Characters

"We are lovers of beauty yet with no extravagance, and lovers of wisdom yet without weakness."

Pericles dominated Athenian politics for over thirty years, transforming the city into the cultural and imperial capital of the Greek world. He funded the Parthenon and the Propylaea with Delian League tribute, extended democratic rights to the poorest Athenian citizens, and championed Athenian imperial expansion with a combination of democratic rhetoric and hard-headed realism. His strategy at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War was to abandon Attica to Spartan devastation, concentrate resources on the fleet, and wear Sparta down through naval superiority and financial attrition — betting that Sparta would run out of money before Athens ran out of ships. The strategy was working when the Plague of Athens struck in 430 BC, killing perhaps a quarter of the city's population — including Pericles himself in 429 BC. He died having watched his strategy vindicated in naval terms but undermined by an epidemic no military planning could have anticipated. His Funeral Oration, delivered over the dead of the first year of war, remains the most celebrated defence of democracy ever written. Pericles left Athens both its golden cultural legacy and its fatal strategic overextension. The empire he built required constant expansion to maintain; the Sicilian Expedition that destroyed Athens was the logical continuation of Periclean imperial logic. He was, Thucydides wrote, 'the first citizen of Athens' — but also the architect of a system that Athens could not survive its own ambitions.

"I cannot do as some do — take an interest in my country only when I am at home; I must live as though I had no country if I am to survive in exile."

Alcibiades was the most brilliant, most charismatic, most dangerous, and most self-destructive Athenian of his era. Ward of Pericles, intimate of Socrates, victor at the Olympic Games, and serial traitor to every city he inhabited, he embodied in one person both Athens's tremendous capability and its fatal inability to discipline that capability in service of consistent strategy. He championed the Sicilian Expedition with an oratory so compelling it swept away the objections of the experienced Nicias. Then, recalled to Athens to face charges of religious sacrilege, he defected to Sparta — giving Sparta the intelligence and advice that enabled Syracuse to defeat the expedition. When Sparta tired of him (he had seduced the queen), he defected to Persia. When that too soured, he was recalled to Athens in triumph, won several battles, and was then exiled again when a subordinate suffered a naval defeat. He died in Phrygia, reputedly strangled on orders from the Thirty Tyrants whom Sparta had installed in Athens after the war. Socrates, who loved him, knew exactly what he was: 'the most gifted and most dangerous of all my pupils.' Plutarch paired his biography with Coriolanus. He is the paradigm of talent without character.

"Where the lion's skin will not reach, it must be patched with the fox's."

Lysander was the man who actually won the Peloponnesian War for Sparta — and did it by breaking every rule Sparta claimed to stand for. Born a mothax (a Spartan of inferior status, son of a Spartiate father but a helot mother), he rose through talent and ruthless ambition to become Sparta's greatest admiral. He cultivated Persian patronage — personally befriending the young Cyrus the Younger and securing the gold that allowed Sparta to build a fleet that could challenge Athenian naval supremacy. At Aegospotami in 405 BC, Lysander won the war in a single morning without a battle: he caught the Athenian fleet beached and unguarded and captured virtually every ship. Three thousand Athenian prisoners were executed. With Athens starved into submission, Lysander installed pro-Spartan oligarchies — the 'Thirty Tyrants' — across the Greek world, creating a Spartan imperial system as oppressive as anything Athens had built. His power terrified Sparta's own kings and ephors. Laws were passed specifically to prevent any single general from holding navarchy twice. He was given the command at Aegospotami through a legal fiction. In his later career, he schemed to change the Spartan kingship itself, intriguing with the Oracle at Delphi. He died in battle in 395 BC, leading a Spartan army in Boeotia, before his schemes could bear fruit. Sparta's victory lasted barely thirty years; at Leuctra in 371, everything Lysander had built was undone in an afternoon.

"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

Thucydides was an Athenian general who lost his command and spent the war in exile — and used those years of enforced leisure to write the most important work of political and military analysis in Western history. His History of the Peloponnesian War was the first work of history that explicitly set out to record only what the author had personally witnessed or verified through the most careful available evidence, distinguishing itself from myth, hearsay, and the unreliable accounts of others. As a general, he failed: recalled to relieve Amphipolis from Brasidas, he arrived too late and lost the city. He was exiled for twenty years. As an historian, he succeeded beyond any possible measure: his analysis of the causes of war (fear, honour, and interest as the permanent drivers of state behaviour), his dramatisation of the Melian Dialogue as a study of power politics, his account of the Plague of Athens as both medical observation and social collapse, and his portrait of the Sicilian Expedition as democratic hubris destroying itself — these are works of permanent political insight that political scientists, strategists, and statesmen quote to this day. His history breaks off unfinished in 411 BC, mid-sentence. He saw how it ended — Sparta won in 404 BC — but died before he could write the conclusion. He may have been the greatest writer who ever went to war.

"No one can be a good general who is not also a good man."

Brasidas was the most gifted and unusual Spartan general of the Peloponnesian War — a man who combined military brilliance with diplomatic skill and personal charm in quantities that Spartans were not supposed to possess. Sparta produced excellent soldiers but poor commanders; Brasidas was the exception. His great campaign was the march to Thrace in 424 BC, where he led a mixed force including 700 helots freed specifically for the expedition. By a combination of rapid marching, skilful diplomacy, and genuine persuasion, he detached city after city from the Athenian empire without a battle — including Amphipolis, Athens's most important northern colony, which he won by arriving before the Athenian relief force under Thucydides. The cities that joined him did so voluntarily, convinced by his personal assurances of respect for their autonomy. He died at Amphipolis in 422 BC, winning the battle that killed both him and the Athenian demagogue Cleon. The Amphipolitans gave him a hero's cult burial inside the city — unprecedented for a Spartan — honouring him as their liberator rather than a conqueror. His death opened the way to the Peace of Nicias and a decade of uneasy quiet. When the war resumed, there was no one on either side like him.

"Men make the city and not walls nor ships without men within them."

Nicias was the wealthiest man in Athens and its most respected conventional politician — pious, careful, conservative, and spectacularly unsuited to the great military adventure of the age. He opposed the Sicilian Expedition with complete clarity and was then, by a bitter irony, appointed one of its commanders by citizens who felt his caution would balance Alcibiades' recklessness. Every error of the expedition was compounded by Nicias's hesitation. He refused to attack Syracuse immediately upon arrival. He delayed the retreat when it might still have succeeded. He delayed again — fearing to seem superstitious — when a lunar eclipse convinced the seers not to move for 27 days; it was the delay that sealed the army's fate. When the fleet was finally defeated in Syracuse harbour, he led the survivors in a desperate overland march toward the interior, where they were cut off, starved, and destroyed in detail. Nicias was captured and executed by the Syracusans, who had promised his life in exchange for surrender. Thucydides, who admired him, wrote that 'of all the Greeks in my time, he least deserved this fate, because he had lived his whole life in the practice of virtue.' The tragedy of Nicias is the tragedy of a decent, capable man given a task that required qualities he did not and could not possess.

"A democracy is incapable of empire."

Cleon was Athens's most powerful politician after Pericles' death — and everything Pericles was not. A tanner's son who made his fortune in trade, he rose to leadership through inflammatory popular oratory, personal attacks on opponents, and a willingness to make democratic assemblies vote for the most brutal options available. Thucydides, who despised him, is our main source — and even Thucydides admits that Cleon's most unpopular policies sometimes worked. His greatest triumph was the capture of the Spartan hoplites at Sphacteria in 425 BC — a coup he had boasted was easy and then delivered on, shaming the generals who doubted him. With 120 full Spartiate prisoners in Athenian hands, Cleon wielded extraordinary leverage and probably could have negotiated a favourable peace at the moment of Athens's greatest strength. He refused, preferring to continue the war toward total victory. His death at Amphipolis in 422 BC — killed while fleeing when Brasidas's surprise sortie routed his force — was almost comically humiliating for a man who had presented himself as the people's warrior. Yet his death, combined with Brasidas's death in the same battle, removed both sides' war hawks and opened the Peace of Nicias. The man who prevented peace for years died simultaneously with his opposite number, making peace possible at last.

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

Socrates fought in three campaigns of the Peloponnesian War — Potidaea (432–429 BC), Delium (424 BC), and Amphipolis (422 BC) — and was distinguished in each as an exceptionally brave soldier who could endure hardship without complaint. He served as a heavy infantryman (hoplite) despite his physical peculiarity of never seeming to feel cold, hunger, or thirst more than others. His courage at Delium, where he covered the retreat of the routed Athenians fighting step by step and refusing to run, was specifically attested by his pupil Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium. Yet Socrates is remembered as the founder of Western philosophy, not as a soldier. His contribution to the Peloponnesian War era was not tactical but intellectual: in the agora, the gymnasia, and the drinking parties of Athens, he questioned every assumption — about justice, piety, knowledge, and the good life — in a method of relentless cross-examination (the elenchus) that destroyed confident answers and left only productive uncertainty. His pupils included Alcibiades (who used the method for manipulation), Plato (who used it for metaphysics), and Xenophon (who used it for practical wisdom). In 399 BC, five years after Athens's defeat and the horror of the Thirty Tyrants, a democratic Athens put Socrates on trial for impiety and corrupting the youth. He was convicted by 280 votes to 220 and died drinking hemlock, having refused the opportunity to escape, arguing that to flee would be to betray the laws that had given him his life.