This article investigates the theoretical assumptions and implications of de Ste. Croix’s approach to interstate politics in The Origins of the Peloponnesian War. It suggests that two approaches can be identified in the work: one which sees a fundamental connection between political systems within a state and that state’s conduct of interstate politics, and another, closer to conventional ‘Realist’ theories, which sees a clear dividing line between domestic and interstate politics, and in which interstate relations need to be understood (...) according to a distinct analytical framework. Although this tension was probably not a particular concern to de Ste. Croix himself, it does have a bearing on ongoing debates in International Theory; the final part of the article briefly explores the possibility that the concept of ‘compulsion’, important to both Thucydides’ and de Ste. Croix’s understanding of the causes of the Peloponnesian War, might provide a way of reconciling these two approaches. (shrink)

The traditional text of Thucydides, II. 1, dates the surprise of Plataea by the Thebans, which began the Peloponnesian war, έπì ΠυΘοδώρου τι δύο μνας ρχοντος Αθηναίοις. It has long been recognized that the two months are too short a time, and that the facts of the history demand four. The day cannot be precisely determined, but the narrative of Thucydides fixes it near the end of a lunar month, and the choice has lain between the new moons of (...) March 8 and April 7, 431 B.C. Now that Meritt has shown that the year of Pythodorus was not intercalary and ended on July 2, the former must be accepted. Accordingly the Theban attack may be put on the night of, let us say, March 3, which by Attic reckoning would be the early hours of Anthesterion 27. (shrink)

This article aims to discuss the relationship between Herodotus and Thucydides. New scholarly trends date the composition of Herodotus’ Histories to 413 BC, or even later, against high chronology of 431, and suggest Herodotus’ use of Thucydides’ narrative. Herodotus’ debt to Thucydides has been suggested by scholars either cautiously or boldly. This examination will show cases where Herodotus is alluding to events of the Peloponnesian War or even responding to Thucydides’ narrative. In fact, anachronisms, presentisms, and allusions to Thucydides’ (...) text can be found throughout Herodotus’ narrative. We will explore the reasons for Herodotus’ engaging with the events of that War, conjecturing about his goals: attracting the interest of his audience, or providing a warning to his contemporaries; moreover, it is important to understand whether this engagement was just coincidental. (shrink)

This article examines the impact on Spartan historiography of Chapter IV of de Ste. Croix’s Origins of the Peloponnesian War, focusing on his discussions of Spartan politics and society in Sections v–vi. These sections fit oddly within the overall chapter, but they blew a breath of fresh air into Spartan studies through their revisionist approach, intimations of the socio-economic bases of policy-making, and extended accounts of ‘real-life’ political episodes across the classical period. Along with Moses Finley’s near-contemporary article on (...) Sparta, OPW significantly influenced the following generation of British historians (including the author), although they often adopted different interpretations or developed new perspectives on Spartan society only hinted at by de Ste. Croix. OPW also had an important impact on Western European historiography on Spartan politics. Its combination of constitutional and societal approaches gives it an enduring currency in the context of developing Historical Institutionalist approaches to political studies. (shrink)

Thucydides wrote the story of the first democracy in history, and of the fortunes and fall of its empire, but his pages contain the modern world-scene in miniature. The tale is told by a great political thinker, whose penetrating insight and dramatic power caused Macaulay to call him the 'greatest historian that ever lived.' His work, slightly abridged, is here presented in translation with an introduction and notes.

Given the increasing interest in ancient military history it seems timely to set Perikles' Peloponnesian War policy of avoiding major land battles in the context of the military options available and how these worked in practice. I should, however, sound one note of caution from the start. My discussion represents a modern assessment of the defence strategies and options available to Athens in 431. While Perikles and his successors undoubtedly considered how best to fight the war, it would be (...) misleading to even imply that their thought processes involved conducting an analysis anywhere near as sophisticated as the one which follows. Quite simply they lacked the theoretical concepts and even the technical vocabulary to do so. There was no history or tradition of staff college appreciations in fifth century Athens and no body of technical or theoretical military literature, and it seems clear that even experienced and successful commanders did not look at war with the same sort of theoretical constructs which we take for granted today. (shrink)

Athens at the time of the Peloponnesian war was the arena for a dramatic battle between politics and religion in the hearts and minds of the people. 'Fear and loathing in ancient athens', originally published in German but now available for the first time in an expanded and revised English edition, sheds new light on this dramatic period of history and offers a new approach to the study of Greek religion. The book explores an extraordinary range of events and (...) topics: impiety charges and prosecutions; the horrors of the plague; the mutilation of hermai and the profanation of the mysteries; the controversy created by the adoption of new gods; the impressive architectural structures of the sculptor Phidias; the military conflicts of the Peloponnesian war; and the thoughts of the mysterious philosopher Socrates. 'Fear and Loathing in Ancient Athens' will be an indispensible study for students and scholars studying Athenian religion and politics. (shrink)

Throughout the Peloponnesian War, no state remained as aggressively hostile toward Athens as Corinth. Following the affairs of Corcyra and Poteidaia, Corinth successfully argued that war be declared against Athens. After ten years of fighting, when Sparta agreed to the Peace of Nikias, Corinth refused to accept its terms and make peace with Athens. We know that Corinth and Athens were directly engaged in hostilities in 419 and 416 and were on opposing sides in the fighting between Epidauros and (...) Argos in 418. After Athens sent forces against Sicily in the summer of 415, Corinth voted independently to support Syracuse and encouraged Sparta to increase hostilities against Athens in both Greece and Sicily. When the Peloponnesian War came to an end in 404 with the final Athenian defeat, Corinth continued to oppose peace with Athens and urged that the city be destroyed. (shrink)

It might reasonably be argued that this question is one of those historical problems which form excellent subjects for the writing of essays, but which are far too complex to admit of a decisive answer, and consequently are much better left alone. No one man is responsible for a war between great powers, and the motives which influence the vast number of people, whose consent is necessary, can rarely, if ever, be identical. It is therefore comparatively easy to argue against (...) any given motive which is asserted to be the one and only reason. Certainly the writer would make no effort to rake up the ashes of this controversy, were it not that in Dr. Grundy's recent work on Thucydides a new and ingenious theory is put forward concerning the vera causa of the Peloponnesian War. (shrink)

In an article in the Classical Quarterly of October, 1911, Mr. Guy Dickins criticized certain views put forward by Mr. Cornford, by the writer of the article on Greek History in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and by myself, on the statements made by Thucydides as to the cause or causes of the Peloponnesian War. Mr. Dickins makes three statements as to the views which he supposes me to hold. Not one of the three statements is even approximately correct.

This article discusses the fortune of Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s famous article ‘The Character of the Athenian Empire’, and reassesses its basic thesis that the Athenian Empire was popular among the lower classes of the allied cities in the light of recent developments in the field. After surveying the article’s immediate and more recent reception, and discussing its relation with The Origins of the Peloponnesian War and The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, it isolates four key new (...) trends in Greek history that, while going against some of Ste. Croix’s basic convictions, end up reinforcing his overall case. These are: a renewed attention to the mass and elite dichotomy, with recent work interpreting Greek oligarchy as a fundamentally reactive and anti-demotic regime; the recognition of the continued relevance of Persian meddling in the later fifth-century; a sea-change in Attic epigraphy which has led to the post-dating of several ‘imperial’ decrees; the new recognition of the dynamism of the Greek economy, and of the economic function of the Athenian Empire itself. Finally, the article addresses the paradigm of class struggle and stresses how democracy and economic dynamism, to which the Athenian Empire contributed, fostered the growth of slave markets and worsened the exploitation of ‘marginal’ regions as slave suppliers. (shrink)

This article examines the disconnect between, on the one hand, the insistence on the part of multiple characters in Thucydides’ first book on the need for the Peloponnesians to invest in naval power to defeat Athens, and, on the other, the failure to act on this in the narrative of books 2–7. It then analyses the numismatic evidence for the way in which Sparta does then act upon this advice in the course of the Ionian War, and suggests that Thucydides’ (...) view that this was done primarily with Persian support may be missing a (brief) Spartan attempt to create a fiscally self-supporting empire. (shrink)

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Justiça, lei e poder são três conceitos que se interligam na História da Guerra do Peloponeso, de Tucídides. Este artigo desenvolve-se em torno do confronto que se pode estabelecer entre as noções de nomos (lei) e physis (natureza), tanto em Tucídides, como nos sofistas, nos pré-socráticos, em Platão e Aristóteles.

It has become necessary to enter any discussion of the date of the Kallias decrees, IG i3.52, armed with apologies and justifications merely for bringing up the matter again; such is the result not so much of the quantity of articles and chapters written on the subject as of the belief that the orthodox date, 434/3, has been proved, despite reliance on circumstantial evidence and some forceful objections levied against it.1 Indeed, that the case is considered closed can find no (...) better reflection than the assignment of the date 434/3 in IG i3 without even a question mark. (shrink)

It has become necessary to enter any discussion of the date of the Kallias decrees, IG i3.52, armed with apologies and justifications merely for bringing up the matter again; such is the result not so much of the quantity of articles and chapters written on the subject as of the belief that the orthodox date, 434/3, has been proved, despite reliance on circumstantial evidence and some forceful objections levied against it.1 Indeed, that the case is considered closed can find no (...) better reflection than the assignment of the date 434/3 in IG i3 without even a question mark. (shrink)

In Ancient Greece, the relation between war and peace used to have an ambiguous meaning. War was considered as a normal state and peace was seen only as an exception or a temporary truce during a long lasting conflict. But peace and political stability were also valued: the aim of war was never the total annihilation of the opponent. Besides this opposition, there was a balance between war and peace during these times and this conception, inherited from the heroic times, (...) lasted until the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. This event redefined the relation between war and peace. The meaning of conflict moved from polemos, as codified conflict between cities, to stasis, as civil war. War was less perceived as something positive and more people valued peace and stability. Plato’s political thought was developed in this context as a potential answer to this redefinition of conflict as well as the threat of an excessive and radical conception of war. However, Plato had to face an exigent challenge. No political regime was able to establish peace anymore, so Plato needed to create a brand new political system to solve the problems raised by the Peloponnesian War. The goal of this paper will be to present Plato’s response to these political challenges by showing that his response is deeply innovative for his time but also profoundly rooted in a traditional conception of conflict that was already obsolete when he wrote his masterpieces. (shrink)

In this 2001 book Jonathan Price attempts to demonstrate that Thucydides consciously viewed and presented the Peloponnesian War in terms of a condition of civil strife - stasis, in Greek. Thucydides defines stasis as a set of symptoms indicating an internal disturbance in both individuals and states. This diagnostic method, in contrast to all other approaches in antiquity, allows an observer to identify stasis even when the combatants do not or cannot openly acknowledge the nature of their conflict. The (...) words and actions which Thucydides chooses for his narrative meet his criteria for stasis: the speeches in the History represent the breakdown of language and communication characteristic of internal conflict, and the zeal for victory led to acts of unusual brutality and cruelty, and overall disregard for genuinely Hellenic customs, codes of morality and civic loyalty. Viewing the Peloponnesian War as a destructive internal war had profound consequences for Thucydides' historical vision. (shrink)

This essay argues that the Republic is, among other things, a meditation by Plato on the proximity of philosophy and war and on the dangers of that proximity for philosophy and politics. It is also Plato's reflection on the conduct, execution, and impact of a particular war, the panHellenic Peloponnesian War, in whose aftermath the dialogue was written and against whose backdrop it is set. Destabilizing settled rules of engagement and categories of identification, that war made especially urgent the (...) practice of independent judgment and its virtues, whose inculcation, I show, amount to the education to philosophy that is the dialogue as a whole. (shrink)

Although Plato writes less about war than we might expect--especially considering the fact that his dialogues are historically set during the Peloponnesian War--the right conduct of war constitutes a crucial concern for Plato. In both the Alcibiades and Laches dialogues, rightful conduct of war is linked to the practice of virtue. Neither a good statesman nor a good military man can ignore this link, which joins military pursuits not only to courage, but to the whole of virtue, including justice. (...) In the Republic , the passage from a luxurious city to a well-ordered and virtuous city is described by means of the proper education of the city's military guardians, and a teaching of ius in bello --to use a just-war term--for wars between Greeks is outlined. Finally, in the Laws , peace, not war, is presented as the true aim of good laws, and the importance of legitimate authority in war-making is duly emphasized. (shrink)