Donald Kagan's Peloponnesian War

Donald Kagan's Peloponnesian War is a summary for general readers of the Peloponnesian War. The war this book seeks to cover is long and complex, and the myriad battlefields, places, and ever-changing alliances are difficult to follow. The book does a good job of breaking down a complex event and making it comprehensible to the general reader. A general knowledge of Greek history will help immensely in following it.

The Peloponnesian War was a war between Athens and its allies against Sparta and its allies that raged off and on from about 431 to 405 B.C, ending in the defeat of Athens. Athens was a directly democratic maritime empire while Sparta had an elite land army and unique oligarchic social structure to support it. Athens was wealthy through trade, while Sparta had essentially no real wealth other than its military. Even though both city-states were Greek and shared the many common elements of Greek culture, they were polar opposites in terms of government and social structure. Greece’s perennial enemy of Persia loomed large in the conflict, and their financial support of Sparta was one of the biggest factors in the eventual defeat of Athens.

Cover of the book from Amazon

Our main source for the Peloponnesian War is Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, which I started to read before decided I really needed to read a survey of the event before I could comprehend our primary source. Kagan occasionally disagrees with Thucydides’ explanations, which is always a dangerous proposition from more than 2400 years later, but Kagan generally has good reasons to do so. Kagan is considered one of the foremost scholars of ancient Greek history and also wrote a four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War for scholars. I’m not aware of any particular biases that he has other than being neoconservative and American. I found Kagan to have an excellent writing style for a very difficult topic. There are a ton of Greek city-states, and he does a great job making sense of the constantly shifting alliances of the War.

My chief criticisms would be that I would love to see more maps like the excellent landmark editions like the one for Thucydides book that is the main source for this one. Kagan's analysis is incisive, but he probably goes too easy on Athen's direct democracy as a cause for many of their war woes, which I suspect is product of his American patriotism and neoconservatism. Many of their more outlandish and unfortunate decisions during the war can be traced to the bizarre decisions of what could become an unruly mob. For example, Athens’ choice to undertake a massive and disastrous invasion of Sicily left it permanently vulnerable thereafter and was a direct product of mob politics. The United States obviously is not a direct democracy ruled by assembly, but mob politics and demagogery are issues here as they were in Athens.

Pericles, Athens' legendary leader who guided policy until his death during the great plague that swept Athens. Athens thereafter lacked a leader of his ability.

Athens experience also shows an historic example of the limits that an open, democratic society has when making war due to the inability for any real secrecy. Anything that the Athenian assembly decided to do was completely public and could be communicated to their enemies as soon as a decision was made. This is an issue faced by all open societies—it is very easy to set up a spying operating in the United States. It is (I imagine) much harder to so in Iran or China.

Something I did not realize about the Peloponnesian War is that those who fought it very much considered it to be a war of dueling political systems between democracy and oligarchy. Frequently in the war, the sides take advantage of the betrayal of either a democratic of oligarchic faction when they seek to conquer new territory. Democrats and oligarchs in various city states frequently and brutally massacred each other when given the opportunity to do so. Democracy was permanently discredited in Greece as a result of Athens’ defeat.

The war itself is full of fascinating characters, heroism, and a seesaw of fortunes back in forth. It's worth reading about for anyone interest in Western European history, and this has to be one of the best books to choose. Seriously, just take a look at Alcibiades wikipedia page—you couldn’t make up a guy like this! The war is also the backdrop for the work of Socrates and the coming of age of Plato, who are going to feature heavily in future reading.

Alcibiades being taught by Socrates, Francois-Andre Vincent

Image Credits:

• Cover: Spartan Helmet stock photo I purchased.

• Bust of Pericles: Bust of Pericles bearing the inscription “Pericles, son of Xanthippus, Athenian”. Marble, Roman copy after a Greek original from ca. 430 BC. Photo by Jastrow; released to public domain.

• Alcibiades being Taught: Reproduction of painting at Musee Fabre uploaded to Wikimedia Commons from the museum brochure; CC license / public domain image due to age of the painting.