Persia and Pericles’ Grand Strategy. Was the Peloponnesian War a Bipolar Hegemonic War?

Abstract

It has remained popular, especially among international relations scholars, to conceptualize the Peloponnesian War in terms of a bipolar hegemonic struggle between Athens and Sparta. However, Thucydides’ depiction of the war, which inspired this view, has been criticized for eclipsing the roles of other Greek and non-Greek actors and their implications for the development of the war and thus oversimplifying the complexity of the war. In line with this criticism, this essay proposes positioning the Peloponnesian War in the context of the long-term evolution of the power struggle between the Greek cities and the Persian Empire during the fifth century BCE, stressing how the Persian factor continued, even after the end of the Greco-Persian Wars, to influence the strategic constellation in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean, driving the Greek cities into complex strategic calculations. It reconstructs the Athenians’ cleavages regarding their city’s grand strategy and analyzes how Pericles’ war strategy reflected the strategic uncertainty and complexity deriving from Persia’s presence. As a chapter in the one-century long power game by Greek cities and the Persian Empire, the Peloponnesian War was a complex event to which the popular concepts such as bipolar hegemonic struggle hardly do justice, as this essay will show.