The Peloponnesian War

The short analysis

The war between Athens and Sparta that consumed the Greek world across the final decades of the fifth century BCE has long been read as a kind of Greek original sin: a proof that democracies are too reckless and too quarrelsome to sustain power. Donald Kagan challenges that reading. His account, distilled from a lifetime of scholarship, insists that Athens was not fated to lose. It entered the conflict with genuine strategic advantages and, at several points, held positions from which a capable and steady leadership could have secured an acceptable peace. What unravelled those opportunities was not democracy itself but the specific failures of particular Athenian politicians who exploited popular emotion rather than guided it. Kagan places Pericles' original strategy, essentially a war of attrition designed to exhaust Spartan will without hazarding land battles, in a surprisingly favorable light. The problem was that Athens could not sustain that strategy once Pericles was gone. His successors competed for influence by promising bolder strokes, and the assembly, never well equipped to evaluate long-range strategic logic, proved vulnerable to the most compelling voice of the moment. The catastrophic Sicilian expedition becomes, in this light, not a symptom of democracy's incurable recklessness but the specific product of a broken political culture that had lost the habit of sober deliberation. Kagan's argument is finally an optimistic one: disaster requires human agency, which means it was also avoidable.