When the war began most Greeks thought that it would last no more than three years and that the Athenians would quickly give in (Thucydides 5.14.3, 7.28.3). Instead it took four years for the fighting merely to reach its peak. By then the usual pattern was for the Spartans to invade Attica each spring, while the Athenians sent a fleet to harass the Peloponnese.
Frustrations grew as the war dragged on. In addition to watching the Spartans ravage their crops each year, soon after the war began the Athenians suffered repeated attacks of the plague; siege operations in Chalcidice were depleting their treasury. A rebellion of the cities on Lesbos (428), led by the Mytileneans, tried them further. The Athenians put down the revolt, but their initial decision to condemn all the Mytilenean men to death and sell the women and children into slavery reflects the seriousness of the rebellion’s threat. But hostilities had yet to escalate to the point that the Athenians were blind to the savagery of their initial decision, which they quickly rescinded (Thucydides 3.49).
So, too, by the first Olympic festival of the war (428), the Peloponnesian League showed signs of strain. Although the allies who had convened at the festival agreed to a double invasion of Athens by land and sea, many of them failed to muster at the isthmus. Thucydides explains that they were ‘‘both in the middle of harvesting and tired of campaigning’’ (3.15.2). That the Spartans were willing to send a fleet to Lesbos to help with the rebellion the next spring further suggests that frustration - and perhaps fear oflosing their grip on their alliance - was driving them toward more daring undertakings.
At around the same time, the Athenians began to act more aggressively. Before the outbreak of war Pericles asked the Athenians to think of themselves as islanders (Thucydides 1.143.5) and warned them not to try to acquire more or voluntarily undertake additional risks while they were waging war (1.144.1); he adhered to this advice even after the plague struck Athens (2.61.2). In 427, however, the Athenians captured the island of Minoa, off the coast of Megara. In the following year the general Demosthenes defeated troops consisting of Peloponnesians and their allies in Amphilochia and discredited the Spartans there by allowing important Peloponnesians to depart in secret, deserting the rest of the troops (3.109.2). The Spartans may have responded to increased pressure on their periphery by establishing a colony outside the Peloponnese, Heracleia Trachinia (Thucydides 3.92-93).
Euripides’ Children of Heracles
More than half of our surviving tragedies were composed after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. A number of these plays have been mined for specific historical content - in my view with limited success. Zuntz (1955, 81-88), who dismisses most direct historical allusions in Euripides, is convinced that Eurystheus’ promise at the end of the Children of Heracles to protect the Athenians’ land from a future invasion by the children of Heracles (1032-36) can only allude to the Spartans’ invasion in 430. Spartan kings were the putative descendants of Heracles, and in 430 the invasion led by King Archidamus spared a large part of Attica; afterwards he would show less restraint. Poole (1994, 6) is rightly skeptical; there is no reason to assume that the predicted invasion had yet taken place or that the play could not have been performed before the outbreak of war. Moreover, to sustain his argument, Zuntz must impart irony to the words of Heracles’ friend lolaus (82). After the Athenians have protected Heracles’ children from the Argives, he advises them, ‘‘Never raise a hostile spear against [the Athenians’] land’’ (313). As we will see when we turn to Suppliants, if there are historical allusions in Euripidean tragedies, they are oblique; features such as anachronisms (Easterling 1985a), touches of sophistic rhetoric, and contemporary character types give the plays their topicality.
World History
