Athens was necessary to Sparta, in the exercise of her virtue, as steel is to flint in the production of fire; and if the cities of Greece had been united under one head, we should never have heard of Epaminondas or Thrasybulus, of Lycurgus or Solon.
ADAM FERGUSON
CALLIAS son of Hipponicus was not just the wealthiest man in Athens. He was also among the most canny. As a diplomat, he demonstrated consummate skill. The arrangement that he negotiated initially with the Persian monarch Xerxes and then with his son Artaxerxes was well crafted. As we have had occasion to note, in leaving the Aegean and much of the coastline of Anatolia to the Athenians and their allies, and in relegating the interior of Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean to the Persians and their subjects, the arrangement reflected a balance of power between the two rivals that had proved enduring. On three separate occasions when the Great King had issued a challenge—at Salamis, at Eurymedon, and Cypriot Salamis—the Hellenes had demonstrated their decisive superiority at sea; and, along the way, they had discovered in a highly painful manner that they did not have the resources with which to wrest Egypt, much less Asia Minor and the Levant, from Achaemenid control.
The agreement also met the genuine security needs of the two parties. Under its terms, neither had reason greatly to fear the other. In addition, it fulfilled part of the purpose for which the Delian League had been founded. It guaranteed the Greeks of Anatolia and their neighbors on the islands of the Aegean freedom from the barbarian yoke. Of course, in the aftermath, there were episodes of skirmishing in Anatolia; and, on occasion, the Athenians provided aid and comfort to rebellious satraps and the like while the satraps loyal to the Great King were similarly helpful to dissident Greeks resentful of Athens’ hegemony. In modest ways, the longtime antagonists probed for weakness and maneuvered for advantage. But, in the end, whenever out-and-out war presented itself as a genuine option, caution prevailed; and, for more than thirty-five years, the terms of the pact were honored in the breach. As diplomatic endeavors go, the peace negotiated by Callias was a signal accomplishment.
The arrangement that Callias and his colleagues worked out with the Spartans late in the fall of 446 or the winter of 446/5 was no less well crafted. It, too, reflected an enduring balance of power. It acknowledged the facts and left the Spartans and their allies supreme on land and the Athenians supreme at sea. In the aftermath, neither was in a position to strike terror into the other. The Peloponnesus was once again a bastion of defense for Lacedaemon, and Athens retained her Long Walls, her maritime allies, and her great fleet. Furthermore, neither Sparta nor Athens nursed a grievance. Apart from Aegina and Naupactus and perhaps Molycreium to the north of the Corinthian Gulf and Chalcis to the west on the north shore of the Gulf of Patras, Athens relinquished everything that she had seized. None of her remaining acquisitions lay within Lacedaemon’s natural sphere of influence; and, to head off possible objections on the part of the Spartans, she may even have reiterated that she would honor the autonomy of their sometime allies the Aeginetans.
The terms of the agreement were in other ways sensible as well. There was not to be another Megara, for the treaty listed the allies of each of the two parties and specified that neither city could accept into her confederacy a community allied with the other. It also allowed a measure of flexibility. Both parties were free to admit into their alliances communities hitherto neutral; and, although Athens was barred from making a formal alliance with Argos, she was free to have close and friendly relations with that city. There was even provision for quarrels unforeseen in a clause stipulating that disputes be settled by arbitration.
The handiwork of the diplomats of Lacedaemon and Athens differed, however, from the accord worked out by Athens with Persia in two important particulars. It was not, as the latter appears to have been, an informal arrangement. It was a formal treaty, which both parties solemnly swore to honor; and its duration was not indefinite. Like the agreements forged in the past between those perennial rivals Sparta and Argos, it had a specified term. At the end of thirty years, it would fall into abeyance. In short, it was not a putatively perpetual pact like the agreement founding Athens’ Delian League. There was no pledge of friendship, and the accord was not, strictly speaking, a treaty of peace. It was a truce between once and future foes, albeit an extended truce; and it expressly advertised itself as that and as nothing more.1
The instrument recording the agreement reached by the Lacedaemonians and the Athenians reflected a brute fact. Both parties were exhausted. Although nearly twenty years had passed, the Lacedaemonians had not fully recovered from the demographic damage inflicted on them at the time of the earthquake and in its aftermath; and the Athenians still felt the cumulative impact of the dramatic losses they had suffered in Egypt as well as at Drabeskos in Thrace, at Tanagra, and Coronea. Those who forged the deal were persuaded that each of the two parties needed a generation in which to recover. No one even imagined that the two would henceforth be on amicable terms and that the deadly rivalry between them had come to an end.
This may seem strange to us. When we forge a peace agreement, it is nearly always meant to last. Or, at least, that is the pretense. We piously presume that peace is the norm and war, an almost unthinkable, highly regrettable exception. Under the influence of Immanuel Kant, many in our number even dream that peace can be made perpetual.2 We fight wars to end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy. These are the lies we tell ourselves.
The ancient Greeks did not anticipate our optimism in this particular. They told themselves and others no such tales. For moral guidance, they looked not to a god who had suffered crucifixion and died on their behalf; who had urged them to love their neighbors, turn the other cheek, and themselves take up the cross; and who came to be called the Prince of Peace. They looked, instead, to Homer, and from this poet—whom Plato rightly termed “the education of Hellas”—they learned to take war for granted, to thrill to prowess in battle, and to admire canniness in council. In consequence, ordinary Hellenes would have nodded their heads in approval of the opinion attributed by Plato to the lawgiver of Crete: “What most men call peace, he held to be only a name. In truth, for everyone, there exists by nature at all times an undeclared war among cities.” And they were less inclined to mourn this fact than to embrace it with excitement and without regret.3
In the event, as we shall see in this volume’s successor, the cessation of hostilities negotiated by Callias and his colleagues was short-lived. It did not last even half of the thirty years stipulated. This should come as no surprise. For, however well-crafted the treaty may have been, one insuperable obstacle stood in the way of its success, distinguishing it sharply from the agreements Callias had reached with the Mede. Xerxes and Artaxerxes undoubtedly regretted Persia’s inability to project power overseas, but repeated, decisive defeats had persuaded each in turn to eschew ambition, at least for the time being, and to put on hold the dictates of Ahura Mazda; and the Athenians, by this time a people of the sea, had grown wary of troop commitments ashore in Africa and Asia. By way of contrast, however, within Hellas, Athens remained an unsatisfied—some would say, an insatiable—power.
Athens might sidestep Peloponnesian entanglements for a time, but she was still governed by the spirit of ambition, innovation, and audacity that had made so great an impression on the Corinthians. If the Egyptian debacle had left the Athenians chastened, their victory on both land and sea at Cypriot Salamis had in considerable measure restored their confidence; and, thanks to the restraint foolishly exercised by young Pleistoanax, it was easy for them to suppose their defeat at the hands of the Peloponnesians a mere “theft of war.” In the late summer of 446, they had been outwitted and outmaneuvered. This was undeniable. The Spartans had snatched from them an impressive victory, but they had not overpowered, defeated, and humiliated them on the field of battle. They had not demonstrated their superiority and forced the Athenians to grovel, beg, and acknowledge the fact.4
After ratifying the Thirty Years’ Peace, the Athenians may not have been spoiling for a fight. But their morale was intact. No less than in the past, they were “keen in forming plans and quick to accomplish in deed what they” had “contrived in thought.” As events would confirm, they were still “daring beyond their strength” and “risk-takers against all judgment.” For, “in the midst of terrors,” as always, they remained “of good hope”; and it was still appropriate to say of them what the Corinthians reportedly would soon say to the Lacedaemonians regarding the threat they posed: “They are by nature capable neither of being at rest nor of allowing other human beings to be so.”5
Thucydides’ narrative is structurally defective in one particular. If he is correct in asserting that it was the growth in power achieved by Athens in the course of the Pentekontaetia that forced Lacedaemon to initiate the war which terminated the Thirty Years’ Peace—above all, if he is right in contending that it was inevitable from the outset that the war fought in the 450s and 440s be renewed—he erred when he treated the bloody struggles between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians prior to and subsequent to the ratification of that treaty of peace as distinct episodes. As Dionysius of Halicarnassus intimates, the logic of the Athenian historian’s argument requires that we regard the interlude between the Peloponnesians’ first two Attic wars as a respite and as nothing more.6