of troops on the Theban side: these extra troops are a kind of tactical reserve, of a kind later perfected by the Theban Epaminondas in the
fourth century. Henceforth more was to depend on the judgement and timing of the general who had to decide when and where to deploy the
reserve. Handbooks about, and the oral teaching of, tactics (both of which we hear of first in the late fifth century) announce the change of
intellectual attitudes: if warfare is to be scientific it can be taught like any other science.
But strategy, in the sense of grand strategy - the achieving of political results by the best military means - was cautious to a degree in the early
phases of the Peloponnesian War. The best strategy which the Spartans could think of at the beginning of the war was to invade the territory of
Attica every year in the hope of making the Athenians submit. This was bound to fail because Pericles' strategy for Athens was to abandon the
territory of Attica and concentrate the population within the walls of the city and its harbour town Piraeus 9 kilometres away (Athens was
joined to Piraeus by a line of parallel walls, the 'Long Walls', so that the two places formed a defensible unit). Access to Piraeus meant access
to the food and commodities which Athens' imperial possessions could provide. All Athens needed to do to win the war was to survive it:
Thucydides uses the same Greek word for 'survive' and 'win'. She had the financial resources of the empire, capital accumulated over many
years, to pay for any disciplining of her allies which might be necessary to ensure that essential supplies kept coming through.
Sparta's position was less easy: she had no reserves or tribute and so had to satisfy the military and political wishes of her allies, on whose
human resources she was dependent for her levies. But those wishes included, above all, the 'liberation' which we saw the Greek world
expected of her in 431, and liberation meant taking the initiative, taking positive steps to dismantle the Athenian Empire. But, for that purpose,
Sparta needed extra manpower, which her social system was ill equipped to provide, and above all the money to pay for more audacious
campaigning, possibly by sea (which would mean building a fleet, a costly business). There was one way out: to apply to the richest non-
Greek power in the offing, namely Persia; but here the Spartan dilemma became acute because the 'liberation' of Greece from Athens, which
Sparta's allies required of her, logically implied as the next step liberation of the east Greeks of Asia Minor from Persia - a point which
Alcibiades makes to a Persian satrap in the final phase of the war. Before paying for the Spartan war effort, Persia would require guarantees
about Spartan intentions in the east Aegean, guarantees which Sparta's obligations to her own League allies made it impossible for her to give.
Nor did Persia have any special motive for disturbing the satisfactory relationship with Athens created by the Peace of Callias.
So Sparta must think of some way of striking a positive blow at Athens and her empire; and that blow must be struck without help from Persia
- that is, without a fleet. The answer she hit on in 426 was the resumption of her old central-Greek aspirations. Much of Thucydides' account
of the fighting in the middle years of the so-called Archidamian Wars of 431-421 is concerned with the northern activities of the Spartan
commander Brasidas. But it is important to notice that the first step, the founding of a large-scale military colony at Heraclea-in-Trachis at the
southern approach to Thessaly, was taken in 426, before Brasidas moved with his army to the north. So some Spartans other than the
unusually energetic Brasidas were after all forcing themselves to think about grand strategy. It was, however, Brasidas' successful operations
against Athens' Thracian and northern possessions (including Amphipolis, which he captured in 424), which made Athens happy to make
peace by the end of the 420s; Sparta was equally ready to cease hostilities because Cleon, partly by chance and partly by a skill with which
Thucydides does not credit him, had taken prisoner over a hundred full Spartan citizens at Pylos in the western Peloponnese. Full Spartan
citizens in these numbers could not be spared; the result was that Brasidas' successes were cancelled politically by Cleon's, and the Peace of
Nicias was made (421-415). Athens had kept her empire and won the Archidamian War.
Thucydides calls this peace a 'festering peace', and it is true that though there were no formal hostilities Athens, prompted by Alcibiades and
perhaps by Hyperbolus, was energetic in stirring up anti-Spartan elements within the Peloponnese. This came to nothing because in 418 Sparta
defeated a coalition of her enemies at Mantinea. But a far more important development than all this inconsequential diplomacy was a
catastrophic error made by Athens at some point in the years of peace; she supported two Persian satraps in western Anatolia, Pissouthnes and
then his son Amorges, who were in rebellion against the Persian King. It was this which gave the Persian King the motive for helping Sparta
against Athens, which in the Archidamian War he had lacked. Hence when Athens sent a fleet against Sicily in 415, and this fleet was
annihilated at Syracuse (413), with a consequent shaking of confidence in Athens within her empire, Persia at last seemed in a position to win
the war for Sparta.
But, despite Sicily and despite a short-lived oligarchic revolution in 411 in the aftermath of Sicily, Athens fought on for a further nine years.
Indeed as early as 410 she had scored one major naval success, the battle of Cyzicus, which actually caused the Spartans to sue for peace.
Only when Persian money, supplied through the King's son Cyrus, began to pour in without stint, after 407, did Sparta under Lysander force
Athens to capitulate, after the battle of Aegospotami (405) - and even then it was not the battle, but the subsequent blockade of the Hellespont,
which was decisive. The war was lost; the empire was dissolved; the eagle had been shot down from the clouds.
Hegemony: The Fourth-Century Struggles
'Freedom, or rule over others' is a phrase which Thucydides puts into the mouth of one of his speakers. The equation is instructive about Greek
attitudes: freedom to oppress others was valued at least as much as freedom from oppression. Sparta's behaviour, after she had finally
'liberated' Greece from the Athenian Empire, was to illustrate the positive, sinister side to the notion of liberation. A few years after 404 Sparta
was to be engaged in war in Greece, the Corinthian War (395-386) against a coalition of Greek states: Boeotia, Corinth, Argos, and,
remarkably, a revived Athens which had got rid of the oligarchic junta briefly imposed by Sparta after the Peloponnesian War. At the same