The Collapse CXCI: The Peloponnesian War

06 November 20XX+1

My Dear Lucilius,

This morning, at our now regular breakfast consisting of ½ a cup of grains, a handful of dried berries, and some kind of herbal tea which I cannot identify by taste, Pompeia Paulina asked me about civil wars.

It was an unexpected and odd question coming from my wife. Yes, she is well read and we share some (but not all) subjects of reading together, but she has never before asked about that specific subject or genre.

I knew a bit, I replied. Followed by “But most of my knowledge is about civil wars long ago”.

---

Modern civil wars never interested me, even back in the day when we could see them on our screens nightly if we so desired. Part of it was the fact that it was not just an entertaining five minute action sequence in a movie; it was reality. The other was the fact that depending on one’s opinions, even a not-so-recent event such as the American Civil War could result in a re-fighting of the entire campaign by people whose great grandparents were not alive at the time.

And so my interests and knowledge lay safely in the past, insulated by centuries and lack of passions by the modern world.

---

Of the books here, she asked, did I have any worth reading on the subject? I know you will be surprised to hear that I had one or two. The best, I told her, was The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides the son of Olorus.

I have others of course – the works of Diodorus Siculus and Xenophon’s Hellenica which cover the same period, and Appian’s The Civil Wars and Caesar’s The Civil Wars and half a dozen Roman authors that covered the same ground. But Thucydides’ work remains the best.

Why, she asked.

Thucydides was not precisely “The Father of History”; that title falls to Herodotus but perhaps only because he wrote a bit sooner – in my opinion Thucydides was the better writer. And it was because of that better writing – that actual attempt to gather facts and get the gist of speeches correct, let alone his personal experience in the War itself that made him more engaging.

It is a simple story I told her, as old as time: two entities that once were close but over time drifted apart to the point that they began encroaching on one another’s perceived strategic interests; in some ways no different than human relationships. One argument leads to another, which leads to action, which leads to a point (it is quite clear in the text) where the fork in the road for peace or war is clearly seen, and war is chosen.

Like most wars, I said, both sides assumed that it would be over after a season or even a few years, as most wars of the age were. No-one predicted it would go on for 27 years and result in the effective destruction of the Classical Greek world: the Athenian Empire would find itself shorn of its greatness and its empire and became one among many Greek City-States, the Spartan state (now the Spartan Hegemony) essentially becoming everything the Spartan state never intended to be and collapsing a mere 30 years later into a backwater rump state with a proud history but denuded of territory and manpower and everything that had made Sparta Spartan.

It was, I said, a very clear discussion of the folly of humans and ability to destroy everything they valued in pursuit of a goal they thought they wanted. Over 27 years, the old Classical Greek polity was destroyed as war went from the traditional short struggles of hoplite warfare to total war, where cities were destroyed, populations slain or enslaved, and horrors perpetuated.

All in pursuit of a power which would, a little over 60 years later, slip forever from their grasp with the rise of their neighbor Macedon to the North.

My favorite quote, I told her, was from early in the work, Book I, where Archidamas, Eurypontid King of the Spartans, tells the Spartan assembly “If you take something on before you are ready for it, hurry at the beginning will mean delay at the end….’Slow’ and ‘cautious’ can equally well be ‘wise’ and ‘sensible’”.

She laughed at that. It sounds a lot like you, she said.

Maybe it does sound like me, Lucilius. But it troubles me that even in thinking about that work, the parallels lay everywhere around me.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca