These are annotations for the seventh chapter of the book Impossible Histories. I’m not saying you need to keep a copy of IH open next to you as you read, but it might make some things clearer?
p. 107
•epigraph:
Yea, Athens and Sparta they’d fain reconcile:
As well trust a wolf who is feigning a smile.
§Aristophanes, Lysistrata (411 BC).
•Kings and queens are always getting flattered: Another example: Ğulām Husayn Salīm, in speaking of Siraj ud-Daula, Nawab of Bengal (r. 1733-57), refers to “that beauteous face of his, so renowned over Bengal for its regularity and sweetness…” [Quoted in Wm. Dalrymple, The Anarchy (2019). NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. p131.]
p. 111
•Ernest Haeckel: The other primitive eugenicists Haeckel praised were “many tribes” of Native Americans, but I have no idea if his sources are reliable or sober.
•Sparta’s buildings stood out in the open: Pyrrhus, the second-greatest general of antiquity (according to Hannibal; see IH p. 44), unsuccessfully besieged the city of Sparta in 272 BC: The Spartans had no wall, but while Pyrrhus’ army camped at night outside the city, the Spartans dug a trench; and a trench sufficed.
p. 112
•Athenians’ economic and naval power: It is impossible to overstate the way that the Spartan economy could not compete with Athens’. Spartiates were forbidden by law to have real jobs, for example—real jobs might distract them from fighting. History has shown that it’s usually a bad idea to start a war with someone whose economy is larger or better than yours—Germany learned this lesson twice in the twentieth century, and the defeat of the Confederacy in the American Civil War is another obvious example. But the Spartans would probably say that economies were like walls: scarcely necessary if your army was good enough.
One comparison should suffice to prove this last claim. Daniel “Robinson Crusoe” Defoe wrote, in his General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (published pseudonymously in 1724), about an anarchistic state founded by pirates in Madagascar—Defoe gives no dates, but internal evidence points to shortly after 1707 for the founding—known as Libertatia. Anarchist colonies usually fail in part because it’s hard to create a viable economy without the rule of law; but Libertatia thrived, because unlike all other anarchist colonies, every citizen of Libertatia was a pirate. You don’t need economic regulation when you can sail off and take what you want. Nobody could ever defeat Libertatia with economic sanctions. They simply didn’t need an economy.
(It’s probably important to note that Libertatia may be just a flight of Defoe’s fancy. The great writer was notoriously dishonest, or at least prone to pranks. His famous Journal of the Plague Year is an ostensibly authentic record of his life as a shopkeeper in plague-ridden London in 1665—a year in which Defoe was all of five years old. Even Robinson Crusoe was originally marketed to the credulous as a true autobiography. Eventually, in Defoe’s General History, the Malagasy people killed off the Libertatians, which is probably the wise choice with pirates in your backyard, so no independent record of them remains.)
The Spartans were not pirates, of course. Their economy did depend on indigenous people they had conquered and enslaved (the helots), and who still did all their manual labor centuries later, so you can make something of that. But the real point is that the Spartans knew all about Athens’ wealth, and believed they were strong enough to overcome this disadvantage. Like the Libertatians, their health was not in their economy, but in their weapons.
•After a decade of Peloponnesian fighting: The actual strategy and counterstrategy of the early years of the Peloponnesian War are no fascinating that I wanted to insert a summary of them here.
When the war began, the most respected man in Athenian politics was Pericles, and Pericles had a plan for fighting the war. He knew that Sparta’s army was unbeatable, but he figured it didn’t matter. He gathered all the scattered citizenry of Athens, from the farms and suburbs, into the walled city. Although the situation would change over the next century or two, in 431 BC strong walls were an almost perfect defense, and cities fell only because of starvation or betrayal. The Spartans could march to Athens, could rant and rave outside its walls, burn its crops and outbuildings, and make a nuisance of themselves; but the Athenians would be kicking back, safe as houses behind their walls, ignoring them.
Athens lay some four miles inland, but long, impervious walls connected it to the harbor. This harbor was its lifeline. Seventy years before, Athens had been a land power—its origin myth has Athena, goddess of wisdom, defeating Poseidon, god of the sea, for its patronage, an obvious metaphor—but in the years leading up to the Persian Wars, the Athenian general Themistocles had persuaded Athens to turn its attention to the Mediterranean, and build up a great navy. By now Athens’ navy was as unbeatable as Sparta’s army, and could bring the city supplies from all over the Athenian Empire. And the Athenian Empire was big—not big compared to the Persian Empire, or (later) the Roman Empire, but big compared to the little Peloponnesus. Athens’ allies and tributaries held an almost complete ring of land around the Aegean Sea, a ring formed by the east coast of Greece, the south coast of Thrace, the west coast of Asia Minor, and the smattering of islands that divide the southern Aegean from the Mediterranean. The only real gap in this ring was neutral Thessaly. Athens also held the Bosporus and Dardanelles, straits that gave them control over the Black Sea and trade with the east. With supplies pouring in from all over, Athens should have nothing to worry about. Once the Spartans realized that Athens was immune to their tricks, they’d give up and go home; peace would ensue.
It seemed like a good plan, but almost right away things went wrong. The Spartans came and ranted and raved and burned, as they were supposed to; they even went home, according to plan (they could only carry a few weeks’ supplies, so they couldn’t both ravage the land and live off it); but then they came back. Against all logic, the Spartans refused to acknowledge that they were doing the Athenians, the safely huddled Athenians, no real harm.
Then, after a year and a half of huddling, a plague swept through Athens. Plagues always spread best in densely crowded cities, and with all the suburban citizenry jammed together behind those walls Athens was denser than it ever had been. Over the next three years the plague killed off about a third of the population of Athens—recall that until the twentieth century, disease has always been the deadliest aspect of warfare, killing far more soldiers than violence—including Pericles. Pericles was the man who had come up with this whole strategy. With him pulled abruptly off the field, the Athenians had to come up with a new plan. It was becoming evident that Pericles’ strategy wasn’t going to work anyway, for Pericles had assumed a short war, three years or less; the Peloponnesian War lasted over a quarter century. Pericles had assumed that most of the action would be armies roving around the walls of Athens; the Peloponnesian War was rapidly becoming a world war: not the whole world, of course, but the world as the Greeks saw it. As Spartan allies clashed with Athenian allies, the theater of war spread. Eventually the fighting would range across the Mediterranean, from Sicily to the Persian Empire.
Now, the Athenians had a navy, and that navy brought them not only an endless stream of supplies, but also a great mobility. The Athenians were able to sail down to the Peloponnesus and build a fortified naval base at Pylos, well within the Spartan sphere of control and only forty miles from the heart of Sparta, before the Spartan army even knew they were there.
When an army faces off against a navy, they’re almost fighting different wars. So it turned out that the Spanrtan–Athenian contest, overall, seemed evenly matched. Until something surprising happened. In 425, by a combination of luck and cunning, the Athenians operating from Pylos managed to isolate over 400 Spartan troops on the desert island of Sphacteria. Not the biggest number, 400, but it included 180 Spartiates—and Spartiates were Sparta’s rarest and most valuable commodity. Worried about the safety of their men, and doubtless dispirited by the length of the war (seven years so far), the Spartans offered to make peace.
This was not the first armistice sued for in the course of the war: The Athenians’ whole plan, under Pericles, had been to persuade the Spartans to give up, and they themselves proposed a peace in 430, which Sparta rejected. Now, though, faced with the peace offer they’d been banking on, the Athenians found themselves afraid to accept.
The proverb runs, “Who draweth his sword against the prince must throw away the scabbard”—but any war, you will notice, is fought against a prince, or a prince equivalent. Violence is easier to start than to stop. The Athenians had hoped to persuade Sparta that their war was futile; but Sparta only wanted peace because of this one group of hostages. Once the hostages were returned, what was to prevent Sparta from declaring war again?
The twentieth century offers a vivid example of this principle, and, because this is the Peloponnesian War, the example has to be drawn from World War I. While the Allies marked the end of the that war as the beginning of eternal peace, some elements in Germany treated it as a temporary setback; twenty-one years later, a rested Germany fell upon an unprepared Europe for round two. The Athenians feared that Sparta might “pull a Germany.”
Both sides, at that moment, longed for peace; and yet they could not negotiate one. And so the war continued. But once a serious suggestion of peace was made, perhaps it was difficult to forget that option. Only four years later (“only”!) , both Athens and Sparta found themselves exhausted. The Athenians had pulled off several victories that proved they were no pushovers, even against the might of Sparta’s army. The most bellicose generals on each side—Cleon of Athens and Brasidas of Sparta—had both recently died, in the same battle. And a wealthy Athenian general, Nicias, who was respected both at home and, by reputation, in Sparta for his piety and incorruptibility, managed at last to broker a peace. Everyone sighed in relief. The full decade of war had been devastating, but both sides had emerged intact, and there was no reason for them to fight again.
Except Alcibiades.
p. 113
•Alcibiades persuaded: Timon the misanthrope (the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens) once congratulated Alcibiades on his popularity: “Soon,” he said, “you’ll be powerful enough to destroy them all!” No one but Timon would have thought universal destruction a good outcome; no one could have imagined that Timon’s words were prophetic.
(Two centuries later, Callimachus would write a poem that imagined the shade of Timon griping about the large number of souls in the underworld; he’d been better off alive, with fewer people around to hate!)
p. 119
•tried to arrange Alcibiades’ assassination: In this way, Alcibiades was under sentence of death by both sides of the war, a situation that sounds unique: but the various turmoils of the twentieth century offer plenty of examples. In the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell managed to get purged by the Republicans, who tried to arrest him on a capital charge, while the Nationalists shot him in the neck.
Or: In 1922 Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (father of the famous author), was assassinated in Germany by a man shouting, “For the tsar’s family and Russia!”; he may have been aiming at someone else; V.D.N. was only in Germany in the first place because he had been fleeing the Bolsheviks—who were, of course, the very people who had killed the tsar’s family. The moderate V.D. Nabokov was caught between the tsarist right and the Bolshevik left, a common fate of twentieth-century moderates.
But for that matter, the Cold War was generally fought (on both sides) by people who had first battled fascism and now battled former enemies of fascism. Richard Nixon, to take just one example, was under fire both from Imperial Japanese in the South Pacific (1944–45) and from communists in Caracas (1958).
p. 123
•they lost horribly: According to Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, at least, “there is every reason to believe conservative pro-Spartans betrayed the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami.” A twist! [Roberts, Athens on Trial (Princeton UP, 1994) p. 47.]
•The war had lasted twenty-seven years: According to Thucydides, an oracle had correctly predicted the length of the war, the only correct prediction of any oracle in that harum-scarum time. [Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (Penguin, 1972) p. 364.]
p. 124
•most crimes in Athens were potentially capital charges: The current spate of Athenian laws were nevertheless more lenient than the earlier legal code written “not in ink but in blood” (as the orator Demades said) in the seventh century by Draco. Draco himself, when asked why so many offenses required the death penalty, replied that he believed the death penalty was suitable for minor crimes, and for major crimes he had simply been unable to think of anything worse.
Hence the word draconian.
[Plutarch, Solon.]
•The case against Socrates: A few decades earlier, Socrates would just have been ostracized at this point, no need for a trial. Ostracism: The Athenians had a custom in which citizens could vote to exile a prominent Athenian for ten years by writing his name on an ostrakon—a potsherd. Ostracism was designed to keep Athenian politicians from getting too big for their britches. In the early fifth century, the notorious political rivalry between Aristides the Just and Themistocles (they started out by quarreling over the affections of a young man, Stesilaus of Ceos, but after he died they continued their quarrel in the public sphere) found first Aristides and then Themistocles in turn ostracized.
(Plutarch tells the story that Aristides was approached, unrecognized, by an illiterate Athenian who wanted an educated citizen to help him out by writing the name of Aristides the Just on his potsherd. In reply he asked the man if this Aristides had ever done anything to hurt him. “No,” was his answer, “but I’ve grown sick of hearing people call him ‘the just.” Aristides, being Aristides, wrote his own name down, and was indeed kicked out of town.)
But the custom of ostracism fell out of favor not long before Socrates’ trial. This, too, was Alcibiades’ fault. When he and Nicias were the two most prominent Athenians, an ostracism was called by a demagogue named Hyperbolos, and everyone expected one or the other to be ostracized. But Alcibiades conspired with Nicias, and each encouraged his followers to vote out Hyperbolos himself instead. Afterward, the Athenians felt that they’d been duped; Hyperbolos was too minor a figure to merit ostracizing. Athens decided to stop the custom, and indeed, Hyperbolos remains the last Athenian ever ostracized.
So Socrates could not be ostracized. Whoever wanted to get rid of him would have to take him to the courts.
•the defendant spoke in his own defense: Alcibiades’ name does not appear in Plato’s or Xenophon’s accounts of Socrates’ speech—but why would it? Socrates’ students are only interested in recording accusations that Socrates can rebut, and there’s no way to rebut Alcibiades. “I loved him, I taught him, he destroyed Athens. Sorry.” This isn’t much of an Apology.
p. 125
•And yet we know that Alcibiades took Socrates as his model. It’s a difficult paradox to unravel: Xenophon proposes this solution: that Socrates kept Alcibiades’ baser impulses in check as long as he was A.’s teacher, and it only when A. took to other, worse influences that he turned bad. “If the teacher of a wind or string instrument or of some other art has made his pupils proficient, and they then attach themselves to other teachers and deteriorate, is the first teacher blamed for this result? “ [Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates (Penguin, 1990) p. 77.]
•the handsomest man in the Greek army during the Persian Wars, Callicrates: Callicrates (Καλλίκράτης) would mean in Greek something like “beautiful strength,” which in on-point enough to make me suspect he wasn’t a real guy at all. But it’s not like I was there.
•epigraph:
An old saying has been handed down that it is not men of average ability but those of outstanding superiority who destroy democracies.
§Diodorus Siculus, Universal History XIX.i (ca. 30 BC).
p. 127
•that everyone quotes: The Penguin edition of History of the Peloponnesian War quotes it on the first page of the introduction, which is pretty telling, but that’s not the only edition to highlight the passage in its introduction. The introduction to The Landmark Thucydides quotes it; the introduction to Donald Kagan’s own history of the Peloponnesian War quotes it; the introduction to the University of Chicago Press edition of Thucydides does not quote it but does cite it, which is pretty close. In the Time-Life Library of Curious and Unusual Facts, the only mention of the Peloponnesian War is this passage, quoted (in the volume Manias and Delusions, naturally).
p. 130
•Apothegms: I’ve heard this called [where? I don’t recall] the first English jokebook, although I don’t think that’s true, and would give priority to 1526’s A C. Mery Talys (i.e. A Hundred Merry Tales).
•A man saw Socrates eating tree roots: I mention in the endnotes that this story in older texts is told of Diogenes the Cynic, and let me add that that makes more sense since Socrates never lived under a king.
•West in the Middle Ages didn’t have access to much of the works of Plato or Aristotle: This doesn’t mean (as some people claim) that the works of Aristotle were lost in Greek and only preserved in Arabic translations. That canard is almost entirely false, as you can prove for yourself: Have a look at any English volume of Aristotle and you’ll see that it says “translated from the Greek.” It is true that at certain times in Western Europe it was easier to locate an Arabic copy of Aristotle (available in Spain, which had been conquered by Muslims from North Africa) than a Greek copy (which would have been all the way across Europe, in Constantinople).
p. 131
•the title of king: Contrarily, in the ancient world, the word tyrant was not necessarily pejorative. The title Oedipus Rex is a translation of Oedipus Tyrranus, and Oedipus isn’t a bad, guy, a few obvious peccadillos excepted.
•the Republic of Venice, was in practice an oligarchy: This didn’t stop Longfellow from famously calling Venice “the eldest Child of Liberty.”
•Oligarchies, we recall from Plato, are less dangerous than democracies: Plato’s idea of utopia (presented in the text of The Republic, of course, as Socrates’ view of Utopia) is not a democracy but an aristocracy. More importantly, in the part of The Republic that discusses different types of governments, Plato places Sparta’s (which he calls a timocracy) two steps above Athens’ (a democracy). Even oligarchies are better than democracies, according to The Republic!
•When Adam delved and Eve span: Span just means spun, which forces us perversely to mispronounce two rhyming words in order to make them rhyme—but vowels sounded different in the fourteenth century.
p. 132
•James Harrington: Harrington was critical of Athens, blaming its foreign policy for the Peloponnesian War, “the wound of which she died stinking” (in his colorful phrase). [Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, op. cit., p. 9.]
p.134
•Alice Duer Miller: Miller’s book is a very funny collection of ironic pieces; in one section she takes anti-suffragette statements and then crafts verses that take the statement at face value, creating some reductio ad absurdity. For example, Thomas R. Marshall (VP under Wilson) she quotes as saying “My wife is against suffrage, and that settles me,” a declaration that inspires Miller to rhyme:
My wife dislikes the income tax,
And so I cannot pay it;
She thinks that golf all interest lacks,
So now I never play it;
She is opposed to tolls repeal
(Though why I cannot say),
But woman’s duty is to feel,
And man’s is to obey.(That’s just the opening.) The whole book is an exercise in excellent wise-acreage, starting with the arch title.
[Miller, Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times (George H. Doran, 1915) p. 20.]
p. 135
•the “democratic peace theory”: This idea was anticipated by Immanuel Kant in his essay “Perpetual Peace.” The essay starts with a description of a Dutch tavern sign that juxtaposes the words “perpetual peace” with a graveyard, but continues in a more optimistic vein.
•no hard-and-fast definition of a democracy: “In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning.” —Orwell.
