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Războiul peloponesiac
by Tucidide · -411 · 4 reading cards · public domain
4 cards
Războiul peloponesiac · -411
The road from alliance to domination begins when contributions become tribute and the treasury moves home.
Delos, an island five kilometres long in the middle of the Cyclades, was the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, with a sanctuary frequented by all of Ionia from the seventh century BC. It had almost nothing else: no water, no arable land. Precisely its sacred neutrality made it, in 478 BC, the seat of the alliance led by Athens after the Persians were driven off: the Delian League, with a common treasury in the temple and members' assemblies on the island. Each city contributed ships or money, and the money contribution, more convenient, became the rule. Twenty-five years later, in 454 BC, the Athenians moved the treasury from Delos to the Acropolis. The assemblies ceased; contributions became tribute; cities that wanted to leave — Naxos, Thasos, later Samos — were besieged and subdued. With the league's money Pericles built the Parthenon. In 426–425 Athens "purified" Delos, forbidding births and deaths on the island and removing its inhabitants; the sacred island had become property. Thucydides, who saw the end, says that exactly this — Athens's growth and Sparta's fear — made the Peloponnesian War inevitable. Today's parallel: the "Thucydides trap" is Graham Allison's name for the rivalry between a rising power and an established one. But Delos teaches something else, smaller and more frequent: how a defensive alliance, with money contributions and a common treasury, turns into an empire within one generation, without anyone declaring it.
“The real cause I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.”
Războiul peloponesiac · -411
What we know for certain about Troy is less than the legend and more than nothing.
In 1870 Heinrich Schliemann, a German merchant made rich, begins digging on the hill of Hisarlik in Turkey, where Frank Calvert had suspected for years that Troy lay. Schliemann is looking for Priam's city and cuts a huge trench through the middle of the hill, destroying the upper layers — including, ironically, the one that might have been Homeric Troy. "Priam's Treasure", which he brings out in 1873, is a thousand years older than the war. But the hill is real, holds nine superimposed cities, and remains the most probable site of Ilion. The excavations of Wilhelm Dörpfeld and then Carl Blegen (1930s) showed that Troy VI, with sloping walls and towers, was destroyed around 1300 BC, probably by earthquake, and that Troy VIIa, rebuilt more poorly, burned around 1180 BC, with arrowheads and skeletons in the streets — the favourite candidate for the besieged city. Manfred Korfmann (1988–2005) found the lower town, much larger than the citadel, and the defensive ditch, making Troy a regional centre, not a village. What is missing: any inscription naming Priam, Hector or the Achaeans. The Hittite archives (Wilusa, Ahhiyawa) are the best bridge, but still indirect. Today's parallel: Schliemann is the textbook case of confirmation — he found what he was looking for because he dug until he found it. Serious analysis, Thucydides says 2,400 years earlier, withstands both the poet and the chronicler "attractive at truth's expense".
“Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth's expense.”
Războiul peloponesiac · -411
Tightly coupled systems do not fall to one shock but to five at once.
The traditional date of Troy's fall, calculated by Eratosthenes, is 1184 BC. Archaeology shows that between 1200 and 1150 BC nearly all the Mycenaean palaces — Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes — are destroyed, often by fire, and never rebuilt. Linear B disappears completely; the Greeks will write again only four hundred years later, with a Phoenician alphabet. Population falls, settlements move to the heights, long-distance trade dies out. This is the "Bronze Age collapse", which strikes the Hittite empire, Ugarit and the Egyptian coast at the same time, where the pharaohs fight the "Sea Peoples". The causes are disputed and probably multiple: prolonged drought (shown in pollen and sediments), earthquakes, the breaking of the copper and tin routes bronze depended on, migrations, revolts against the palaces, and a system too centralised to withstand several shocks at once. Thucydides, without archaeology, guesses a mechanism: the warriors' late return, the power struggles at home, the exiles founding other cities. The legends of the returns — Agamemnon killed by his wife, Odysseus finding his house occupied — are the memory of that chaos. Today's parallel: complex, tightly coupled systems — supply chains, energy grids, empires — fall not to a single shock but to five at once. And military victory does not protect against collapse: the Achaeans won at Troy and vanished within two generations.
“The late return of the Hellenes from Ilium caused many revolutions, and factions ensued almost everywhere; and it was the citizens thus driven into exile who founded the cities.”
Războiul peloponesiac · -411
A coalition holds through the strongest member's power to punish, not through the shared oath.
Between 1600 and 1200 BC mainland Greece is divided between fortified palaces: Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes. Their "Cyclopean" walls are blocks weighing tons; inside, scribes keep accounts on clay tablets in Linear B, deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris — the first written Greek. The tablets speak of sheep, oil, bronze, chariots and slaves, not heroes. The king is the wanax, with a staff of officials, and he controls long-distance trade: Baltic amber, Syrian ivory, Cypriot copper. Homer keeps the memory of this world: Agamemnon, "king of kings", leads a coalition of lesser kings, each with his own ships, listed in the Iliad's "catalogue of ships". Thucydides, eight centuries later, does not believe in the oath of Helen's suitors: the coalition formed because Mycenae had the largest fleet and the others were afraid. It is the first alliance analysis in European history — the power to punish binds more tightly than the common cause. Today's parallel: modern military coalitions also hold through a mix of interest, dependence and the fear of being left out. Each member's contribution is public, as in the catalogue of ships, and the quarrels about who brings how much are just as old.
“He had also a navy far stronger than his contemporaries, so that, in my opinion, fear was quite as strong an element as love in the formation of the confederate expedition.”