Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/114

Rh &quot;but which lay deeper than either of the others. The two alleged causes were (1) the active help given by Athens to the Corcyraians in their quarrel with Corinth concerning Epidamnus, a colony of Corcyra; (2) the Athenian blockade of Potidrei, a Corinthian colony which had revolted from Athens. The more essential cause was the growth of Athenian power, and the alarm which this caused to the Lacedaemonians. In truth the affair of Epidamnus and the affair of Potidsea were merely the sparks which hap pened to kindle the flame. That long conflict which we call the Peloponnesian War had been prepared from the time when the Athenian democracy, founded by Clis- thenes, had become a power in Greece through the suc cessful struggle against Persia. From- that time there were two antagonistic principles, represented by two rival eities, oligarchy by Sparta, democracy by Athens. The other cities grouped themselves naturally around these. All Greece was divided between these two ideas. The Peloponnesian War is the collision between them. It would be inconsistent with the limits and the scope of this sketch to enumerate the details of the war in each of its twenty- seven years. Yet we must aim at indicating the periods into which it falls, the leading characteristics and tenden cies which it presents.

1. The first period of the Peloponnesian War comprises the years from its commencement in 431 B.C. to the peace of Nicias in 421, hence sometimes called the Ten Years War. As one of its main features was the frequent invasion of Attica by the Peloponnesians, the latter called it the Attic War. The result of it was that Sparta had gained nothing, and that Athens had lost nothing except Amphipolis. By the peace of Nicias Athens kept all places which had surrendered voluntarily. Those allies of Sparta from which these places had been taken were naturally discontented. Corinth and Thebes especially were aggrieved. In spite of all the mistakes of Athens, in spite of the desolating plague, in spite of such reverses as the defeats at Delium and Amphipolis, and the loss of the Chalcidic towns, Athens remained on the whole triumphant; and against what Brasidas had done for Sparta might be set the victories of Phormio and the capture of Sphacteria. On the other hand the peace of Nicias had brought disaffection into the Spartan confed eracy.

2. The second period of the war extends from the peace of Nicias in 421 to the catastrophe of the Sicilian expedi tion in 413. The four years immediately following the peace of Nicias are the only years during which the great fundamental antithesis on which the whole war rested was temporarily obscured. Many of the allies of Sparta were discontented, and the intrigues of Alcibiades were active among them. But it was in vain that oligarchical allies were gained for the moment to the democratic cause. The normal relations were soon restored. Then came the Athenian expedition to Sicily, ending in a crushing disaster. Thucydides thinks that the mistake lay, not so much in an original miscalculation of strength, as in the failurs at Athens to support the expedition after it had gone. It is indeed possible that with other guidance Athens might have conquered Syracuse. But at least it was essential that Athens should put forth its whole strength, if only for the reason that no people resembled the Athenians so closely as the Syracusans. Yet never had the Athenians fought under greater disadvantages. The Athenian forte was in attack ; at Syracuse they had to act on the defensive. The bold and versatile Alcibiades was made a public enemy. Nicias, timid and in weak health, is opposed to Gylippus, who unites a Dorian energy of hatred to Athens with something like Ionian command of resource. And, when everything had been lost except a chance of saving the army, the perversity of Nicias defeated the prudence of Demosthenes. The Sicilian disaster was the turning-point of the war. Pericles had warned the Athenians against needless ventures and a policy of aggrandizement. They had incurred a needless risk of tremendous magnitude, and had lost. If they had won, Alcibiades would probably have raised a tyranny on the ruins of their democracy.

3. The third and last period of the war is from the Sicilian defeat in 413 to the taking of Athens by Lysander in 404, a few months after the battle of /Egospotami, This is the period called the Decelean War, because Decelea in Attica was occupied by the Spartans in 413, and continued to be a permanent base of their operations against Athens. As the sea board of Asia Minor was the scene of much of the fighting, it is sometimes also called the Ionian War. In this last chapter the war takes a new char acter. After the Sicilian overthrow Athens was really doomed. The Decelean War is a prolonged agony of Athenian despair. Athens had now no hope but in her ships ; and the leaders had to find their own supplies. The Spartan treasury was also empty. This want of money on both sides gave the mastery of the situation to Persia. And it was due to the factious treason of Alcibiades that the aid of Persia was given to Sparta. Athens was ulti mately conquered, not by the Spartan confederacy, but by the disloyalty of Athenians bent on ruining political oppo nents. The &quot; Revolution of the Four Hundred,&quot; with its brief success, greatly contributed to the exhaustion of the city. Even at /Egospotami, even when Lysander was before Athens, it was the baneful influence of Athenian faction that turned the scale. When Athens had been taken and the walls destroyed, Sparta was once more the first power in Greece. When Thrasybulus and the patriotic exiles had overthrown the rule of the Tliivty Tyrants, they restored the Athenian democracy, but they could not re store the old Athenian power.

Sparta itself was changed. The old Spartan institutions had taught a simple reliance on disciplined strength. In the Peloponnesian War Sparta had won the victory with Persian gold. Already the love of money had found its way into the state which had once been so carefully protected from it. Differences of degree had arisen between the citizens, whose equality had been the very basis of the old Spartan life. Citizens who had been impoverished by the rise of prices, and who could no longer pay their share of the public tables, were now distinguished as &quot;inferiors&quot; (vTTo^eiove?) from those who retained their full civic rights (ofj.oioi). Spartan commanders abroad were not always inaccessible to bribes. The habit of military discipline indeed remained. Spartans were still distinguished, as a rule, by gallantry in the field, by care for the dead, and by attention to the ritual of the gods. Nor had the valley of the Eurotas remained closed to the higher culture of Greece. The old type of Spartan leader the rough soldier incap able of eloquence or of finesse had ceased to be the only type. An Athenian might have envied the powers of persuasion and the diplomatic tact of such Spartans as Brasidas, Lysander, or Gylippus. But the qualities of the old Sparta were seldom fused into a perfect harmony with the new accomplishments. Such men as Lichas and Cal- licratidas were rare. The balance of political power, as it existed in the old constitution, had also been unsettled. The kings were still, as of old, the commanders-in -chief on land. But the new office of the admiral (vavap^o-;) was invested with the chief command at sea. The supreme control of the state had passed more and more into the hands of the ephors, and the ephors, chosen annually, were not always incorruptible.

Sparta had waged the Peloponnesian War in the name 