Without a navy of her own there was nothing she could do to confront Athens and so she had to stand by in frustration when Pericles subdued the rebellious island of Samos in 440. What shifted the balance of power was a series of events that drove Corinth towards Sparta. Corinth had been in dispute with her former colony Corcyra (the island of Corfu), and Athens had come to Corcyra’s support. Her motive may have been to prevent Corcyra’s large fleet from joining Corinth’s or she may have had her eye on another base in the western Mediterranean. In 432 another dispute broke out in the northern Aegean, over the city of Potidaea, a colony of Corinth on the peninsula of Chalcidice, but also a subject member of the Athenian empire. Athens had tried to rid Potidaea of her Corinthian magistrates, but only succeeded in sparking off a revolt that forced her to retaliate with an expensive siege. Corinth had had enough. Why, her envoys taunted Sparta, was she so slothful when Athens was so energetic in her ambitions?
This time Sparta responded. It seemed an opportune time to strike at Athens. Sparta could rely on the support of Corinth just at a time when an Athenian army of 3,000 hoplites was absent at Potidaea. Megara, which seems to have been under some form of trade ban from Athens, was eager to offer help. The outbreak of war was engineered by Sparta when she encouraged one of her allies, Thebes, to attack Plataea, an ally of Athens. The way was open for Spartan forces to make a lightning raid across the Isthmus in the hope of seizing Athens. So war broke out. The Spartans realized that they deserved the guilt for initiating the war, and when things went badly they were haunted by the belief that the gods were punishing them for their transgressions.
Technically, this was the Second Peloponnesian War—the First covers the fighting in the 450s and early 440s—and even this is somewhat of a misnomer as there were two distinct periods of war between 431 and 404 with a pause at the Peace of Nicias in 421. The fundamental problem of the war was how a naval power such as Athens could defeat land-locked Sparta and how Sparta, with no effective navy, could hope to capture the well-defended Athens. The first years of the war were marked by a series of ineffective raids on each other’s territories. Spartan troops ravaged Attica almost every year (but could never actually storm the city itself, which, protected by its Long Walls, maintained open access to the sea for supplies). Athens launched raids on the Peloponnesian coast and one on Megara, as an ally of
Sparta’s. Her hope was perhaps to stimulate the helots into revolt and destabilize Sparta’s alliances. It was because the Athenians knew that the best response to the Spartan incursion on her territory was to withdraw behind the Long Walls and endure the ravaging of crops that so many people became shut up in the city, with the result that when plague broke out in 431, it spread with frightening speed. (The classic introduction to the war is Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War, New York, 2003, an abridgement of his four-volume history.)
World History
