The Peloponnesian War

By the time he published The Peloponnesian War, Donald Kagan, professor of classics and history at Yale University, had already produced four academic tomes on Thucydides’ history of the conflict.  In this text, however, Kagan takes a different approach.  Here he uses the heavily researched material from his earlier works to tackle a perhaps more difficult task, that of presenting a well worn scholarly topic in a manner accessible to a mainstream audience.  He constructs the text in a format utilizing short chapters and incorporating maps within the narrative en route to what he envisions as, “a readable narrative in a single volume to be read by the general reader.”

The twenty-seven year Peloponnesian War began in 431 BC signifying the symbolic, if not official, end of the “golden age” of peace and cultural advancement of the Hellenic period which existed from the advent of democracy in Athens in 507 BC to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC The Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta were the central warring factions of the Peloponnesian War with the former holding great naval power and the latter the leading army and an authoritarian regime.  The ultimate modern significance of the Peloponnesian War is likely that it contained early examples of differing political entities attempting to coexist but finding inevitable imbalances of power leading to conflict, mistrust, and the desire to draw their allies into pending conflict.  Kagan delves into various facets of the war giving a picture of not only the military aspects but also the political and economical implications.

Any examination of the Peloponnesian War will stem from Thucydides and will face the inherent concern of weighing the accuracy of texts translated from their original language, in this case Greek.  With Kagan considered a, if not the, leading contemporary authority on Thucydides his support for Thucydides’ assertion that war rather than peace is the innate human position is an acceptable starting point for his viewpoints on the ancient Greek and his work.  Kagan goes on to agree that the main cause of the war was a Spartan fear of the growing power of Athens.  While an examination of the war almost has to be tied the Thucydides as the major historian of the era, Kagan does not avoid taking exception with some of his work.  For example, Thucydides considers the Athenian attack on Sicily in 415 BC an indication of its desire to control the entire island, while Kagan says the size of the armada dispatched indicates that the goal was much less than total domination.



The causes of the Peloponnesian War are deep rooted, stemming from the fifth-century BC Athenian-Spartan conflict following their joint victory over the Persians.  After that sixteen year period of unrest following the Persian defeat came a proposed thirty year truce leading to a period of peace.  The Peloponnesian War that became fodder for the histories of Thucydides began in the city of Epidamnus where democrats clashed with oligarchs ending the truce.  Kagan presents his topic in a (relatively speaking) concise five hundred pages journeying through war and peace.  He chronologically covers the years of threats of war and attempts to avoid it through diplomacy.  Both Athens and Sparta had vast numbers of allies many of which switched sides based on their own shifting self-interests.  The book’s thirty-seven chapters begin with subtopics such as Sparta and its Alliance, Athens and its Empire, and Threats to Peace, and progress through Sparta Chooses War, Attacks on Pericles, The Spartans Attack the Northwest, ultimately culminating in The Results of the Battle and the Fate of Athens.  Throughout, Kagan’s narrative balances historical descriptions, political discourse, and biographical sketches, leading to what might be the lasting theme of the war itself.  In that Sparta’s victory resulted in a movement away from democracy in the Greek world that was short-lived, Kagan supports Thucydides’ view of war as a violent teacher saying, “the thin issue of civilization that allows human beings to live decently and achieve their higher possibilities was repeatedly ripped asunder, plunging the combatants into depths of cruelty and viciousness of which only human beings at their worst are capable.  The declared purpose of the victors, the liberation of the Greeks, became a mockery…and the peace that followed was of short duration.”  He concludes, “If it was indeed the greatest of Greek wars, it was also the most terrible of Greek tragedies.”

While Kagan relies on Thucydides’ work, as would be necessary for any historian writing of the period, Kagan’s book is far from a mere rehashing of the ancient texts.  Kagan presents a history that stands on its own, even in comparison to the previous four works of his own on the topic by presenting an accessible manuscript with particular attention given to the strategies of Athens and Sparta and the lasting implications to which they lead.