the neglected cause

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The Neglected Cause: Religion and the Peloponnesian War

Stefan Dolgert

PS 220

December 1, 2003

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After more than two thousand years, the spectacle of the war between the

Athenians and the Peloponnesians1 still holds our imagination. Why this is so, or

whether it is entirely healthy, contemporary scholars wrestle with the question of why

this first war between superpowers occurred, and whether it could have been avoided

by the policy makers of that time, had they simply learned the correct lessons from their

past. It presents us with equal parts mystery and tragedy, and provides fertile ground for

the ruminations of the historical consciousness. In addition it is the first historical event

that presents itself, via its reporter Thucydides, as an open book for the scientific

imagination. In searching out the causes of the war, and the laws of human nature that

are revealed therein, the war promises us the chance to learn the real grounds of life, so

that we may make ourselves as secure as possible from the shocks and catastrophes that

fate might otherwise hold in store for us.

The Peloponnesian War is taken to be the paradigmatic example of war in the

ancient world, but it is also looked to for lessons in the modern world. In particular, the

resemblance between Athens and the United States has led many commentators to look to

the Athenian experience to guide contemporary American policy. Two commercial

republics, well-known for democratic practices at home and imperial pretensions abroad,

Athens and the United States seemed to face a parallel set of dangers in their respective

paths through the international arena. While this similarity was more pronounced during

the Cold War, when the USSR appeared in the guise of Sparta, many today still look to

1 The termPeloponnesians refers to the Spartans and their allies, who generally (though not exclusively)

dwelt in the southern region of Greece known as the Peloponnesse, and who were linked together in a loose

confederation known as the Peloponnesian League. The termLacedaemon and its adjectival form

Lacedaemonians are synonymous with the terms Sparta and Spartans, respectively. No such additional

terms are used for the Athenians, though their empire was exercised through the Delian League.

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ancient Athens, and to the lessons of Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War in particular,

for guidance in matters of international policy.

Recent scholarship in International Relations has focused on the characteristics of

Thucydides as a political thinker, rather than on the war itself. Realists and

Constructivists have debated whether Thucydides is the father of political realism, as

Realists from Waltz to Gilpin generally maintain, but have largely ignored assessing the

underlying causes of the war, which are usually taken for granted (see Keohane, 1986,

Garst, 1989, Clark, 1993, Bagby, 1994, and Forde, 1995, among others). Robert

Keohane, for example, asserts that Thucydides was the first to set out the basic maxims

of political realism: (1) states (or city-states) are the key units of action; (2) they seek

power, either as an end in itself or as a means to other ends; and (3) they behave in ways

that are, by and large, rational, and therefore comprehensible to outsiders in rational

terms (Keohane 1986, 8). But the causes of the war itself modern International

Relations has left to the province of the historians and classicists (see Kagan, 1970 and

Ste. Croix, 1972 for a summary of the vast literature on this topic). It is this gulf which I

hope to bridge.

I will attempt to elucidate an underappreciated aspect of the cause of the war,

using Thucydides as a source for historical reflection rather than a tome of political

wisdom. In particular, I will bring in a variable that has not been considered by prior

International Relations scholars, though my essay responds to the general concerns of

those scholars who examine the causal influence of norms and identity in world politics

(see Zehfuss 2002 for a summary of Wendt, Kratochwil, and Onufs differing brands of

constructivism. In the particular case of the Peloponnesian Warreligious norms and

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beliefs have gone unexamined, largely because our primary source for the war,

Thucydides, generally ignores them, and when he does consider them he dismisses them

as pretexts for self-interested power seeking rather than as actual causes of action. But

recent scholarship in Classical Philology and History has uncovered a cultural and

religious background that Thucydides studiously fails to mention. With this additional

variable, I hope to provide a clue into a richer explanation for the outbreak of the war.

My question in sum can be phrased: What role, if any, did Greek religious norms and

beliefs play in the origin of the Peloponnesian War?

After a brief discussion of methodology, I will begin by laying out what

Thucydides himself asserts to be the real cause of the war. This traditional interpretation

is largely accepted by realist scholars, and it will therefore serve as the jumping off point

for the rest of my analysis, in which I take issue with this prevailing interpretation. I will

then proceed to assess the character of Thucydides as a historian, with respect to his

proclivity to ignore or slight the religious dimension to the facts that he relates. In effect,

I am trying to establish that Thucydides has a peculiar bias against reporting religious

data, and that his silence on the topic should lead us to believe that much more religious

data lies beneath his narrative than we would have thought. Given this bias, I will then

proceed to examine the desultory religious information not specifically related to the

origin of the war that Thucydides provides us. Even this scattered information should

show that religious norms do indeed play a causal role during the war, though

Thucydides does not emphasize the point. Following this, I will at last get to the origins

of the war, and discuss the religious significance of the two Spartan peace embassies that

immediately preceded the opening of hostilities. Thucydides acknowledges a religious

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aspect to each of these missions, though he considers that religion is a tool of propaganda

rather than genuine piety in both cases. Finally, I will conclude with the implications of

my analysis for theory and policy. These implications will be tentative, but will suggest

that the world we live in may not conform very neatly to the one which realist theory

assumes.

Considerations on Method

Much of this paper must be considered speculative from the vantage of

nomological or positivist political science. But it is no worse off than other treatments of

Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War, in that the evidence for all research into this part

of history is relatively scant. Thucydides is our primary source for the war, and there are

serious problems with relying primarily on a single source for any research. That said,

we have over the course of the past hundred years accumulated a substantial amount of

secondary documentary evidence, in the form of newly discovered ancient papyri (written

texts), tablets, steles (a kind of pillar upon which were recorded public transactions),

coins, and pottery (for more on this evidence, see especially Hornblower, 1992, Kagan,

1970, Ste. Croix, 1972, and Jordan, 1986). This evidence can be used to check or

corroborate Thucydides account, and we also have the writings of a number of other

ancient historians whose narratives differ in part from his version of events. These

differing stories can be checked against each other, and against the documentary

evidence. Still, our predicament has been summed up by Simon Hornblower: But in

this area as in so many others we can often do no more than correct Thucydides out of

Thucydides. That is, we choose to play up what he chose to play down. Our justification

for doing this, a perilously arrogant justification, consists in the little that we think we

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know about Greek religion. Occasionally we can point to an item of non-Thucydidean

evidence as a control on Thucydides. But that is a rare luxury (Hornblower 1992, 170).

This essay will not claim to assess the causal role of religious norms according to the

hypothetico-deductive model of positivism, and its conclusions will therefore be more

nuanced, but also more tentative. It consists in something more akin to a plausibility

probe than anything else. That is, I hope to make plausible the case that religious norms

did indeed play a role in the origin of the Peloponnesian War, and that understanding the

causes of any war entails an appreciation of the cultural and religious worldview of the

participants in the war. The specific variable that I argue for may not be relevant in most

cases it is probably irrelevant in the case of World War I, for instance but we should

remain open to the possible causal role of norms for past and future international events.

Thucydides on the Causes of the War2

Thucydides statement at the end of the archaeological section of his first book

on the origin of the war would seem to place him squarely in the realist camp. It is worth

quoting his most famous statement at some length:

To the question why they broke the treaty, I answer by placing first an account of

their grounds of complaint and points of difference, that no one may ever have to ask theimmediate cause which plunged the Hellenes into a war of such magnitude. The real

cause I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of

the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war

inevitable. Still, it is well to give the grounds alleged by either side, which led to thedissolution of the treaty and the breaking out of the war. (I.23)3

2 Just what Thucydides means by cause is subject to debate. The Greek termprophasis has a number of

connotations that differentiate it from the scientific sense of cause and effect, though at some times it canhave this more narrow meaning. For a useful discussion of this point, please see the second appendix to

Clifford Orwins The Humanity of Thucydides, Princeton University, 1994.3 All references to ThucydidesHistory will take this form: Book X. Chapter Y. TheHistory comprises

seven books, and breaks off abruptly in the twenty-first year of the war, in 411 BCE. The war continued

until 404 BCE, when Athens was compelled to surrender to Sparta. The unfinished nature of the work has

created a veritable industry concerning The Thucydides Problem, which basically addresses the question

of the unity of composition of theHistory. I will not engage this controversy in this paper, though at the

margins it could affect my findings. I do not take a position regarding this question, as it is largely

irrelevant whether Thucydides composed the work in several stages, with incomplete revisions to the

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He also reiterates this point somewhat later in the first book of his history, after the

Spartans voted in July, 432 BCE that the Athenians had broken the Thirty Years

Treaty, which had ended the first Peloponnesian War in 445 BCE:

The Lacedaemonians voted that the treaty had been broken, and that war must bedeclared, not so much because they were persuaded by the arguments of the allies, as

because they feared the growth of the power of the Athenians, seeing most of Hellas

already subject to them. (I.88)

Finally, Thucydides sums up the results of the fifty years between the victories over

Persia, and the commencement of hostilities in the present war (from 480/79 to 432/1

BCE):

During this interval the Athenians succeeded in placing their empire on a firmer basis,

and advanced their own home power to a very great height. The Lacedaemonians,though fully aware of it, opposed it only for a little while, and remained inactive during

most of this period being of old slow to go to war except under the pressure of

necessity, and in the present instance being hampered by wars at home until the growth

of the Athenian power could no longer be ignored, and their own confederacy became theobject of its encroachments. They then felt that they could endure it no longer, but that

the time had come for them to throw themselves heart and soul upon the hostile power,

and break it, if they could, by commencing the present war. (I.118)

These are the three most direct statements made by Thucydides regarding the causes of

the war, and they should leave little doubt as to why Thucydides is taken to be the father

of political realism

What Thucydides Does Not Tell Us

earlier stages at the time he left off composing it, or whether he composed it in a basically unified manner.

But it could be argued that the basic issue of Thucydides reliability is the most salient aspect revealed bythis controversy. If one asks, apropos this question, how Thucydides knows what he claims to know, or

how he came to report the speeches that make up a substantial portion of the text, one begins to question

the veracity of the entireHistory. This is certainly an interesting and compelling question, but it is one that

falls outside the scope of my paper. I can only note that if it is indeed fatal to our acceptance of Thucydides

as a reporter, my own account is no worse off than the works that I take issue with herein. The realist

literature that I hope to challenge is as beholden to Thucydides as am I, and if Thucydides is more a

mythmaker than a realist historian, both their interpretation and mine are in serious trouble.

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We are caught in am evidence trap when attempting to find alternative

explanations for the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides is the main source for any serious

history of the Peloponnesian War, yet Thucydides himself is not an objective reporter.

Like any observer, he brings a particular perspective to bear when he chooses which

events to relate and which to ignore, which facts are significant and which are merely

prosaic. In this case his history is problematic, because he generally ignores or

understates the religious importance of many events in his history. Indeed, his attitude

toward religion is one of great controversy in the scholarly literature. While one scholar

claims that for Thucydides, religion is the underlying fabric which holds human society

together, (Jordan 1986, 147), most others consider him a far from sympathetic observer

of religious life. Ernst Badian asserts Thucydides contempt for established Greek

religion, and Paul Veyne notes that the most surprising feature of Thucydides account

is that one thing is missing: the gods of the time (both cited in Hornblower 1992, 169).

Simon Hornblower has shown that Thucydides fails to explain a substantial aspect

of the war due to these oversights, whether intentionally or not. He adduces numerous

examples, among which I will cite only two. First, Thucydides neglects to inform his

reader about the religious aspects to the first Peloponnesian war, which lasted from

462/1 BCE until the signing of the Thirty Years Peace in 445 BCE. Hornblower alleges

that Spartas role in the war is inexplicable without reference to the Delphic amphiktiony,

which was something akin to a pan-Hellenic religious council that oversaw the operation

of the all-important religious sanctuary at Delphi (from whence spoke the oracle of

Apollo famed among other things for saying that Socrates was the wisest of the

Athenians). The amphiktiony was something like a democratic assembly the cities

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which were represented there each had one vote, and decisions were passed by simple

majority rule. In the first war, Sparta directly acted against Athens only twice, and on

both occasions it was a threat to her status in the Delphic amphiktiony that prompted her

to send out armies into the field. Thucydides mentions none of this in his treatment of

this prelude to the main war (Hornblower 1992, 180-2). While one might certainly argue

that these Spartan actions are motivated more by politics than religion, Thucydides

slights the amphiktiony in a way that both earlier and later Greek historians (like

Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, respectively) did not. As Hornblower asks:

Is it credible that such things should matter in the archaic age and again in the Hellenistic,but that the period covered by Thucydides should happen to be the only period when such

control [of the amphiktiony] did notmatter? Or is it not more plausible that, as I wouldprefer to suggest, the anomaly is merely apparent, and due to the nature and prejudices of

our main source? That is, the reason why we hear so little in the Thucydides period about

struggles for control of the great sanctuaries lies in Thucydides narrow view about the

kind of thing that mattered. (Hornblower 1992, 180).

One might suspect that this lacuna is limited to Spartan motivations, and that it

does not go far toward explaining Athenian actions. But Hornblower argues that Athens

too has religion in mind, though Thucydides fails to tell us about it. In 426 BCE, in the

midst of the war, and after a devastating plague had wracked Athens proper, the

Athenians undertake a purification of the island sanctuary of Delos. Delos was the site of

the origin of the Delian League, where Athens has organized the coalition of cities in

their continuing war against Persia, and the members of this league had later become the

(somewhat unwilling) members of the Athenian Empire. In 426 the Athenians undertook

a costly purification of Delos, which involved not only settling colonists there, but an

extensive religious festival that required a substantial financial outlay. Hornblower

contends that Athens action can be best explained by attending to the religious

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significance of Delos: Athens was attempting to recover from a devastating plague,

whose origins were believed to be sacred in nature, and as a pan-Hellenic sanctuary

Delos was dear to the hearts and minds of many Greek cities. In addition to healing

herself of the plague, the Athenians could hope to gain the favor of other cities by

honoring a sanctuary that was revered by all (Hornblower 1992, 195-6). While one might

again question whether the Athenians were motivated more by power than piety, the

point is that Thucydides leaves us in the dark about these very important matters, which

Hornblower summarizes as a religious war for the hearts and minds of the Greeks

(Hornblower 1992, 197).

What Thucydides Tells Us About Religion

Though Thucydides does not consider religion or piety as one of the true or real

causes of the war, and while he often ignores the religious dimension of the events of his

narrative, he also provides us with a wealth of evidence about the religious affairs of his

day, perhaps to the detriment of his own causal account of the war. He gives us

numerous examples of pious conduct in the midst of the brutality of the war, and on

most of these occasions he does not bother to dismiss the religious element as a mere

pretext, as he does when he relates the first Spartan peace embassy to Athens (the

Cylonian Affair, to be discussed below). The most significant aspect of this pious

conduct is that it occurs in the midst of war, that rough master (III.82). Thucydides

shows us Greeks, both Spartans and Athenians, behaving in ways contrary to the dicta of

rationality and power maximization. By this I mean that the actions of the Greeks do not

maximize self-preservation and security through the pursuit of power (Bagby 1994,

134), and that instead we see them sacrificing these ends to the dictates of what they

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believe to be a higher law the laws of the gods of their city. I will highlight two areas

that Thucydides makes particularly prominent, though they do not enter into his broader

explanation of causation in I.23 or elsewhere. Here, as stated above, I attempt to correct

Thucydides out of Thucydides (Hornblower 1992, 170). First, he shows us the behavior

of the Spartans at war. While the speeches in Book I have described the Spartans as

pious and fearful of reckless action, Thucydides shows us multiple instances of Spartan

piety in their actual conduct of the war. Second, Thucydides shows the Athenians to be

susceptible to pious actions in war, though perhaps not to the extent that the Spartans are.

He gives us at least two notable occasions of Athenian piety: the trial and recall of

Alcibiades in 415 BCE on charges of impiety, and the actions of the general Nicias at

Syracuse in 413 which led, in part, to the destruction of the entire Athenian expedition to

Sicily.

The Spartans conduct the war as if their gods watch every move. They believe

that earthquakes are signs, and halt military conduct on at least three separate occasions

(mentioned in Thucydides at 3.89, 6.95, and 8.6) when earthquakes strike. They are

convinced that the great earthquake at Sparta (which occurred before the war began) was

caused by their massacre of serf suppliants at a temple (1.128), and they believe that their

setbacks in the early phase of the war were due to their violation of oaths that they had

pledged to the Athenians (7.18). They also turn back several armies from campaigns,

when the soothsayers find the oracles to be unfavorable (5.54, 5.55, 5.116), and in

general they are reluctant to fight on holy days or in the sacred month of Karneus (5.54,

7.73, 8.9). Throughout the war, Thucydides shows us a Sparta that does not act solely

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according to the dictates ofrealpolitik, even when the lives of its soldiers are at stake (for

a larger list of these and other references, please see Jordan 1986, 124-5).

In the midst of the fiercest fighting in the war, so too are the Athenians

susceptible to the religious mindset. On the eve of the preparations for the Sicilian

expedition, the largest overseas military expedition ever undertaken to that date by

Athens or any other state, the city was scandalized by the desecration of the Hermae, the

small religious statues that protected the homes of most Athenians. Many of these were

damaged in one night, and suspicion fell on Alcibiades, who was to be the general in

charge of the Sicilian expedition. Though he refuted the charges at the time, and the

expedition was allowed to begin its journey to Sicily, Alcibiades was later recalled and

forced to flee Athenian jurisdiction, accused of sacrilege in the matter of the mysteries

and of the Hermae (6.53). Though Thucydides tells us that Alcibiades was also feared

because he might be a threat to the democracy, his recall was legally based on a charge of

impiety, and Thucydides gives us no reason to doubt that many indeed believed him

guilty of it. That the Athenians could recall the man they believed to be one of their best

generals, merely on such grounds, indicates that they were not immune to the ordinances

of their gods.

Most dramatically, we can see the Athenian mindset through the actions of the

Athenian soldiers in Sicily, and of Nicias, the general who ends up presiding over the

Sicilian adventure. After two years of fighting at Syracuse, the Athenian army is

exhausted and near defeat. The army prepares to evacuate Sicily:

All was at last ready, and they were on the point of sailing away, when an eclipse of the

moon, which was then at the full, took place. Most of the Athenians, deeply impressed

by this occurrence, now urged the generals to wait; and Nicias, who was somewhat

overaddicted to divination and practices of that kind, refused from that moment even to

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take the question of departure into consideration, until they had waited the thrice nine

days prescribed by soothsayers. (7.50)

Shortly thereafter the Athenians are defeated in battle, and the entire expedition of fifty-

thousand men is lost. Thucydides himself supplies us with the religious motivation that

partially causes the disaster, and we have seen how loathe he is to supply the religious

dimension to anything. When faced with a life or death decision in which their rational

self-interest dictates immediate flight, the Athenians choose instead to listen to their gods.

This is difficult to square with accounts of Greek behavior that stress only the aspect of

rational maximization of power and interest, and should leave us open to the real causal

force of religious norms, even in the midst of war.

In closing this section of the paper I should add one qualification. I have been

using the terms piety and rationality throughout as if they are contradictory, or at

least opposed in some fundamental sense. This claim should be taken in a qualified

sense. It does not mean that the dictates of religious norms (piety, in general) are

inherently irrational or non-rational, or that they are somehow inferior to the commands

of scientific or philosophic rationality. I oppose the two only because the claims of

realism rely on what I take to be a fairly circumscribed idea of rationality, and that the

demands of piety do not fall under the heading of rationality, considered from the

viewpoint of political realism.

One could indeed construct a theory that includes piety and rationality as kindred

spirits, each emphasizing aspects that the other plays down, while neither excludes or

invalidates the other. Many have done exactly this, whether they be Catholic

philosophers like Alvin Plantinga or postmodern critics like Jacques Derrida. In the

alternative, one could even reconstruct Greek piety from the realist vantage, and claim

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that it too serves as an instrument for rational self-interested individuals. That is, we

might view the pious Nicias as acting according to the dictates of instrumental rationality,

but to a form of it that believes it can transcend the normal bounds of human reason.

From this position, we might claim that he too is seeking to maximize his power, and that

he takes the omens of the gods as prudential warnings. To disobey the signs of the gods

and leave Syracuse when they are not propitious would be to risk the wrath of the gods,

and bring further harm to him and his men. On this reading, piety would therefore be

nothing more than practical wisdom: to disobey an oracle is as foolish as setting sail in

the midst of a hurricane, but it would not entail a violation of the realist assumption that

humans act rationally to maximize their power. Nicias error would therefore not be

considered irrational in a fundamental sense, in that it stemmed from a cause outside the

bounds of rationality. It would merely be irrational in a limited sense, in that Nicias was

foolish enough to believe that the gods can actually affect the outcome of human events.

Nicias pursues rational ends, but he chose an irrational means to pursue them.

There is something to be said for this argument, and I will only sketch what a

refutation of it might entail. First, it assumes rather too much. Rather than asking about

human actions in their own terms, and attempting to explain the fact that humans account

for their own behavior in terms of its meaning, the rationality assumption reduces human

activity to a limited set of motivating factors. Hobbes may be correct that human life is a

perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death

(Leviathan, Part I, Chapter 4), but this requires more than a simple bold assertion for its

demonstration. The second part of the refutation would take the form of an immanent

critique of the rationalist position. If Nicias and the Spartans are acting rationally, what

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would it mean to act irrationally? Given such a broad interpretation of the term, no

human behavior (or precious little, at least) could be said to be irrational, which gives the

assumption rather little explanatory power. It becomes difficult to understand much

about human activity, if it is not possible to specify the difference between rationality and

irrationality. The very use of the term rationality conveys a sense of its contrary, but

without this contrary (irrationality), the term loses its meaning. And if all human

behavior conforms to its dictates, stating the assumption devolves into a mere clich.

Beyond Thucydides I: Cylon, Taenarus, and the Curse of the Brazen Goddess

The war does not begin immediately after the Spartans and their allies vote that it

should be commenced. Almost a year elapses, and in that time the Spartans send three

embassies to the Athenians. Thucydides is skeptical about the purpose of these missions,

telling us that Sparta spent its time sending embassies to Athens charged with

complaints, in order to obtain as good a pretext for war as possible, in the event of her

paying attention to them (I.126). But are these embassies merely pretexts which obscure

the true cause of the war? Or are they ancient curses which were clearly taken seriously

and were themselves regarded as sufficient casus belli (Jordan 1986, 142-3)?

There is no need to elaborate the details of the first embassy as Thucydides relates

it. Suffice it to say that the Spartans ordered the Athenians to drive out the curse of the

goddess (I.126), which related to an Athenian act of sacrilege from the sixth century in

which suppliants at a temple were massacred. Athens had publicly atoned twice

previously for this act, once by exiling the perpetrators of the murders, and then again

under compulsion by the Spartan king Cleomenes (at a time when Sparta exercised

hegemony over Athens) by expelling the bones of the descendants of the perpetrators.

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Now the Spartans were demanding a third atonement, and Thucydides tells us exactly

what they are up to: They were actuated primarily, as they pretended, by a care for the

honour of the gods; but they also knew that Pericles, son of Xanthippus, was connected

with the curse on his mothers side, and they thought that his banishment would

materially advance their designs on Athens (I.127). So Thucydides claims that the

Spartans use a religious argument for irreligious purposes, and that the embassy cloaks its

attempt to weaken Pericles in the garb of pious rhetoric.

The Athenian retort is similarly described by Thucydides as a religious covering

for political machinations. They demand that the Spartans themselves drive out not just

one, but two curses. First, the Spartans must atone for a similar massacre of suppliants at

the temple of Poseidon at Mount Taenarus, who also were killed against religious

custom. Second, the Spartans are accused of impiety relating to the violation of another

sanctuary, the temple of the Brazen Goddess (1.128). What is most significant about

Thucydides account is that he spends so much time (nearly eight pages of English text)

to explain the background of this second curse. If this is mere pretext, why bother to go

into such detail? We cannot know this, and it is possible that he added it to his narrative

for the sake of variety or entertainment. But we should also be open to the possibility

that he shows us an important aspect to the origins of the quarrel between Athens and

Sparta, while slighting its real significance.

Beyond Thucydides II: The Megarian Decree

While the third Spartan embassy to Athens took the form of an ultimatum,

demanding that the Athenians leave the Hellenes independent (I.139), and leaving little

room for compromise, the second embassy seems intended as a partial gesture of

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conciliation, at least according to the assessment of Donald Kagan (Kagan 1970, 322-56).

Again, there is an important religious dimension to the embassy, though it comes from

the side of the Athenians on this occasion. The Spartans demanded that Athens lift the

siege of Potidaea (a colony of Corinth, another member of Spartas Peloponnesian

League), recognize the independence of Aegina (another city-state subjected to Athenian

rule in the decade before the outbreak of the war), and revoke the Megarian Decree. This

last point was most important, according to Thucydides, as the Spartans made clear:

Above all, it gave her most distinctly to understand that war might be prevented by the

revocation of the Megarian decree, excluding the Megarians from use of harbours in the

Athenian empire and Athens market (I.139). Megara was a minor member of the

Peloponnesian League. Why should this decree, excluding one small member of the

Spartan alliance from some Athenian markets, have been so important, so much so that

Sparta demanded its revocation as the sole condition to avoid war, and that the Athenians

refused to budge at all, leading to the outbreak of a twenty-seven year war?

Thucydides tells us a little, but he leaves much unsaid. He first merely states the

Athenian complaint against Megara: she accused the Megarians of pushing their

cultivation into the consecrated ground and the unenclosed land on the border, and of

harbouring her runaway slaves (I.139). He later gives us a little more insight, when he

quotes Pericles speech in reply to the Spartan demands: I hope that none of you think

that we shall be going to war for a trifle if we refuse to revoke the Megarian decree this

trifle contains whole seal and trial of your resolution. If you give way, you will instantly

have to meet some greater demand, as having been frightened into obedience in the first

instance (I.140). So while Pericles seems to believe his audience will believe this is

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potentially a minor affair, he claims it will set a precedent of appeasement for the

Athenians, who will then be constantly in the position of weakness in their negotiations

with the Spartans.

But why did Athens enact this decree in the first place? Scholars differ over this

point, even including the question of the date of the decree. Many even believe it

occurred decades before 432 BCE, though the evidence seems to weigh against this

conclusion, and most consider that it occurred sometime in 433 or 432 BCE (see Kagan

1970, 251-72). Many scholars, including Kagan, contend that Athens, and Pericles in

particular, was trying to punish Megara for its participation in the Battle of Sybota, where

the Athenians and their Corcyraean allies fought against the Corinthians in 433 BCE.

This battle did not breach the peace between Athens and Sparta, and it was not alleged in

any of the complaints that the Spartans leveled against the Athenians. Kagan and others

claim that it was designed as a moderate measure by Pericles, in that it acted as an

economic weapon to damage the wealth of Megara, but it stopped short of actual

hostilities with the Peloponnesian League (Kagan 1970, 265-6).4 But Kagans thesis

leaves at least one question totally unexplored. While he contends that Athens felt it had

to punish Megara, lest other states believe that they could assail Athenian allies with

impunity, he fails to ask why the other cities that participated in this battle were not the

targets for similar economic measures. Corinth, Elis, Leucas, Ambracia and Anactorium

were also involved, but none were the subject of economic retaliation by Athens. While

measures against Corinth, a major power second only to Sparta and Athens, would have

4 For the primary interpretation of the decree as an economic measure, see F. M. Cornfords Thucydides

Mythistoricus, London, 1907 (reprinted 1965). Cornford further argues that the war can be understood as

the result of the commercial competition between Athens and Corinth for the markets and resources of Italy

and Sicily. According to Cornford, Corinth goaded Sparta into starting the war because it was losing its

quest for economic hegemony in the central Mediterranean.

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raised the specter of an all-out war between Athens and the Peloponnesians, Athens took

no action against the other four cities who fought against her. If she were trying to send a

message, singling out Megara was probably not the best means of doing so, as she could

easily have enacted the same measures against the other minor (non-Corinthian) cities.

A clue to why only Megara felt Athens wrath can be found in the decree itself.

As G. E. M. de Ste. Croix leads us to see, the purpose of the decree may not have been

economic at all, but might have been just what Thucydides tells us (if allusively): it was

intended to punish a religious offense committed by the Megarians against the Athenians.

What evidence can we muster for this? First, the Athenian answer to the Spartan

embassy in Thucydides tells us that the Athenians had several complaints against the

Megarians, among which was the cultivation of sacred ground. According to Ste. Croix,

the same actions by the Megarians a nearly century later, in 352 BCE, led Demosthenes

to refer to them as the accursed Megarians, and these later events are relevant to the

period of 432 BCE because they show the Athenians intensely concerned about a

Megarian intrusion upon the hiera orgas [my note: sacred ground], and prepared even to

take vigorous military action to stop it, at a time when they clearly had no reason to

provoke Megara needlessly and no ulterior strategic designs against her, and were not

trying to gain political control of her (Ste. Croix 1972, 254).

Second, the Athenians of the Fifth century had already shown themselves capable

of acting on the basis of religious concerns. In 438, the philosopher Anaxagoras has been

charged with impiety (asebeia) and had fled Athens, several years later the atheist

Diagoras had been accused of the same charge for writing a book that attacked an

Athenian mystery cult, and in 415 BCE, as we have seen, the Athenians became enraged

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at Alcibiades for his alleged role in the desecration of the sacred statues that adorn

Athenian homes. Finally, Pausanias the ancient geographer claimed that the Megarians

who had cultivated the sacred land could never appease the wrath of the goddesses at

Eleusis, leading Ste. Croix to conclude: We cannot simply assume that the Athenian

complaint about cultivation of the sacred land at the time of the Megarian decree was a

trumped-up charge, made with the deliberate intention of picking a quarrel with the

Megarians and providing a pretext for the exclusion decree (Ste. Croix 1972, 255). He

goes on further to say that the decree should be viewed, as a measure, not unreasonable

in the circumstances, taken against men who were genuinely believed to be guilty of a

form of asebeia, of a religious offense against the Two Goddesses (Ste. Croix 1972,

255). This view of Ste. Croixs is not uncontroversial, and Kagan in particular is

skeptical of his conclusions (see Kagan 1970, 251-72). But while we may doubt that the

decree was exclusively religious in nature, as does Kagan, we know that religious matters

played an important if undetermined part in these Athenian decisions on the eve of the

war.

Conclusions

How are we to assess the implications of these findings? First, it should be clear

that I have not refuted, nor have attempted to refute the portion of the realist assumption

that power, interest, and rationality sometimes matter. They surely do, and it would be

vain to argue that they do not. Humans are interested in their own security and power,

and will fight wars to ensure that those two commodities are maximized. What I have

taken issue with, however, is the idea that all human actions, especially vast and complex

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conflicts between nations, must be understood only according to these assumptions. Yes,

considerations of power matter, but so too the beliefs that humans hold about right,

justice, and piety.

How to assess the relative weight of piety as a cause in the origin of the

Peloponnesian War? That the Spartans feared Athens is surely true, but as Kagan notes,

Athenian power in the years 445-431 BCE (that is, after the first Peloponnesian War and

the signing of the Thirty Years Peace) was actually stable, and Pericles did not pursue

any aggressive policies toward the Spartan alliance. If Sparta decided on war, it was only

after the actions of the Athenians could be taken as a breach of the treaty, and even then

the Spartans were slow to move. Twice they afforded the Athenians the opportunity to

avoid war, and in both of these embassies religious matters were crucially important.

While the first, regarding the curse of the Goddess, may have been highly politicized, we

cannot discount the fact that the Spartans framed their case in religious terms. Even in

the most political matters, the Greek culture of argument required that grievances receive

some justification from the religious sphere. That is, effective political rhetoric had to

appeal to the religious conscience of its audience, and these appeals would hardly have

been necessary unless many in the audience (in this case, the other Greek cities) actually

believed them.

In the second embassy, religion again was crucial. If the Athenian action against

Megara was sacred rather than secular, they might have been severely restricted in terms

of the concessions they could make to Spartan demands. Pericles may have urged war at

this point based on purely political grounds, as Thucydides tells us, but we should not his

blindness to be our own. In particular, as Ste. Croix has shown, Athens took its religious

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obligations very seriously, and they may have led it down a path to war with Sparta when

this was far from what they wished. In short: there were many causes of the

Peloponnesian War, and religious norms were important among these, though

considerations of power and interest were clearly at play as well.

Do these findings in any way affect any of the claims of current theories of

international political behavior? There are several implications which should not be

ignored. First, the claim that human nature is essentially the same, for all times and all

places, should be rendered suspect. While some constants may yet be found, we are far

from that point at the present time. The Spartans on the whole, and even notable

Athenians like Nicias, all take their gods quite seriously. We have seen how the Spartans

were peculiarly prone to heeding omens, often to their detriment when it came to the

actual conduct of the war. Nicias conduct at Syracuse appears almost inexplicable to a

mind trained to think in the modern scientific manner, but we must take seriously the fact

that he jeopardized his own life and the lives of his men in order to follow the dictates of

his gods. As Thucydides reports matters, Nicias knew of his peril, but his piety did not

allow him to listen to his more earthly ratiocinations. While it may be true that no

modern general would behave as did Nicias, the fact the he acted in this way tells us that

human nature can listen to other voices than the trio of power, rationality, and the

interests of the state, and we should not reduce the diversity of human action to overly-

simplified assumptions.

Second, we should be open to the causal role of norms, even international ones, to

structure or constrain behavior. Remember that the Greek system of cities, if such it

can be called, was based on the overarching claims of a series of pan-Hellenic religious

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sanctuaries, at Delphi, Olympus, and Delos, among others. No one state controlled these

religious organs, and their influence on Greek political life cannot be reduced to the

interests of the individual Greek cities.

This fact has implications for the contemporary international political

environment. It may be that human rights norms might come to hold the same status as

the Greek religious sanctuaries arguably this is already the case. While states are not

legally or physically prevented from engaging in abuses of human rights, an emerging

consensus places increases pressure on states to conform to international norms of

behavior. There are substantial gaps in the way this global regime of human rights treats

differing nations, but this should not lead us to believe that it is a mere phantom. It

provides one important structure within which state and non-state actors frame debates

over contemporary policies. Some forms of state behavior are less justifiable under this

system of norms, and consequently these behaviors may be less likely to occur. The

Democratic Peace may be one result of this emergent set of norms.

Therefore, rather than basing future state policy on the imagined dangers inherent

in a realist world, one might instead encourage policy-makers to attend to the

intersubjective dimension of the world polity. The international arena may only be the

scene of continued anarchy if we expect to be so, and continue to act as if it is. But if we

act to re-imagine the world arena, we may be able to remake our world into one where

international norms play an even greater role than at present. Future research should thus

focus on this norm-driven aspect of the international polity. In looking both at the

diverse role of norms in the past, as well as the current role they play, we may be better

able to shape the future by seeing the limitations of the set of constraints in which we

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live. Research can show us that other forms of international association are possible, not

to enjoin us to re-instantiate a new form of the ancient Greek system, but in order to show

how our future may be more open than we have yet thought.

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1. Badian, Ernst. Thucydides and the Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, in June

Allison, ed., Conflict, Antithesis, and the Ancient Historian. Ohio State University, 1990,

pp. 46-91.2. Bagby, Laurie. The Use and Abuse of Thucydides in International Relations,

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3. Clark, Michael. Realism Ancient and Modern: Thucydides and IR,PSVol. 26(1993).

4. Elman, Colin, and Elman, Miriam, editors. Progress in International Relations

Theory. MIT, 2003.

5. Forde, Steven. International Realism and the Science of Politics: Thucydides,Machiavelli, and Neorealism,International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 39 (1995).

6. Garst, Daniel. Thucydides and Neorealism,International Studies Quarterly, Vol.

33 (1989).

7. Hornblower, Simon. The Religious Dimension of the Peloponnesian War,HarvardStudies in Classical Philology, Vol. 94 (1992).

8. Jordan, Boromir. "Religion in Thucydides." Transactions and Proceedings of theAmerican Philological Association 116 (1986): 119-147.

9. Kagan, Donald. On the Origins of War, and the Preservation of Peace. Anchor, 1996.

10. Kagan, Donald. The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. Cornell University, 1970.11. Keohane, Robert. Realism, Neorealism and the Study of World Politics, in Robert

Keohane ed., Neorealism and Its Critics. Columbia University, 1986.

12. Mikalson, J. D. "Religion and the Plague in Athens, 431-423 B.C." Studies

Presented to Sterling Dow on his Eightieth Birthday. Durham: Duke UP, 1984. 217-225.13. Powell, C. A. "Thucydides and Divination."Bulletin of the Institute of Classical

Studies of the University of London 26 (1979): 45-50.

14. Powell, C. A. "Religion and the Sicilian Expedition."Historia 28 (1979): 15-31.15. Ste. Croix, G. E. M. de. The Origins of the Peloponnesian War. Cornell University,

1972.

16. Strauss, Leo. "Preliminary Observations of the Gods in Thucydides' work."Interpretation 4 (1974): 1-16.

17. Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. Translated by Richard Crawley. Random

House, 1982.

18. Zehfuss, Maja. Constructivism in International Relations. Cambridge University,2002.

the neglected cause

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