamentally right,
but even he thought that it was somewhat one-sided and
doctrinaire, and in its execution it was lacking an
energetic procedure and in the spirit of enterprise;
that's from a very good friend. Hermann Bengston,
as you can see, the Germans have dominated this
entire field of discussion, defends the plan against its
critics, but concedes that the carrying out of the offensive
part of the plan appears to modern viewers as not very
energetic and resolute; I'll say.
Their influence no doubt, these critics are,
by the knowledge that Pericles' successors took some actions
that did not risk significant land battles or numerous
casualties, and yet produced important
successes. In the spring of 425,
the brilliant and daring general Demosthenes,
conceived and executed a plan to seize and fortify the
promontory of Pylos at the southwestern tip of the
Peloponnesus. From there, the Athenians could
launch raids at will and encourage the escape or
rebellion of the helots, Sparta's enslaved population.
His success panicked the Spartans who allowed several
hundred of their troops to be trapped and captured on the
Island of Sphacteria, just off Pylos.
He immediately proposed a peace, which the Athenians then
refused. Later in the same spring,
the Athenians seized and garrisoned the Island of Cythera
just off the southeastern tip of the Peloponnesus,
and immediately they began to launch raids against the
mainland. Thucydides reports that the
Spartans suffered what I think of as pretty much a nervous
breakdown. Here's the account
Thucydides gives, "The Spartans sent garrisons
here and there throughout the country,
deciding the number of hoplites by what seemed necessary at each
place. In other respects,
they were very much on guard for fear that there would be a
revolution against the established order,
and from every direction a war rose up around them which was
swift and defied precaution. In military affairs they now
became more timid than ever before since they were involved
in a naval contest outside their normal conceptions of
preparation for war, and in this unaccustomed area
they fought against the Athenians to whom the omission
of an enterprise was always a loss in respect to what they had
expected to achieve." In other words,
whatever victories the Athenians won,
however great, they were always disappointed,
because they had expected more than that.
At the same time the misfortunes that had struck them
in such numbers, unexpectedly and in such a
short time, caused great terror and they
were afraid, the Spartans were, that another calamity might
against strike them sometime, like the one on the island of
Spachteria. For this reason they were less
daring in going into battle, and they thought that whatever
they undertook would turn out badly,
because they had no self confidence as a result of having
little previous experience with misfortune.
Let me just remind you of the enormous confidence with which
they entered the war thinking that it would be no problem at
all, all they had to do was walk
into Attica, and either the Athenians would come out to
fight them as they had done the last time and be destroyed
immediately, or they would surrender rather
than see their lands destroyed and look to what they had been
reduced, not by Pericles' strategy of
exhaustion, but by the rejection of that strategy and the effort
at a more aggressive approach. In the light of results
such as these, it is natural to ask why did
the enterprises that produced these successes,
why did they need to wait until the fifth year of the war?
Why didn't Pericles use them at once?
His failure to do so is the most weighty of the charges
brought against him, and Delbruck uses much effort
and ingenuity to defend him. He is forced to concede,
however, that a more aggressive, offensive effort
would have been helpful. He believes that the attack
Pericles led against Epidaurus in the second year of the war,
in 430, was meant to take and hold that city.
Quote from Delbruck, "If any such conquest had
succeeded, any success in Acarnania,
any campaign of devastation, however intensive,
any fortification of a coastal spot in Mycenae would disappear
in comparison." Taking Epidaurus,
he says, would have threatened the neighboring states near the
coast, it might bring peace at once,
or at least cool the ardor for war amongst Sparta's allies.
So, why did Pericles wait and then do so little?
Delbruck's answer is "we do not know."
The failure by so learned, clever, and determined a
scholar and by as many other defenders to explain Pericles'
behavior in this way, I think, is a powerful sign
that they have taken the wrong path.
Pericles did not mean to use any serious offensive measures
to wear down the enemy's ability to fight.
His goal, as I have said before, was psychological and
intellectual. To convince the Spartans and
their allies that victory was impossible, that the Athenians
could easily sustain the only damage the enemy could inflict,
the ravishing of Attica, and to show to them and the
allies that the Athenians could do them considerable harm,
if they chose. Athens' carefully calculated
limited offensive efforts were meant to deliver a message
without inciting the enemy to fight and to fight harder.
Just as the carefully calculated limited attacks by
American forces against North Vietnam,
aimed at putting pressure on the enemy, without causing their
Chinese supporters to intervene, that kind of strategy calls for
very delicate action and very delicate judgment,
and of course there's no guarantee that it would work.
The offensive part of Pericles' plan was deliberately to do
little harm. For actions that were too
aggressive might anger the enemy and harden his determination.
The goal was to depress the enemies' spirit by showing that
there was no way for them to win, to destroy their will to
fight. Just a little footnote here,
that's always a critical issue in any strategy that anybody
adopts in a war--really, the two fundamental goals and
they do not always produce the same strategy.
One is to make it impossible for the enemy to fight,
to destroy his capacity to fight, if you do that you have
certain victory. The other is to destroy his
will to fight, and of course if you do that
you win, but his will may not be responsive to your approach. If they could destroy the
Spartan will, they could be expected to make
a negotiated peace that would return to the status quo before
the war, only made more secure by the
demonstration that it could not be overthrown by force.
That was Pericles' aim in the war.
That strategy failed, as had Pericles' diplomatic
maneuvers in the period leading to war from 433 to 431.
When civil war in Epidamnus, a remote town on the fringes of
the Greek world, threatened to bring a great war
between the Peloponnesian League and the Athenian Empire,
Pericles, as I have argued to you, pursued a policy of
restrained, limited intervention meant to deter Corinth,
Sparta's important ally without driving the Spartans and all
their Peloponnesian allies into a war against Athens.
That effort also failed, and resulted in a terrible war
that Pericles had wanted to avoid.
Do these great strategic failures fully make the case for
Pericles' critics? Were they the result of
cowardice, lack of enterprise and resolution?
I think that a fair examination of his performance throughout
his life as general suggests otherwise.
The charge of personal cowardice is ludicrous,
even Pflugk-Harttung concedes that his personal courage
operated in battle and in the assembly.
No Athenian who led armies and navies in many battles
repeatedly setting up trophies of victory could have escaped
condemnation, had he shown any sign of
cowardice, nor could he have been re-elected general year
after year, if that was the picture of him.
Nor did he fail to demonstrate boldness and enterprise.
In 446, the very survival of Athens and her empire were
threatened. The most menacing rebellions
broke out close to home, in Euboea, Megara,
and Boeotia. Pericles swiftly took an army
to put down the Euboean rebellion, and just as swiftly
withdrew on news of the second, which opened the door to a
Peloponnesian invasion of Attica.
He arrived, you remember, just in time to persuade the
Spartans to withdraw and then he returned at once to Euboea to
suppress the rebellions there. Again, when the island of Samos
launched a dangerous rebellion back in 440, Pericles took
personal charge, acting promptly and decisively,
and catching the Samian rebels unprepared for his swift
reaction, taking them by surprise,
ultimately forcing them to surrender by means of a naval
blockade. These expeditions,
however, show that Pericles' frequent caution did not derive
chiefly from a temperamental tendency or a character flaw,
but from thought and calculation.
The main reason he avoided land battles against their Spartan
and Peloponnesian allies is because he was certain to lose;
the numbers were decisively against him.
Yet, he was more careful than were bolder generals.
No polis in the Greek world was prodigal with its
citizens in battle, and it behooved the general,
especially in a democratic state, to keep the casualty
lists as low as possible. We need to remember that
Athenian generals were not only military leaders but also
politicians, who needed to be re-elected to their posts every
year. No doubt Pericles sincerely
took pride in the prudence and economy of his leadership,
but it could not have hurt his political popularity when he
boasted to the Athenians what I've quoted before that as far
as it was in his power they would live forever and be
immortals. Such considerations help
explain his cautious performance, and yet there is no
evidence to suggest that he was one of those rare military
geniuses who belonged in the ranks of Hannibal,
Caesar, Alexander the Great, a lesser but still worthy
example in our own time, George Patton,
who understand the limits of rational calculation and war and
the need boldly to seize opportunity when it offers.
Pericles was what--a term that was used in the Second World
War, a soldier's general as the PR forces of Omar Bradley
attached that title to him. He was no George Patton,
or perhaps, even a Bernard Montgomery, who seeks battle
only when the odds are very heavily in his favor.
He lacked the flair and the boldness of a Cimon,
the daring and ruthlessness that seeks victory at any cost.
Another element has been suggested to explain the
Periclean strategy. Pericles himself,
says one critic, was rather an admiral than a
general. The Athenian admiralty it was
which framed the strategy out the outset of the war,
not Pericles the burgermeister,
but Pericles the admiral invented the strategy of
exhaustion, a strategy which came near to
ruining Athens in a couple of years and could never have won
the victory. Well, there is some merit in
this analysis; the Athenians under Pericles
had built a grand strategy that was based on naval power that
might seem to suit a maritime empire,
whose homeland was an island such as Great Britain,
or a power that dominates a continent and is separated from
other great powers by two great oceans,
like the United States. Athens' geographical
situation was not so fortunate, for the city was attached to
the mainland, offering targets of coercion
not available to the enemies of the great Anglo-Saxon countries.
Pericles tried to cancel that disadvantage by building the
long walls connecting the city to its fortified harbor,
thereby in effect turning the city into an island.
It was an extraordinary strategy, far ahead of its time,
in its reliance on human reason and technology and its rejection
of traditional ways of fighting that cost lives and gave the
enemy an advantage. At the same time,
he abandoned all ideas of further expansion and devised a
policy aimed at preserving peace and the status quo that
perfectly suited Athenian interests.
Such a policy depended for success on an extraordinary
amount of rationality on everyone's part.
The Athenians must be content with what they had and abandoned
hopes for extension of their power.
There were always the Athenians who objected to that,
but while he lived Pericles had the wisdom and the political
strength to restrain and control them.
What he could not control were the other states and especially
the enemy. Unexpected changes and shifts
in power are the normal condition of international
history. These changes have always taken
place, because international relations are guided only
partially and spasmodically by rational calculations of
material advantage. Always at work as well are
greed, ambition, jealousy, resentment,
anger, hatred, and Thucydides' famous triad,
fear, honor, and interest.
In the world, as it has been,
therefore, a state satisfied with its situation and wishing
to preserve peace cannot rely on a reason that responds to its
reasoned policies, but must anticipate challenges
that seem unreasonable. The Spartans and their allies
ought to have recognized that they had no realistic strategy
to promise victory over Pericles' reliance on defense
and refusal to fight a major land battle.
But resentment and anger at Athenian power and the fear that
it might ultimately undermine their own alliance and their
security led them to fight. As I find it usual in human
history, they were more influenced by the memory of the
Athenians' failure to fight a traditional battle and
negotiating a peace in 446 than by the recognition that the new
technology in the form of the long walls made it unnecessary
for Athens to risk such a battle in the future.
To deter a war in such circumstances,
which is what Pericles was trying to do,
requires some offensive threat to the Peloponnesians,
whose menace was great and impossible to underestimate,
that would make the fear of immediate consequences of war
stronger than all the emotions leading to war,
but Pericles had come to think of Athens as an invulnerable
island since the acquisition of a fleet,
a vast treasury to support it, and defensible walls.
For such a state to adopt a defensive strategy is natural.
It had developed a unique and enviable way of fighting that
used these advantages, and avoided much of the danger
and unpleasantness of ordinary warfare.
It allowed the Athenians to concentrate their forces quickly
and attack islands and coastal enemies before they were
prepared. It had permitted them to strike
others without danger to their own city and population.
Success in this style of warfare made it seem the only
one necessary and defeats with great losses on land made the
Athenians reluctant to take risks by fighting on land.
Offensive action, in their view,
should be taken as a last resort only;
only when it was absolutely unavoidable.
Pericles carried this approach to its logical conclusion by
refusing to use a land army even in defense of the homeland,
much less by using it in offensive efforts that might do
the enemy serious harm. The enemy's passionate
refusal to see reason made what might be called the Athenian way
of warfare inadequate and Pericles' strategy a form of
wishful thinking that failed. For a state like Athens in 431,
satisfied with the situation, capable of keeping the enemy at
bay, the temptation to avoid the
risks of offensive action is great, but as people often don't
notice, it contains great dangers.
It tends to create a rigid way of thinking that leads men to
apply a previously successful strategy,
or one supported by a general theory to a situation in which
it is not appropriate. But it may have other
disadvantages as well; its capacity to deter potential
enemies from provoking a war is severely limited.
Deterrence by standing behind a strong defensive position and
thereby depriving the enemy of the chance of victory,
assumes a very high degree of rationality and some degree of
imagination on the part of the enemy.
Spartans invaded Attica in 431. They must have thought they
were risking little, even if the Athenians refused
to fight, even if they persisted in that
refusal for a long time, both of which they thought was
unlikely and unnatural. The Spartans would still be
risking little more than time and effort.
In any case, their lands and city would be
safe. Had the Athenians possessed the
capacity to strike where the enemy was vulnerable and had
that capacity been obvious to everybody,
Pericles' strategy of deterrence might have been
effective. Once the war came,
there was no way to win without abandoning the Athenian way of
war and the Periclean strategy. As Pericles lay dying in the
fall of 429, his strategy was a failure.
After three campaigning seasons, the Peloponnesians
showed no signs of exhaustion of any kind.
On the contrary, they had just lately refused an
Athenian offer of peace and fought on with the determination
to destroy Athenian power forever.
The Athenians, on the other hand,
had seen their lands and homes ravaged repeatedly,
their crops and trees burnt and destroyed.
They were also suffering from the plague which was killing
great numbers of them and destroying their moral fiber.
In the anecdote that I quoted at the beginning of this
talk, Plutarch speaks of Pericles' response to the praise
of his military prowess, you'll remember.
He expressed astonishment--you know they thought he was
sleeping, it turned out he wasn't.
He was hearing what they were saying.
He expressed astonishment that they should be praising what was
the result of good fortune as much as his own talents,
and what many others had accomplished.
Instead, he said, they should be praising the
finest and the most important of his claims to greatness -- that
no Athenian now alive has put on mourning clothes because of me.
That assertion, the last words of Pericles
reported to us, must have astounded his
audience, even his friends would have had
to admit that his policy had contributed, at least something,
to the coming of the war and that his strategy had something
to do with the intensity of the destruction caused by the
plague. His final words show deeply
how he felt the wounds caused by the widespread accusations
hurled against him and his stubborn refusal to admit that
he had been wrong in any way. He had applied his great
intelligence to his city's needs, and reason told him that
he was not responsible for the results,
which he must have believed to be temporary.
He must have thought in time his expectations would be
fulfilled. If his fellow citizens would
have the wisdom and courage to hold to his strategy,
they would win out. So he believed and so did his
contemporary Thucydides. More than two millennia
later, Clausewitz saw war through very different eyes.
I quote him, "War is more than a true
chameleon that slightly shapes its characteristics to the given
case. As a total phenomenon,
its dominant tendencies always make war a paradoxical trinity
composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity,
which are to be regarded as a blind natural force.
Of the play of chance and probability, within which the
creative spirit is free to roam and its elements of
subordination as an instrument of policy which makes it subject
to reason alone. These three tendencies are like
three different codes of law, deep rooted in their subject
and yet variable in their relationship to one another.
A theory that ignores any one of them, or seeks to fix an
arbitrary relationship between them would conflict with reality
to such an extent that for this reason alone it would be totally
useless." Like most generals in
history, and unlike its few military geniuses,
Pericles saw war as essentially a linear phenomenon subject,
as Clausewitz said, to reason alone and too little,
in my judgment, did he understand its other
aspects; for that he and his people paid
a very great price. Okay, well, we do have some
time and I'd be very glad to hear any questions or comments
that any of you'd like to make. After all we only have a
twenty-seven year war and we've got twenty minutes to talk about
it, no problem. Anybody have anything to say?
Yes?Student: [inaudible]Professor
Donald Kagan: That's a fairly long story but I think
the best answer I can give is the one I gave last time when I
spoke about Thucydides' reasons for writing the story that he
did. He had been a supporter of
Pericles and things hadn't worked out well.
The state had gone a direction very different from the one that
he favored, including a strategy that was the opposite of
Pericles. The average guy in the street,
who was a guy that he didn't approve of very much,
thought wrongly, he believed,
that Pericles had been dead wrong.
It was Pericles' fault they went to war, it was Pericles'
fault they lost the war, and Thucydides associated
himself, I think, with Pericles and his approach
to things, and so he had to make the case,
that he believed the case that he made.
I mean, it's very important to realize that.
And Plutarch, coming many centuries later,
like everybody, who has ever spoken about the
Peloponnesian War, once Thucydides had written,
was powerfully influenced by Thucydides.
I think just about everybody who has ever considered the war
has come away pretty much with Thucydides' judgment of these
things. So, I think that's the answer
to that. Student:
[inaudible]Professor Donald Kagan: The question
is, "can I think of any modern generals who did use Pericles'
approach as a model." I think the answer is not
anybody--well yeah, General McClellan in the Civil
War and it was a very analogous situation.
McClellan did not want to fight Lee's army.
He wasn't all that crazy about the anti-slavery stuff anyway,
but apart from that, he didn't want to pay the
price, which was a tremendous price fighting the Civil War and
so he wanted to avoid battle and pretty much Lincoln couldn't get
him to fight. So, that's one example.
Now, the next thing I would offer you as something to chew
on at least--it is not identical, it's only similar.
I think the strategy undertaken by the Secretary of
Defense in the current administration in launching the
attacks on Afghanistan and on Persia--I mean Iraq.
I got Greeks on my mind; I have to fight Persians.
Iraq reflected an aspect of it. They were both,
for reasons I don't have to explain to you,
desperately eager to reduce casualties to a minimum and they
were desperately eager to choose an approach that would limit the
time that the war lasted, because of the political
situation in the last decades in American history and they had an
advantage technologically that seemed to make that
possible--America's fantastic advantage in fire power,
the capacity to deliver the fire power at a distance with
very little risk to the deliverers,
with the notion of doing tremendous harm when it got
there, but I don't know if any of you remember any of this,
some of you were too young to even think about it I guess.
Originally, remember--what was that phrase that they had,
what was that great strategy we were going to use by bombing the
hell out of the Iraqi's? Shock and awe;
it was the same thing. Shock and awe was meant to say
oh my God this is going to happen to us and we quit,
was what they had in mind. They deliberately chose not
to have ground forces that would have been capable of doing the
kinds of things that it turns out you need to do to be
successful in these wars just like other wars.
So, when it happened that it was clear things were not
working out, according to their plan,
they stubbornly clung to that plan, even as the evidence was
that it wasn't going to work. So, that would be a candidate I
suggest. Yes?Student:
[inaudible]Professor Donald Kagan: Yeah,
the question is, "do I think that recent
Athenian history or the structure--you mean the
democratic society--the democracy had anything to do
with the adoption of this plan?" Perhaps.
You're absolutely right; there must have been a very
clear and painful memory of what happened to Tolmides,
when he invaded Boeotia. There were very,
very heavy casualties there for the Athenians.
That's the only one in which they did have a lot,
but they did have those and they were unusual.
So, it may have persuaded Pericles that the Athenian
people would find it hard, but on balance I really think
not. I don't think that the Athenian
democracy was very different from the oligarchies of the
other Greek cities in the way they thought about things.
They would have much preferred to fight it out.
It was only Pericles' incredible command of the
political situation that allowed him to take the strategy that
people said, what in the world is this guy
doing? They turned against it very
swiftly. So, no I don't think that
democracy was especially important.
Now, the enemies of Pericles and the enemies of democracy--I
shouldn't say the enemies of Pericles,
I mean the ancient enemies of democracy do say that it was the
Athenian democracy's way of running the war,
which guaranteed disaster and they fix on something that comes
later down the road, the Sicilian Expedition,
which was a dangerous undertaking as it turned out,
although the Athenians didn't think so at the time,
and they think only a democracy could have done anything as
stupid as that.They are, in that way,
following precisely what Thucydides says,
but if you read my account you will see that there's another
way of looking at it, but that's what the ancient
anti-democratic view was. Democracies are idiots;
they don't know how to conduct war or do anything else right.
They will bring disaster. I think you can get disaster a
lot of ways. Student:
[inaudible]Professor Donald Kagan: It's very
clear that so long as Pericles was in charge everybody did what
Pericles wanted done. Part of the reason was that we
know pretty well, from the evidence that at least
a good number of the ten generals in any one year were
close to Pericles, so that his political influence
spread. Very unusual thing in the
ancient world for anybody in ancient Athens for anybody to
have that kind of a carry-over effect,
but we see there's always several generals that we know
are friends of Pericles, and I think the rest of the
story is that you see the generals don't get to decide
what they do in ancient Athens. This is the part that blows
your mind. When you send an army out,
that army gets a general or more, it gets an assigned amount
of money and equipment and stuff,
and it gets orders and all of those things are decided by the
assembly after a debate by a majority vote.
And what I would suggest to you is that Pericles did not lose
any of those arguments, except in the one case when
they came after him and nailed him, and then they put him back
in office again. So, does that take care of your
question? Student:
[inaudible] Professor Donald Kagan:
The heart of the question is, "was Pericles wise to adopt a
strategy no matter how good a strategy it might have been,
which he knew the Athenians didn't like," and I think the
answer--well, the outcome is obvious.
No, he wasn't wise, but that's I think more because
the strategy was faulty, not so much because the
Athenians didn't like it. He had proven over the years,
and he proved now in the most delicate of times,
that essentially he could get the Athenians to do what he
wanted to do, whether in fact they liked it
to begin with or not; he persuaded them to do it.
So, I don't think that was really a flaw.
The problem was that things went wrong almost immediately
and then such terrible things were happening as did shake his
power for awhile, but even then he came back into
power and still his strategy wasn't working.
I think the problem, therefore--I think you could
say he knew what he was doing. He thought he could get away
with it and he could have if the strategy had been correct. Yes?Student:
[inaudible]Professor Donald Kagan: Oh yes,
yes, the question is ancient writers--Plutarch is whom you're
really talking about. They give Pericles credit for
being a great general, but they say bad things about
Nicias, who was involved in the great
defeat in Sicily and yet, Nicias pursued something like
the strategy of Pericles, which was avoiding these
conflicts. I think the first thing I want
to point out is that Thucydides didn't do that.
Not only does Thucydides thoroughly support the strategy
of Pericles, he writes an encomium on the death of Nicias
that raises him to the level of Pericles or higher in his own
estimation. But in the case of Nicias it
was, in a way, even worse than what Pericles
did because Nicias, first of all,
was against the war, against going to Sicily in the
first place, then when he was chosen to be
general he went, but before he did that,
he tried to convince that having lost the vote shall we
go. He then decided to trick
the Athenians into not going anyway by saying to them,
oh well, if you're going to go all right, but it'll be
perfectly safe if you just sort of take this--the original fleet
was going to have sixty ships period.
Well, they ended up having a 130 ships, 5000 hoplites,
raising the risk of that thing to the level that finally made
it seem like they could lose the war by losing the Sicilian
campaign, and he didn't--the Athenians,
instead of saying what he expected, oh no,
no if that's what we have to do,
let's not go, Instead they said,
right on, yes you can have everything you ask for Nicias,
what would you like, and off they went.
Thereafter, his performance on that
expedition is one of somebody, who doesn't really want to
carry out his instructions. What he would have liked to do
was, having lost the argument twice now--he went out and did
everything he could to avoid confronting any battle in
Syracuse and was finally driven to fight at Syracuse,
very much against his will and then I could go back and read
it, but he screws up the detail of it over and over again,
and so I think there are good grounds for condemning him as a
general, whereas, the grounds on which Pericles
should be criticized, I think, is as a strategist
rather than as a commander. Anybody else?
Yeah?Student: [inaudible]
Professor Donald Kagan: No, but I think they--well,
I'll make one little exception to that, but I think they could
have had a very good chance to come out of the war in the way
Pericles hoped they would. If they had pursued the limited
aggressive program that was undertaken by Cleon and
Demosthenes after the death of Pericles--so,
taking Pylos, building a fort at Pylos,
taking Cythera, building a fort there,
and perhaps even a few other places on the periphery of the
Peloponnesus and launching attacks from those places,
but not staying to fight the Spartans at any great battle,
just causing that to happen. If they had been able to do
that for a stretch of time, then the hope that Cleon had
that the helots might escape to these forts and ultimately bring
about an internal upheaval, which the Spartans panicked
might happen, would have led the Spartans to
offer peace, and in fact they do.
The Spartans offer peace. You could argue that if the
Athenians had simply accepted the Spartan peace offer in 425
the war would have been over and the Athenian Empire would have
been intact just the way Pericles wanted it.
So, not only could they have done it--and they would have
done it, if they had accepted it.
They wouldn't accept victory you could argue,
as many a scholar does. The only other point I want to
make is after that didn't happen, and finally a peace was
drawn up and signed and in effect in 421,
which is another evidence that they could achieve what they
wanted by the techniques that were put forward,
but after that happened that peace broke down and now the
Athenians found themselves part of a new alliance of states,
Athenians with three Peloponnesian democracies who
produce a big land battle in the Peloponnesus and the Athenians
come--I mean, the enemies of Sparta come that
close to defeating the Spartan army in the Peloponnesus.
Had they done that, they would have finished Sparta
off as a dominant power of the Greeks.
So the answer is, they actually had it in their
hands a couple of times and on another time they missed by
about an inch. Yeah they could have won that
way. I think we're out of time.
Let me wish you all a very happy holiday.
Bye-bye.
