Review of International Studies (2012), 38, 661682 doi:10.

1017/S0260210511000738

6 2011 British International Studies Association First published online 21 Feb 2012

Thucydides, amended: religion, narrative, and IR theory in the Peloponnesian Crisis

STEFAN DOLGERT*

Abstract. Most of our knowledge of the Peloponnesian War comes from the text of Thucydides History, yet IR scholars are strangely credulous when evaluating Thucydides pronouncements. I explore what Thucydides does not tell us, and suggest that his text obscures important information regarding the outbreak of the war. Thucydides has a secular bias which leads him to discount the Spartan religious self-narrative, but by attending to this schema, in which Sparta sees itself in the role of the pious defender of moderation pitted against the corrupt Athenians, we gain a richer understanding of the chain of events that led to war. Contemporary scholars have too readily adopted Thucydides perspective on this issue, but by assessing Thucydides data using insights drawn from contemporary cognitive theories of narrative and image we see that misperceptions based in the conicting Athenian and Spartan narratives played an important role in the escalation of the crisis. Stefan Dolgert is Assistant Professor in the department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. He has also been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, and writes on the relationship between sacrice, animality, and citizenship. His recent publications include Species of Disability and Sacricing Justice: Suffering Animals, the Oresteia, and the Masks of Consent, both in Political Theory.

Everyone likes cottages and most people like industry, but no academic wants to be classied as working in a cottage industry. Nowhere is this truer than in the cottage industry surrounding the question of whether Thucydides was a realist or not, as it has now become as common to chide those who dabble in the question as it once was to criticise those who assumed Thucydides was the original realist.1 Robert Keohane, for example, had asserted that Thucydides was the rst 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;

* The author would like to acknowledge the valuable insights provided by three anonymous reviewers, and also the painstaking commentary and criticism of Timothy Ruback. His critique was nuanced, pointed, and witty, and immeasurably enriched my argument. 1 Robert Keohane, Realism, Neorealism and the Study of World Politics, in Robert Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 126; Daniel Garst, Thucydides and Neorealism, International Studies Quarterly, 33 (1989), pp. 327; Michael Clark, Realism Ancient and Modern: Thucydides and IR, PS, 26 (1993), pp. 4914; Laurie Bagby, The Use and Abuse of Thucydides in International Relations, International Organization, 48 (1994), pp. 13153; Steven Forde, International Realism and the Science of Politics: Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Neorealism, International Studies Quarterly, 39 (1995), pp. 14160.

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and (3) they behave in ways that are, by and large, rational, and therefore comprehensible to outsiders in rational terms.2 In response to this kind of thinking David Welch semi-seriously enjoins International Relations (IR) theorists to cease reading Thucydides,3 and Timothy Ruback thoughtfully argues that our constant recourse to Thucydides serves more as a device to police the boundaries of the IR community than as a means of enhancing our ability to explain the dynamics of war and peace.4 Welch and Rubacks cautionary tales are surely onto something about the use and abuse of Thucydides,5 but this may not exhaust the usefulness of exploring Thucydides History. Signicantly, though, we should be asking more about what Thucydides himself takes to be his subject matter the war between the Athenian Empire and their opponents, the Peloponnesian League led by the Spartans rather than the text that he left to posterity. That we have so often conated these two kinds of questions: (1) what happened in the war? and (2) what does Thucydides say? is hardly difcult to understand. Thucydides is, after all, our primary source for the war, and so we must say something about him even when we do not mean to, or even if that is not primarily what we intend our access to the war is, for better and worse, fundamentally mediated by Thucydides. This fact of historiography, coupled with the rhetorical mastery displayed in Thucydides text, has allowed the text to take the foreground while the war has receded into the background.6 This is true even among IR scholars who are professionally trained to treat all forms of evidence with a healthy dose of scepticism, yet who evince a strange credulity when examining Thucydides pronouncements. To give one recent example: It is widely believed that Thucydides rendering of the speeches should be considered historically accurate . . . Thus Thucydides penchant for accuracy and his interest in the psychological causes of political decisions make his presentation of historical data ideally suited to our purpose . . . to show the extent to which actors motives, as presented by Thucydides, need to be taken into account.7 While some classical scholars consider Thucydides rendering of the 28 speeches in his text to be largely accurate, though more in the sense of what was appropriate to the situation (as Thucydides himself says at I.22) than literally true, there is also substantial scepticism on the issue of Thucydides reliability as a source of data.8 Imagine for a moment that in the far-off future only Robert McNamaras or Donald Rumsfelds memoirs survive to document the history of the Vietnam War or Operation Iraqi Freedom;
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Keohane, Realism, p. 8. David Welch, Why International Relations Theorists Should Stop Reading Thucydides, Review of International Studies, 29 (2003), pp. 30119. Timothy Ruback, Ever Since the Days of Thucydides: The Quest for Textual Origins of IR Theory, in Scott G. Nelson and Nevzat Soguk (eds), Modern Theory, Modern Power, World Politics: Critical Investigations (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010). Bagby, Use, p. 131. Ruback and others scholars inspired by the writings of Jacques Derrida might be inclined to argue that my distinction here is specious everything is a text, war included. By this they mean that nothing in the world comes to us without interpretation even the most prosaic facts do not speak for themselves but must be interpreted by speech acts in an interpretive community. See Ruback (2010) and Alkopher (2005) for interesting pushback on my interpretation. William Chittick and Annette Freyberg-Inan, Chiey for Fear, Next for Honour, and Lastly for Prot: And Analysis of Foreign Policy Motivation in the Peloponnesian War, Review of International Studies, 27 (2001), p. 73, emphasis added. Simon Hornblower, The Religious Dimension of the Peloponnesian War, Or, What Thucydides Does Not Tell Us, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 94 (1992), pp. 16997; Gregory Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998).

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would they be considered unimpeachable witnesses? This is not to make a partisan point here, but to say that with no other primary texts to rely upon one has no means of judging whether one is reading a Thucydides, a Rumsfeld, a McNamara, or something else entirely. Yet this state of affairs is largely accepted in the IR scholarship on Thucydides. Even in the Hellenistic period readers of Thucydides were hardly so generous, as it became conventional to read his text as a highly partisan defence of Pericles leadership against the common charge that it was Periclean policies that caused the war.9 Thucydides does not even bother to hide his partisanship, since his statement that the real cause I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight (I.23) is precisely referencing the issue of Pericles responsibility and Thucydides intention to refute this criticism. He criticises the vulgar for accepting readily the rst story that comes to hand since they make no effort to investigate the truth of historical matters for themselves (I.20), but it had been thought for centuries that this methodological critique was serving a partisan political purpose. It is surely an irony of history that most contemporary defenders of Thucydides are themselves unlikely to investigate the entire array of available material on the Peloponnesian War. Instead they accept the rst story that comes to hand about the conict, in contradistinction to Thucydides cautionary note, which in this case happens to be: Thucydides History. Of course this story is important since it provides a great deal of the information that we have about the war, but the point is that as a story, and a highly partisan one at that, it requires that we read it critically rather than credulously. Most contemporary IR readings of the History ignore its highly politicised context, perhaps because, as Welch and Ruback suggest, we go looking to Thucydides more for our own ideological purposes than to learn about the causes of war and peace.10 We seek a reection of our own views in Thucydides, but amplied, as in a funhouse mirror that transforms our own smallish countenance into a gigantic and powerful image with the air of authority that we crave. The Thucydides cottage industry, in which this article nds itself an ambivalent participant, continues to focus on the contending theoretical perspectives (realist, constructivist, etc.) of the author as if that is the primary problem to be solved.11 But would we be so concerned about his realism, constructivism, or liberalism if he were also just wrong about the facts? One has to assume that Thucydides knows what hes talking about in order to for it to matter whether he is closer to Wendt or Morgenthau, but what if Thucydides reliability is exactly the problem? What if the war he shows us is the reection of his own mirror-image, his own self-narrative that craves conrmation from the authority of the facts of the world, just as we look to him craving authority for our own views? What then are we missing when we think about the Peloponnesian War, and, more importantly, about how we think about war and peace today, when we adopt this Thucydidean mantle?
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G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972). This too is ideological in its own right, at least in the sense that such an inquiry is neither neutral nor unmotivated. Even the title of this article continues the cottage industry pattern, reafrming Thucydides authoritative presence even as it attempts to move away from the exclusive focus on the gure of the author. While this enacts a kind of performative contradiction, I think it defensible to the extent that the Thucydides Function continues to be an important aspect of contemporary IR scholarship.

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My purpose in this article, in addition to arguing for a more careful reading of Thucydides, is twofold. First, and primarily, I want to reopen the discussion about the causes of the Peloponnesian War by examining the place of religion and religious narratives in the escalation of the crises that immediately precede it.12 This is an issue that Thucydides slights13 and which modern IR scholars have also tended to downplay, but for which we actually have a fair amount of information, both from within his text and from other surviving historical evidence. We will see that, far from being a trivial matter, religion is an important factor in the outbreak of open war in 431 BCE. Thucydides may have had any number of reasons for discounting the importance of religion, not the least of which would be the defence of Pericles (since Pericles too slights religion, specically the religiously charged embassies that the Spartans send to Athens between 43331 BCE), but we do not have to reach any particular conclusion regarding his motivation.14 What matters is that we attend to the war itself rather than Thucydides authoritative presence, and that we begin to treat Thucydides with the healthy scepticism that we bring to any other analyst of data on the causes of war. In the particular case of the Peloponnesian War religious norms and beliefs have gone largely 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.15 Recent scholarship has uncovered a cultural and religious background that Thucydides studiously fails to mention, but which has yet to trouble the general IR consensus on Thucydides purported rationalism and realist pedigree. With this additional information I hope to provide a richer explanation for the outbreak of the war, one that links it more centrally to the dangers we face in the contemporary international clash of religious and secular national narratives. Opening up this question moves me to my secondary purpose, which is to connect this less-visible understanding of the causes of this paradigmatic war with contemporary literature on how state behaviour is inuenced by narrative. This is not to say that states are unaffected by security concerns, but rather that decisionmakers perceptions of the meaning of survival is partially determined by the way that they understand their states identity, and that this in turn is provided by a

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Narrative in Thucydides has not been ignored, but scholars have emphasised the way in which Thucydides as author employs narrative to convey his purposes rather than the narrative scripts that inuence the actions of his protagonists. See Francis Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus (London: Edward Arnold, 1907); W. Robert Connor, Thucydides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); David Bedford and Thom Workman, The Tragic Reading of the Thucydidean Tragedy, Review of International Studies, 27 (2001), pp. 5167; Thomas Heilke, Realism, Narrative, and Happenstance: Thucydides Tale of Brasidas, American Political Science Review, 98 (2004), pp. 12138. C. A. Powell, Thucydides and Divination, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London, 26 (1979a), pp. 4550; C. A. Powell, Religion and the Sicilian Expedition, Historia, 28 (1979b), pp. 1531; Boromir Jordan, Religion in Thucydides, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 116 (1986), pp. 11947; Hornblower, Religious, pp. 16997; Crane, Thucydides. The two primary candidates are: (1) his political and ideological loyalty to Pericles and the Athenian Empire, and (2) his basic secularism that is hostile to the superstitions held by the vulgar. See Ste. Croix, Origins; Jacqueline de Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963); Jordan, Religion, Hornblower, Religious. This is not to say that religion is the only factor that Thucydides misses or slights, but it is one that has become particularly salient for contemporary international politics.

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narrative structure.16 There appears to be an emerging consensus across the realist/ constructivist divide that national narratives are important factors in understanding the behaviour of foreign policy decision-makers and that scholars need to attend to images of self and other in international actors discourse.17 I will briey discuss each pole of this emerging consensus separately, since scholars from the realist tradition tend to use terms derived from rational choice and the psychology of decision-making such as operational code, heuristics, image, schema, and cognitive processing,18 while constructivists tend to draw more from humanistic and sociological sources in their analysis of discourse, identity, norms, stories, and the social construction of reality.19 There are important differences between the two traditions, but for my purposes it is more important to see the common focus on the way that the behaviour of states and their leaders is inuenced by the cognitive processes of decision-makers, and that these processes in some way involve the imputation of meaning in the world via narrative structures.20 As we shall see from the analysis of Thucydides text, both in terms of what it leaves in and what it leaves out about religion, the conict between the Athenians and Spartans is as much a disagreement over religiously inected national narratives as it is a struggle over raw material interests. By understanding the inuence of conicting narratives in the origin of the Peloponnesian War we can see not only that the war was not inevitable, as Pericles and Thucydides narration seem to suggest, but that Athenian misperception of Spartan motivation played a role in the outbreak of the hot war in 431 BCE.21 In my conclusion I will suggest, counterfactually and therefore tentatively, that had the Athenians taken the religious dimension of the Spartan national narrative seriously, rather than dismissing it as mere pretense (as Thucydides himself does),22 the war was perhaps avoidable. The implication of this conclusion is far from merely antiquarian, as it suggests that contemporary international disputes between secular and religious actors, or between secular actors with divergent religiously inected national narratives, may benet
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Brent Steele, Making Words Matter: The Asian Tsunami, Darfur, and Reexive Discourse in International Politics, International Studies Quarterly, 51 (2007), pp. 90125; Will Delehanty and Brent Steele, Engaging the Narrative in Ontological (In)security Theory: Insights From Feminist IR, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 22 (2009), pp. 52340. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976); Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Noel Kaplowitz, National Self-Images, Perception of Enemies, and Conict Strategies: Psychopolitical Dimensions of International Relations, Political Psychology, 11 (1990), pp. 3982; Richard Hermann, James Voss, Tonya Schooler, and Joseph Ciarrochi, Images in International Relations: An Experimental Test of Cognitive Schema, International Studies Quarterly, 41 (1997), pp. 40333; Tanya Charlick-Paley and Donald Sylvan, The Use and Evolution of Stories as a Mode of Problem Representation: Soviet and French Military Ofcers Face the Loss of Empire, Political Psychology, 21 (2000), pp. 697728; Tal Alkopher, The Social (and Religious) Meanings that Constitute War: The Crusades as Realpolitik vs. Socialpolitik, International Studies Quarterly, 49 (2005), pp. 71537; Steele, Making, pp. 90125. Hermann et al., Images, pp. 40333. Alkopher, Social, pp. 71537; Steele, Making, pp. 90125. Kaplowitz, National, pp. 3982; Charlick-Paley and Sylvan, Use and Evolution, pp. 697728. Pericles, in his speech to the Athenian Assembly on the occasion of the nal Spartan embassy before the beginning of hostilities, says plainly that no concession to the Spartans should be contemplated because war is a necessity (I.140, I.144). This interval was spent in 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 no attention to them (I.126). The term usually translated as pretext, prophasis, is more ambiguous than is generally understood, however, as I will discuss later in the article.

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from taking seriously what appears to be mere rhetoric in the discourse of their opponent. At a minimum, national leaders are inuenced by the (auto)biographical narratives of their nation, though only in part, and subject to revision,23 and even when they engage in intentionally deceptive or manipulative speech acts they may nevertheless be constrained to honour commitments made (or at least appear to honour them) if their opponents take them seriously.24 But more promisingly, they may also be able to learn that what they take to be aggressive and pretextural posturing by their opponents is instead a product of sincerely-held religious beliefs.25 Opponents who are merely indicating strongly held preferences based in a desire for ontological security may be amenable to dispute resolution that does not involve open warfare, though as I will also indicate in the conclusion, this does not necessarily make for a world of Polyannas and sunshine. Sometimes conict may result from precisely the recognition of a deep incompatibility between ones own national narrative and the script of ones opponent, and religious narratives may present particular challenges on this score.26 My questions in sum can be phrased: (1) What role, if any, did Greek religious narratives and beliefs play in the origin of the Peloponnesian War? (2) What does this tell us more generally about the place of narrative schemata in the cognition of foreign policy actors, and how might this affect perception and misperception in international crises? While I am primarily interested in the rst of these questions, it will be helpful to discuss the theoretical background to national narratives in the second question before getting back to Thucydides. The emerging realist/constructivist synthesis I mention above will allow us to see that religion and narrative are salient factors to scholars of widely divergent methodological traditions, and are not the possession of any single camp or clique; it is to this discussion that I now turn.

Of codes and constructions Since the 1960s IR scholars have produced an enormous body of literature on the connection between the cognitive processes of decision-makers and foreign policy outcomes, beginning a current with Leitess Operational Code that became a torrent after Jerviss seminal 1976 book.27 Recent scholarship has rened the earlier idiographic case-study model by specifying that foreign policy actors use a schema, a cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus,
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Kaplowitz, National, pp. 3982; Catarina Kinnvall, Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security, Political Psychology, 25 (2004), pp. 74167. Steele, Making, pp. 90125. Gary Weaver and Bradley Agle, Religiosity and Ethical Behavior in Organizations: A Symbolic Interactionist Perspective, Academy of Management Review, 27 (2002), pp. 7797; Kinnvall, Globalization, pp. 74167; Alkopher, Social, pp. 71537; Ira Chernus, The War in Iraq and the Academic Study of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 76 (2008), pp. 84473; Mayanthi Fernando, Reconguring Freedom: Muslim Piety and the Limits of Secular Law and Public Discourse in France, American Ethnologist, 37 (2010), pp. 1935. Had the leaders of Britain and France, for instance, recognised the deep divisions between their narratives that privileged peace and limited foreign policy objectives and those of Hitler, they would likely have escalated conict earlier than 1939. As it was, they continued to misrecognise how dissimilar were Hitlers values from theirs, resulting in the outbreak of war at a much later (and less favourable) time for them (see Lebow, Between Peace and War, pp. 199200). Alexander George, The Operational Code: A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leaders and Decision-Making, International Studies Quarterly, 13 (1969), pp. 190222; Jervis, Perception.

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including its attributes and the relations among these attribute,28 by which they process and incorporate new information as they make decisions. Though there are semantic distinctions in the literature over what exactly a schema is and how it functions, there is general agreement that many individual cognitive items are organised into larger knowledge clusters,29 and that these clusters act as lters in the processing of information new data must rst pass through the schema in order to be used by the decision-maker, but the schema organises the new information in biased ways. While most of the current research on the psychopolitical structure of decision-making is rooted in contemporary cognitive science and adopts a methodology suited to positivism, scholars have also become interested in concepts that seem fuzzier and more suited to humanistic research.30 As Hermann et al. say: The importance of metaphors, analogies, heuristics, and even story lines or scripts in organizing cognition has been recognized and explored,31 and image theory now attempts to include the larger framing provided by narrative into discussions of the specic effects of particular images on the cognition of the decisionmaker.32 While realists and rationalists look to psychology and cognitive science for their models of decision-making, scholars of a more constructivist bent have also been using narratology to evaluate the behaviour of states and policymakers. Ontological security theory (OST) merges insights drawn from sociology, literary theory, existentialist psychology, and feminist IR, and posits that states, like individuals, seek to maintain the continuity of their identity over time. States too experience the anxiety produced by the lack of a coherent framework of reality as a threat to their existential security.33 To avoid this anxiety they generate routine foreign policies that help to reproduce a states conception of Self-identity,34 and these policies are made meaningful by their insertion in a larger narrative that situates the state in the world: The biographical narrative represents the best approximation of what a states actions mean to its sense of national self .35 There are multiple national narratives which may be framing a leaders decisions and we cannot simply assume a simple story of cause and effect, since nations have multiple political traditions to draw on, each with their own corresponding narrative.36 Leaders themselves are also not always consistent in terms of how they think and talk over time,37 and may sometimes also use a particular narrative as a strategic
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Hermann et al., Images, p. 406. Ibid. We should also be careful not to create a xed divide where the terrain is much more uid. Psychological research into the reasoning of international decision-makers that distinguishes between integrative and cognitive complexity, for instance, is methodologically rigorous but also incorporates qualitative insights. See Philip Tetlock, Good Judgment in International Politics: Three Psychological Perspectives, Political Psychology, 13 (1992), pp. 51739; Philip Tetlock and Anthony Tyler, Churchills Cognitive and Rhetorical Style: The Debates over Nazi Intentions and Self-Government for India, Political Psychology, 17 (1996), pp. 14970. Hermann et al., Images, p. 407. Charlick-Paley, Use and Evolution, pp. 697728; Michele Alexander, Shana Levin, and P. J. Henry, Image Theory, Social Identity, and Social Dominance: Structural Characteristics and Individual Motives Underlying International Images, Political Psychology, 26 (2005), pp. 2745. Delahanty and Steele, Engaging, pp. 52340. Ibid., p. 525. Steele, Making, p. 911. Delahanty and Steele, Engaging, pp. 52340. Tetlock, Judgment, pp. 51739.

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tool38 though at other times the narrative is employed subconsciously.39 Scholars who concentrate on this implicit use of narrative have also drawn attention to the connection between political narratives and religious role identity.40 Leaders may see themselves as playing a role in a religiously inected dramatic narrative, and will behave in part according to the attributes they ascribe to their particular role.41 Moreover, this script may also involve attributing enemy-role characteristics to other states or political actors, in effect enlisting them as characters in a play within the heads of the rst states decision-makers, as when Iraqi insurgents were cast as evildoers or Indians by the George W. Bush administration.42 While there are many salient differences between approaches that draw rather directly from contemporary cognitive science43 and those social constructivists who pull mainly from the sociological tradition,44 their common origin in psychoanalysis makes the effort to highlight the narrative connection less quixotic than it might appear. The Operational Code approach, which is in many ways the grandfather of contemporary cognitive models, is grounded in the psychoanalytic theory of personality,45 and Steeles use of ontological security is itself based in existentialist psychoanalysis.46 It is true that contemporary psychology has moved far from its roots in psychoanalysis, and a number of paradigms are distinctly hostile to the seemingly unscientic aspects of psychoanalysis. Still, the current return to narrative of the two branches of IR theory can also be seen as a kind of homecoming to a common point of origin, though now with an appreciation that methodological pluralism can be a strength rather than a sign of lack of rigour. I begin by laying out what Thucydides himself asserts to be the real cause of the war. This traditional interpretation is largely accepted by most IR scholars, even of the constructivist stamp, and it will therefore serve as the jumping off point for the rest of my analysis. 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 omissions on the topic should lead us to question whether more religious data lies beneath his narrative than we would have thought.47 Given this bias, I will then proceed to examine the desultory religious information not specically related to the origin of the war that Thucydides provides us. Even this scattered information reveals that religious
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Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Chernus, War, pp. 84473; Stephen Silliman, The Old West in the Middle East: U.S. Military Metaphors in Real and Imagined Indian Country, American Anthropologist, 110 (2008), pp. 23747; James Wertsch, The Narrative Organization of Collective Memory, Ethos, 36 (2008), pp. 12035; Fernando, Reconguring, pp. 1935. Alkopher, Social, pp. 71537. Weaver and Agle, Religiosity, pp. 7797; Fernando, Reconguring, pp. 1935. Chernus, War, pp. 84473; Silliman, Old West, pp. 23747. Hermann et al., Images, p. 40333. Steele, Making, pp. 90125; Gavan Duffy and Brian Frederking, Changing the Rules: A Speech Act Analysis of the End of the Cold War, International Studies Quarterly, 53 (2009), pp. 32547. George, Operational Code, pp. 190222. R. D. Laing, Self and Others (London: Tavistock, 1969). For this additional data I will rely on a number of historians who have sifted the non-Thucydidean evidence, including: Hornblower, Religious, Jordan, Religion, and Ste. Croix, Origins. I will also argue that the inclusion of this additional data casts the religious evidence Thucydides does provide us in a very different light.

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norms do indeed play a causal role during the war, though Thucydides does not emphasise the point.48 Following this, I will at last get to the origins of the war, and discuss the religious signicance of the two Spartan peace embassies that immediately preceded the opening of hostilities. Thucydides acknowledges a religious aspect to each of these missions, though he considers that religion is a tool of propaganda rather than a genuinely held belief in both cases. We are not required to make judgments about the depth of the Spartans conviction, however, since what we will see is that in both word and deed they follow (in part) the roles outlined by a religious narrative of their city. Whether the conjunction between their speech and action comes from a deeply rooted spirituality is beyond my ability to determine, but settling this question is not requisite for a narratological assessment of their actions or the origin of the war.49

Thucydides on the causes of the war 50 Thucydides statement at the end of the archaeological section of his rst 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 rst an account of their grounds of complaint and points of difference, that no one may ever have to ask the immediate 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 the dissolution of the treaty and the breaking out of the war. (I.23)51

He also reiterates this point somewhat later in the rst 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 rst Peloponnesian War in 445 BCE:

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It has been noted that Thucydides narrative has a generally tragic quality see Cornford, Thucydides; Bedford and Workman, Tragic, pp. 5167; Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests, and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and that this in itself makes his History implicitly religious despite Thucydides overt rationalism. While I agree with the rst observation, the second does not follow. Thucydides tragic vision is a secularised version of an originally religious tradition, but this does not mean that it is still really religious (Crane, Thucydides). The religious variable that I argue for will not be relevant in many cases it is probably irrelevant in the case of World War I, for instance but this is unsurprising given that actors differing cognitive schemata will involve distinct evaluative criteria. Religiously-inclined actors will need to enact roles in a sacred drama (Weaver and Agle, Religiosity, pp. 7797) since that is the way they see the world (Kaplowitz, National, pp. 3982), but agents with more secular worldviews will have no such motivation. This does not lessen my general claim for the importance of narrative, and it heightens the salience of understanding what kind of narrative ones opponent possesses, since narratives with differing evaluative criteria are prone to lead to misunderstanding and conict (Lebow, Between, p. 199). Just what Thucydides means by cause is subject to debate. The Greek term prophasis has a number of connotations that differentiate it from the scientic sense of cause and effect, though at some times it can have this more narrow meaning. For a useful discussion of this point, please see the second appendix to Clifford Orwins The Humanity of Thucydides. All references to Thucydides History will take this form: Book X. Chapter Y. The History comprises seven books, and breaks off abruptly in the twenty-rst year of the war, in 411 BCE. The war continued until 404 BCE, when Athens was compelled to surrender to Sparta.

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The Lacedaemonians voted that the treaty had been broken, and that war must be declared, 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 fty 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 rmer 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 the object 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.52 What Thucydides does not tell us We are caught in an evidence trap when attempting to nd alternative explanations for the Peloponnesian War.53 Thucydides is our primary source for the war, and there are serious problems with relying primarily on a single source for any research.54 Simon Hornblower puts the dilemma thusly: 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 justication for doing this, a perilously arrogant justication, consists in the little that we think we 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.55 Hornblower overstates the problem somewhat, since 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 public transactions were recorded), coins, and pottery.56 This evidence can be used to check or corroborate
52

53 54 55 56

There is one peculiarity about Thucydides pronouncement on the truest cause being the one least seen/discussed. If we were to use just Thucydides text to evaluate this statement we would have to conclude that it was absolutely false, or at least that Thucydides himself does not believe it. The Corinthians allude to this cause in both of their speeches, Archidamus obliquely refers to it before the Peloponnesian Congress, the Athenians themselves try to play on the Spartans fear in their speech at Sparta, and the Corcyraeans reference the coming war and the need for Athenian power to deter Sparta. In short, it seems that everyone is talking about the growth of Athenian power and the fear that it engendered in the Spartans. Hornblower, Religious, pp. 16997. Ian Lustick, History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and the Problem of Selection Bias, American Political Science Review, 90 (1996), pp. 60518. Hornblower, Religious, p. 170. Romilly Thucydides; Donald Kagan, The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970); Ste. Croix, Origins; Jordan, Religion, pp. 11947; Hornblower, Religious, pp. 16997; John Zumbrunnen, Silence and Democracy: Athenian Politics in Thucydides History (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).

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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, `-vis Thucydides reportage. This vantage allowing us to gain critical distance vis-a allows us to see what Ernst Badian has termed Thucydides contempt for established Greek religion, and which led Paul Veyne to conclude that the most surprising feature of Thucydides account is that one thing is missing: the gods of the time.57 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 rst 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 amphictiony, 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 amphictiony was something like a democratic assembly the cities which were represented there each had one vote, and decisions were passed by simple majority rule. In the rst war Sparta directly acted against Athens only twice, and on both occasions it was a threat to her status in the Delphic amphictiony that prompted her to send out armies into the eld. Thucydides mentions none of this in his treatment of this prelude to the main war.58 While one might certainly argue that these Spartan actions are motivated more by politics than religion, Thucydides slights the amphictiony 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 amphictiony] did not matter? Or is it not more plausible that, as I would prefer 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.59

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 purication of the island sanctuary of Delos. Delos was the site of the origin of the Delian League, where Athens had organised
57

58 59

Ernst Badian, Thucydides and the Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, in J. Allison (ed.), Conict, Antithesis, and the Ancient Historian (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1990), pp. 4691; Hornblower, Religious, pp. 16997. Though one scholar contends that for Thucydides religion is the underlying fabric which holds human society together (Jordan, Religion, p. 147), this is distinctly a minoritarian position. Even Francis Cornford, who highlights the connections between Thucydides narrative and Greek religious tragedies, considers him to be a basically secular thinker (Cornford, Thucydides). Hornblower, Religious, pp. 1802. Ibid., p. 180.

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the coalition of cities in their continuing war against Persia, and the members of this league later became the (somewhat unwilling) members of the Athenian Empire. In 426 the Athenians undertook a costly purication of Delos, which involved not only settling colonists there, but an extensive religious festival that required a substantial nancial outlay. Hornblower contends that Athens action can be best explained by attending to the religious signicance 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 favour of other cities by honouring a sanctuary that was revered by all.60 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 summarises as a religious war for the hearts and minds of the Greeks.61 We are able to better assess the credibility of what Thucydides actually does say about religion when we bear in mind these interpretive caveats. As Hornblower, Badian, and Veyne have shown us, we have to treat his presentation of the religious data of the conict with a healthy dose of scepticism. This does not necessarily require that we take a prior position on the salience of religious national narratives, however. The issue of Thucydides reliability is distinct from the importance of religious narrative in the Peloponnesian War, and my contention that we need to treat Thucydides as an unreliable or hostile witness in religious matters does not rely upon the causal role of religion in the war. Though ultimately I will claim that religious narratives inuenced the perceptions of the Spartan leaders (especially) on matters of foreign policy, and that we have ignored this largely because of Thucydides inuence, this is analytically separable from the general methodological caution needed in using Thucydides as a source of data.62

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 rst Spartan peace embassy to Athens (the Cylonian Affair, to be discussed below). The most signicant aspect of this pious conduct is that it occurs in the midst of war, that rough master
60 61 62

Ibid., pp. 1956. Ibid., p. 197. Ian Lustick (History, pp. 60518) provides a quantitative approach to correcting for the biases of historians, though in Thucydides case the peculiar status of his text makes this more difcult to apply. Given that Thucydides is the primary source upon which so many secondary sources rely (almost exclusively), it may not be possible to correct for the systematic biases this causes by quantitative means alone. That said, such a venture is worth pursuing as a corollary to the approach I am using here.

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(III.82). Thucydides shows us Greeks, both Spartans and Athenians, behaving in ways contrary to the dicta of rationality and power maximisation. By this I mean that the actions of the Greeks do not maximize self-preservation and security through the pursuit of power,63 and that instead we see them sacricing these ends to the dictates of what they 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.64 First, he shows us the behaviour 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 III.89, VI.95, and VIII.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 (I.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 (VII.18). They also turn back several armies from campaigns, when the soothsayers nd the sacrices to be unfavorable (V.54, V.55, V.116), and in general they are reluctant to ght on holy days or in the sacred month of Karneus (V.54, VII.73, VIII.9). Throughout the war, Thucydides shows us a Sparta that does not act solely according to the dictates of realpolitik, even when the lives of its soldiers are at stake,65 and much of the motivation to end the Archidamian phase of the war (from 43122) stems from the Spartan belief that the reversals they have suffered to that point are punishments from the gods for impiety.66 Thucydides also gives us evidence of Spartan piety in the speech of the ephor Sthenelaidas at the Peloponnesian Congress, and in the Spartan actions surrounding the oracle at Delphi. Sthenelaidas gives a masterful rhetorical performance in a brief and explicitly anti-rhetorical reply to the Spartan king Archidamus and the Athenian envoys to the Congress.67 Archidamus advises moderation in moving toward war with the Athenians, who themselves trumpet their prior military exploits as well as the power that they currently wield as a way of deterring a Spartan military response. Sthenelaidas bluntly claims not to have understood the long speech of the Athenians but argues that they have nowhere denied their guilt in harming the allies of Sparta (I.86). For him it is enough to know that the Athenians
63 64 65 66 67

Bagby, Use and Abuse, p. 134. Hornblower, Religious, p. 170. Jordan, Religion, pp. 1245. Steven Forde, Thucydides on Ripeness and Conict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, 48 (2004), pp. 17795. Orwin, Humanity; Crane, Thucydides.

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are acting unjustly and that they require punishment. Therefore he enjoins the Spartans: Vote therefore, Lacedaemonians, for war, as the honor of Sparta demands, and neither allow the further aggrandizement of Athens, nor betray our allies to ruin, but with the gods let us advance against the aggressors (I.86). It is signicant not only that he refers to the gods approbation in the nal sentence of his speech, but that he frames the entire matter of the dispute with Athens in terms of honour, justice, and piety. While there are tensions between these three concepts for Sthenelaidas they are linked together by his notion of Spartan identity, which casts the Athenians as impious aggressors who not only must be opposed from self-interest, but richly deserve punishment. This is a narrative of civic religious purpose in which Spartan national identity is inseparable from their concept of the sacred and the roles they believe it to entail.68 In the Spartan relationship to the oracle at Delphi we see further evidence of this. Thucydides tells us that even after deciding that war with the Athenians was justied the Spartans sent to Delphi and inquired of the god whether it would be well with them if they went to war; and, as it is reported, they received from him the answer that if they put their whole strength into the war, victory would be theirs, and the promise that he himself would be with them, whether invoked or uninvoked (I.118). Apollos blessing given, they still convoke another assembly of their allies, at which the Corinthians directly refer to the embassy to Delphi in their attempt to persuade the Spartans to ght: the god has commanded it and promised to be with us . . . You will not be the rst to break a treaty which the god, in advising us to go to war, judges to be violated already (I.123). We can abstract from these discussions a generalised form of the Spartan national narrative and its religious bases. As Lebow puts the stereotype of the Spartans: The Spartans represent the traditional way of life based on subsistence agriculture in which apragomosune and hesuchia (rustic peace and quiet) were the highest goals to which people could reasonably aspire. Efforts to improve ones material lot were disparaged as hubris considered an attempt to transcend human limits and become like the gods and behavior that was dangerous to the individual and community alike. There was no escaping the cruelty of life, and sophrosune (self-control, but also acceptance of ones fate) is the highest form of wisdom.69 This narrative, in which Sparta played the role of the disciplined and pious observer of the old ways, was juxtaposed to the role of an antagonist played by Athens. Moderation and piety were crucial to the identity of the role the Spartans allotted themselves, but these traits were dened in opposition to pleonexia seen as greediness, grasping for more than one can hold, and the desire to take what belongs to others. In the Corinthian speeches at Sparta and in Sthenelaidas speech before the Congress we see how Athens is described as tting this role; what is even odder is that Thucydides himself seems to attribute these same characteristics to Athens, though without applying moral condemnation as do the Peloponnesians.70 Thucydides depicts an avaricious Athens as the logical outcome of the geopolitical conditions set out in the Archaeology that begins his text,71 but the upshot of this description
68 69 70 71

Weaver and Agle, Religiosity, pp. 7797; Kinnvall, Globalization, pp. 74167; and see Chernus, War, pp. 84473, on the religious narratives of the Bush administration. Lebow, Tragic, p. 158. Orwin, Humanity; Crane, Thucydides. Steven Forde, Thucydides, pp. 17795.

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is that it accords with the Spartan self-narrative of Athens as an impious malefactor in need of correction. That said, even the relatively secular Athenians are susceptible to religious norms, though more as a result of superstitious panics than as a normal pattern of conduct. 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 scandalised by the desecration of the Hermae, the small religious statues that protected the homes of 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 ee Athenian jurisdiction, accused of sacrilege in the matter of the mysteries and of the Hermae (VI.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 ghting 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 take the question of departure into consideration, until they had waited the thrice nine days prescribed by soothsayers. (VII.50)

Shortly thereafter the Athenians are defeated in battle, and the entire expedition of fty 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 ight, the Athenians instead listen to their gods. Thucydides critically notes that Nicias was overaddicted to divination, but he also tells us that it was not merely Nicias whim that was at issue: the majority of the soldiers were also persuaded that the lunar eclipse was portentous. Nicias decision, then, was a widely popular one that met with the approval of the religious authorities as well as the army at large. With one voice, and in the face of imminent defeat, the army sat motionless for 27 days. While neither of these cases reects a general religious autobiographical narrative for the Athenians, they do attest to the power of religious ideas to inuence Greek state behaviour, even in the most notoriously secular state of the era. Tellingly, however, Thucydides highlights Athenian examples of the efcacy of religious ideas mainly when things go wrong perhaps as a subtle way of indicating that, to the extent that divination and practices of that kind (VII.50) do make their way into political deliberations, they can only result in disaster.

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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 sceptical 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 no 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 sufcient casus belli ?72 There is no need to elaborate the details of the rst embassy as Thucydides relates it. Sufce 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 BCE 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. Now the Spartans were demanding a third atonement, and Thucydides tells us exactly what he believes they are up to: They were actuated primarily, as they pretended, by a care for the honor 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). It is difcult to say whether the Athenians are responding seriously to the Spartan demands would they have actually de-escalated the crisis had Sparta made atonement as demanded? but we have reason to be wary of Pericles and Thucydides scepticism about the sincerity of Sparta. The information that Thucydides reveals about the Spartan national character, coupled with the repeated Spartan actions that accord with a religious national narrative, suggest that Pericles and Thucydides may have seen what they wanted to see rather than what was actually in the mind of their opponent.

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
72

Jordan, Religion, pp. 1423.

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conciliation, at least according to the assessment of Donald Kagan.73 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), recognise 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 harbors 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 27 year war? Thucydides tells us a little, but he leaves much unsaid. He rst 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 harboring 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 trie if we refuse to revoke the Megarian decree . . . this trie contains the 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 rst instance (I.140). So while Pericles thinks his audience may believe this is 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 rst 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.74 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.75 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
73 74 75

Kagan, Outbreak, pp. 32256. Ibid., pp. 25172. Ibid., pp. 2656. For the primary interpretation of the decree as an economic measure, see F. M. Cornfords Thucydides Mythistoricus; he 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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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 raised the spectre 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 nearly a 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 (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.76 Second, the Athenians of the fth century had already shown themselves capable of acting on the basis of religious concerns. In 438 the philosopher Anaxagoras has been charged with asebeia (impiety) and had ed 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 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.77 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.78 This view of Ste. Croixs is not uncontroversial, and Kagan in particular is sceptical of his conclusions.79 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.

76 77 78 79

Ste. Croix, Origins, p. 254. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid. Kagan, Outbreak, pp. 25172.

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How are we to assess the implications of these ndings? 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 matter. However, the rational pursuit of power and interest takes place within a framework or schema that is not itself subject to purely rational adjudication. Narrative plays a crucial role in how actors interpret new data that they receive about the world, and in how that data is incorporated into instrumental plans to achieve their purposes.80 Actors interpret the world through stories, and these stories use stereotypical images of self and other as a way of determining the salience and signicance of events. These narrative structures place the self as the protagonist in a world that is variously hostile, competitive, or cooperative, depending on the particular framework that the actor possesses.81 It is not that actors do not seek power, prot, and security, but that these motives cannot be understood without reference to the narrative structure in which they take place. How to assess the relative weight of religious narratives 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 44531 BCE (that is, after the rst 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 rst, regarding the curse of the Goddess, may have been highly politicised, 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 justication 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. It is also not necessarily the case that Pericles would have been eliminated as a political force had the Athenians responded positively to this embassy, as Thucydides simply asserts (I.127). Since the Spartan demand was left (deliberately?) vague, only requesting that the Athenians drive out the curse of the goddess, we have no compelling evidence other than Thucydides statement that Periclean banishment was the only possible outcome. Perhaps the Spartans were intent on removing Pericles from power, and perhaps, given his family connection to the curse, this would have caused him some political embarrassment. Still, even if this were the result of the Athenians responding afrmatively to the demand, this does not lessen the importance of the Spartan religious narrative. Recall that Sthenelaidas and his war party in Sparta had already framed the issue at the Peloponnesian Congress in terms of Athenian injustice; here again, in the embassy, they frame the issue in terms that are congruent with their earlier belief that Athenian impiety is the cause of the present discontent in Hellas. That this ts
80 81

Charlick-Paley and Sylvan, Use and Evolution, pp. 697728. Kaplowitz, National, pp. 3982.

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with Spartas perception of its security interests is not in doubt, but it is equally the case that the dominant view in Sparta sees Athens through the image of an unjust and impious aggressor. The Athenian response, per Pericles advice, conrms both of these images and brings the Greek world one step closer to total war. In the second embassy religion again was crucial, though on this occasion it was the Athenian rather than the Spartan religious narrative that was in play. 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 allow his blindness to be our own. In particular, as Ste. Croix has shown, Athens took its religious obligations very seriously, and they may have led it down a path to war with Sparta when this was far from what was wished.82 Athenians other than Pericles and Thucydides were as likely to view themselves as the protagonists in a sacred drama as the Spartans,83 and may have felt themselves unable to simply back down since more was at issue for them than mere politics religious self-identity entails different role expectations regarding the expected duties of the believer84 that may prove less tractable than disputes that involve merely instrumental goods.85 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. Conclusion So could the war have been avoided, particularly if the dispute over Megara was more about conicting religious rather than secular narratives? Perhaps, as Forde has said,86 war was unavoidable because the causes were too deep, too intractable, to brook more than a momentary pause in the momentum towards open conict. Indeed, no matter how we interpret the war from 43104 BCE, whether as a single war or as two discrete events, the fact that it takes place in the shadow of the First Peloponnesian War, from 46145 BCE, means that from 46104 the Athenians and Spartans were engaged in a hot war for 36 of 58 years a powerful testimonial to enduring hostility. Yet the emphasis placed by Thucydides on the outbreak of the conict between 43331 indicates that he and his contemporaries gave special consideration to the importance of the crises in this period. This raises an important counterfactual question: what if the Athenians had taken the Spartan embassies as sincerely intended? Would the war have still occurred? As I have indicated, there were powerful reasons for friction between the rising power of Athens and the status quo hegemony of Sparta that would have continued to exist whether Athens conceded this point or not.87 But on this occasion, as even Thucydides seems to recognise, there was a good possibility that war could have been avoided. Pericles too seems to believe that this particular crisis is susceptible to de-escalation, which is why his recourse is to claim that appeasing the Spartans
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Ste. Croix, Origins. Jordan, Religion, pp. 11947; Cornford, Thucydides. Weaver and Agle, Religiosity, pp. 7797. Alkopher, Social, pp. 71537. Forde, Thucydides, pp. 17795. Ibid.

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will only lead to further demands for appeasement from them, since for him war is inevitable. But surely there is something of a self-fullling prophecy here, since the war becomes inevitable in and through the actions of a man who says that the war is inevitable. If Pericles does not successfully argue for war in the Assembly he seems to believe that war will not come, at least at the present moment. Thus it appears that Pericles believes not so much that war is inevitable, but that it is advantageous to ght Sparta in 431 because friction will continue, to the possible detriment of Athenian martial and civic pride. So then we have two scripts, two narratives in conict. In Spartas narrative her leaders see her as a moderate, traditional hegemon, who rules over a loose confederation of city-states partially because of her strength, partially because of her virtue, and also partially because of the sanction granted to her by the traditional pan-Hellenic sources of religious authority. Spartas leaders see her role as one of preserving the traditional balance between the various city-states, in accord with broad norms of pan-Hellenic intersubjectivity. In this narrative the unruly, unquiet Athenians, who take no rest for themselves and give none to others, are not simply a minor irritation or aberration to be avoided, but a fundamental existential danger. Athens, by contrast, sees herself as a new kind of power, and her narrative, as we can see in Pericles three speeches to the Assembly, places her in the role of antagonist to almost all traditional Greek notions of justice and piety.88 The Athenian Thesis, that justice consists in a state attempting to expand as much as its capacities allow, and that the weaker should naturally submit to the stronger, contravenes both Hellenic and Spartan norms in its naked assertion that justice is only what is in the interest of the stronger. This is not the only narrative available to the Athenians, of course, as we have seen in the cases of Alcibiades, Nicias, and Megara, but it is the one that Pericles and Thucydides assert as the dening criterion for their version of Athenian identity. These conicting narratives are both more and less amenable to amelioration than a rational conict over material interests. They are less immediately revisable, since a revision entails something entirely different from, say, convincing a materially rational opponent that you do not pose a threat to them. Allowing nuclear inspectors to your missile and production facilities is one way of demonstrating, at least to some extent, that you do not pose a material danger to your purported enemy. But how do you convince someone that you are not their mortal enemy when the structure of their commitment to this belief is not materially rational, but is based on a psychological schema which interprets information through already-prescribed roles in which you have been placed in a barbarian or enemy or degenerate position?89 So from this perspective a crisis like that of 43331 does not appear particularly amenable to nonviolent resolution, and Pericles and Thucydides judgments are conrmed, though not for the reasons that either believed. There is, however, another side to the story, or this story of stories, if you will. Imagine that Pericles or Archidamus were to adopt the perspective that I am
88

89

See Crane, Thucydides. Though as I have also noted, there is a religious Athenian narrative as well (in the actions against Megara, for example). This is not Pericles version of the Athenian national narrative, but it attests to the plural political traditions upon which leaders may draw for mobilising constituents and justifying their actions. Michele Alexander, Shana Levin, and P. J. Henry, Image Theory, Social Identity, and Social Dominance: Structural Characteristics and Individual Motives Underlying International Images, Political Psychology, 26 (2005), pp. 2745; Hermann et al., Images, pp. 40333.

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arguing for, and carefully examine his opponent not just for the material threat they pose, and not just from the threat to his citys identity that the other poses, but also for the narrative role which his city is assigned in the other citys selfnarrative. Adopting such a view would have presented each with a number of options, though some of these might have made war as likely an outcome as happened in the actual crisis. Had Archidamus understood that Pericles interpreted the Spartan embassies are mere pretexts, that he saw the religious grounds for the embassies as irrelevant or worse, the Spartan king could have availed himself of other options. He could have chosen to demonstrate Spartan power to Athens in more materialist terms, as one way of speaking his adversarys language, but he could also have lowered the religious stakes by shifting to making more materialist demands in his negotiations. Arguably this was what occurred in the third Spartan embassy, in which only the freedom of the Hellenes was requested (I.139), though it is at this point that Pericles makes his rst appearance in Thucydides narrative and persuades the Athenians not to compromise. Pericles, by contrast, could also have taken steps to avoid the war by viewing Athenian actions through the pietysensitised eyes of the Spartans. That he did not, because he believed war to be inevitable, was due to his belief in the Athenian Thesis which dictated that states must expand or die. Such a schema certainly makes war into a likely outcome of any crisis, though this likelihood stems from not from material causes but from the narrative scripts in play. In short, there is no way to argue conclusively that the Peloponnesian War would have been avoided had either set of foreign policy decision-makers taken into account the narrative of their opponent. This points to the need for further empirical research to specify how religious national narratives operate, especially the connections between cognitive narrative structures, their underlying psychological bases, their susceptibility to strategic manipulation, and the way that these factors intertwine in multiple-actor settings to create, escalate, and de-escalate international crises. In the case of the Peloponnesian War this could include operational code analysis of speeches, as well as testing the specic utility of Ontological Security Theory versus other contending frameworks, particularly those that intersect religious identity with narrative. While I have argued throughout that it is religion in particular that forms the backbone of the Spartan and Athenian national narratives, it bears stating that in many ways the causes of this archetypal war are still an open question. Our cottage industry would be much better off if we focused on rening answers to this question, rather than simply nding ever more clever ways of interpreting what Thucydides the author was up to. Reading Thucydides with a more jaundiced eye is one way to begin this task, but it is really just an opening move in a very long campaign. The best that can be said at this juncture, I think, is that if the war could have been avoided, such an outcome would have been unlikely absent the recognition by one party or the other that they were cast in the role of an existential threat by their foe, and that such role attribution probably did make conict inevitable. Understanding the narrative of your opponent does not necessarily make war less likely, but it does provide another lens for the foreign policy leader, and thereby gives her a set of tools that she otherwise has no access to. Negotiation is unlikely to work unless you understand what your opponent actually wants to gain or fears to lose, and if you misunderstand the others goals from the beginning you are unlikely to nd common ground, if such a thing exists.

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