Sthenelaidas and Performance as Strategy

We meanwhile are the same then and now, and shall not, if we are wise, disregard the wrongs of our allies, or put off till tomorrow the duty of assisting those who must suffer today. Others have much money and ships and horses, but we have good allies whom we must not give up to the Athenians, nor by lawsuits and words decide the matter, as it is anything but in word that we are harmed, but render instant and powerful help…Vote therefore, Spartans, for war, as the honor of Sparta demands, and neither allow the further aggrandizement of Athens, nor betray our allies to ruin, but with the gods let us advance against the aggressors.[1]

Common readings of Thucydides have drawn attention to particular set-pieces in the History of the Peloponnesian War, and from this readers have inferred justifications for war and peace, and explanations for alliance structures. At first, Thucydides seems to construct the Spartan debate between Archidamus and Sthenelaidas about whether to go to war against Athens as a binary opposition between a hawk and a dove. Another reading of this passage in Book One, however, shows their difference is in how they consider risk. Sthenelaidas’ speech shows him balancing risk-aversion and a high-stakes strategy; Archidamus prefers low stakes in a war of attrition. Spartan strategy during the early stages of war is a collaboration from these two contrasting speechmakers. They share an opinion that Athens is now an enemy.

Performance is a crucial, but often forgotten, dimension of strategy. Individual strategists are successful in part because they convince audiences to consent to their argument. They recognize the importance of performance. Our common classifications of warmongering hawks or peace-loving doves stem from how they justify their respective strategies. King Archidamus appears as a dove through urging restraint and caution, but only because he stands in relative comparison to a more obviously hawkish strategist, the ephor Sthenelaidas. This article argues that both were pro-war hawks; the distinction performative, the arguments judged by their audience on a compelling basis. Sthenelaidas’ rhetorical style made Archidamus appear dovish which encouraged the audience to vote for war. His purpose in the broader Spartan grand strategy is to get the audience to vote for war, believe in Spartan superiority, and please its allies. Sthenelaidas’ speech shows he understands Sparta’s power is contingent on showing leadership among its allies. 

The context of their contrasting speeches is one of the early set-pieces in the History. It takes place in Sparta in 442 BC. The debate’s first act is a disagreement between Corinth and Athens over the smaller city-states of Epidamnus and Corcyra. The Athenian envoys surmised disputes over these small city-states were isolated cases, and the peace treaty governing the Hellenic world was not broken. They sought to prevent Spartan intervention, which they thought would enlarge the dispute into a wider intra-Greek war. The Corinthians, a worried and warring Spartan ally, were gunning for war with the ascendant Athens. After hearing their speeches, the Spartans told the foreigners to leave so they could discuss among themselves. 

Two decision-makers, King Archidamus and an ephor called Sthenelaidas came forward to speak in front of the assembly.[2] Archidamus advocated deliberation and caution in a long speech that takes up most of the debate. In his mind, Athens had a strong navy and deep pockets for a long war. Sparta needed time to prepare to match its rival for the looming great war. Athenian strength was its money, fleet, overseas empire, and walls. Spartan allies, like the gung ho Corinthians, would have to sit, wait, and prepare for war. Archidamus’ speech is long, dry, and has few exciting phrases or rhetorical techniques.

Then Sthenelaidas steps forward to make his speech. His laconic style, powerful repetition, and simple messaging demanded the audience’s attention. His argument: Sparta should declare war now while its allies are hungry for it.[3] Sthenelaidas does not address Archidamus’ claims. Instead, he stresses the pull of allies and the prestige of military victory. He whips the crowd up by making them publicly declare their opinions. He makes the occasion a drama, not a board meeting. The great majority agreed with him and concluded Athens broke the treaty.

Reading Sthenelaidas' speech takes about two minutes. It was perhaps twenty minutes long in reality.[4] Although short, it is complex. He preaches consent and coercion through blending the performative with material concerns. Other city-states would recognize Sparta was bound by justice and honor, and it was unafraid to fight wars with them. Through a swift declaration of war, Sparta gained legitimacy, and other Greeks would therefore join it. Its allies, hankering for war, make up for its deficiencies: its lack of manpower, navy, and financial power. The military state was beset by manpower shortages and often contributed few soldiers to battles. The risk of an internal helot revolt was a constant threat in their strategic thought. Instead, it preferred its allies to endanger their own men on the battlefield.

Sthenelaidas’ style as a performance mirrors his view of war and victory: short, sharp, and powerful. Like his audience, Sthenelaidas knows that allies demand a performance. The popular assembly elected him as an ephor. While his true age is not known, we can make some assumptions that he was probably an old and respected soldier due to the facts that Sparta valued old age, and that Sthenelaidas was so in tune with his audience.[5] He may have grown up with stories about the Greco-Persian Wars in 480BC when Athens seized the postwar moment and became a powerful Hellenic leader. The Athenian speech, before Archidamus and Sthenelaidas step up, references this war and it praises their martial valor to a hubristic volume.[6] Listening through gritted teeth Sthenelaidas may have seen this as Sparta’s chance to get even.

Sparta was not an imperial power like Athens, but the leader amongst several other mid-level states that paid no money to Sparta, but formed a loose alliance with it, the Peloponnesian League. For Sthenelaidas, mustering allies, liberating Athenian subjects, and marching onto the Athenian hinterland of Attika is the essence of Spartan hegemony. Without performing this role, Sparta would lose its moral leadership.

In his hawkish speech, Sthenelaidas looks to champion multilateralism. He cares about what allies can do for Sparta—he’s not in favor of multilateralism for its own sake. But he realises the position of Sparta in the alliance. For him, the point of Sparta in the Peloponnesian League was to be a military power that rallies allies and partners, and inspires bravery against common enemies. Often in modern foreign policy commentary, there is an association between hawks having an inclination toward unilateral action and for doves with multilateralism. Yet, this association is misplaced. Wars are often fought with allies and partners even if that impinges on fighting capability.[7] Bringing in allies for war means a dominant state like Sparta can manage the peace after the war.

Sthenelaidas urges courage and the alliance as the only tools that Sparta needs to defeat Athens.[8] In his promotion of courage to go to war, he crystallizes the fear in Sparta. Further deliberation hints at cowardice.[9] Sparta must tread a fine line between its traditional strategic culture of risk aversion and allied pressure against cowardice in front of the enemy. Archidamus argues for risk aversion and a cool-headed rational response to Athenian power, and in doing so misreads the room.

The addition of allies into these strategic decisions means Sparta, as the dominant state, must perform for an audience. Allied states had expectations and needs from the regional hegemon. To couch strategy in just the quantity of military capabilities would be to misunderstand not only the dimensionality of strategy but also relationships with allies. If it does not perform as a regional leader, Sparta does not have the material power to fight Athens.

The Alliances of the Peloponnesian War (US Army/Wikimedia)

On one hand, Thucydides forges an asymmetry in their speeches. Sthenelaidas and Archidamus are in opposition to each other in rationale and style. Archidamus focuses on Athenian material power compared to Sparta. He ignores the audience’s attention span, neglects the dramatic and makes a speech designed for generals and politicians, not a growling crowd of Spartan patriots. As readers, we understand his thought process and the structure of argument in its written form. But as a performance, it does not provide a hearty display of Spartan courage in face of adversity.

Yet, unpacking their arguments does not lead to an easy binary between a hawk and dove, but two different sorts of hawks. Sparta was a military state that forced strategists to think in military terms. Both agreed that Sparta should check Athens through a war fought alongside its allies in an alliance. Their disagreement is more in temperament and timing.

Although these can make a substantial difference to the war; neither speaker dissents nor challenges what is already known by the audience: Athens broke the treaty and war is the solution. The disagreement was only on when to strike. Thucydides thought it important enough to include these dueling speakers, and in doing so, we see that Spartan strategic culture probably already wanted war.

After declaring war on Athens, Sparta adopts a strategy of nonchalant urgency. Archidamus annually raided Attica, the countryside around Athens, burning crops and sacking villages at harvest time. While Sparta rushed into war with Sthenelaidas’ oratory, its initial actions suggest that Spartan strategy was not rapidly containing Athenian power on land and sea. The raids became a permanent fixture when the Spartans fortified Decelea, just outside of Athens, in 413 BC towards the end of the war.[10] This strategy had little material or geostrategic result. Sparta committed just enough to its war effort, while Athens could absorb the losses.

The reasoning behind the raids, however, is not in their immediate result. Raiding Attica pleased its war hungry allies. Sparta was performing its role as a martial hegemonic leader. Through emphasizing the performative dimension of Spartan strategic decisions, we can make sense of Spartan strategy early in the war. It suggests that Sparta did not significantly alter its traditional strategic outlook of being reluctant to engage outside its borders.

The performative capability of Sparta in its regional hegemony is present in Thucydides’ History. He often refers to this hegemony as “the Lakedaimonians and their allies,” or the Peloponnesian League. It brought various small city-states together in ad hoc conferences to decide about matters of war, peace, and boundaries. Sparta had to perform for allies to keep power; it couldn’t rely on formal structures. In contrast, the Athenian-led Delian League was more of an imperial hierarchical power, where allies had to pay tribute or men to Athens. The details about the mechanics of the Peloponnesian League are imprecise.[11] It seems likely Sparta was in favor of oligarchical governments, but it didn’t intervene much in their foreign policy.[12] The city-states of Elis, Tegra, and Mantinea had “mini-hegemonies” within the League and seemed to have their own foreign policies.[13] For instance, Sparta, who had recently signed an armistice with Athens, was not involved in a battle between two of its Arkadian allies, the Mantineans and Tegeans.[14]

There are other successful laconic speeches that inspire rigor to seize the audience into action. Wulfstan II, Archbishop of York in the 11th Century had the “The Sermon of the Wolf to the English” and Abraham Lincoln had the Gettysburg Address in 1863. Sthenelaidas’ role wasn’t to be a general in war, but to be an orator in the preamble. It was Archidamus whose role was to play the general. On first blush, their contrasting rhetorical styles point to two different strategies for war. Ultimately, however, they push in the same direction. There is a unity of opposites. Their rhetorical style is different, but they need each other to launch Sparta in its great power rivalry. Sthenelaidas understands that for Sparta to be a great power it needs its allies to be onside. Archidamus knows caution in warfare is a Spartan strength. Sparta gained legitimacy in the Greek world by fighting alongside its allies, and it meant that allied soldiers could die for it.

Thomas Furse is a PhD candidate in International Politics and a member of the Centre for Modern History. He is researching American strategic thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. The work focuses on a collection of military intellectuals who designed the AirLand Battle Doctrine to resolve the post-Vietnam crisis in the U.S. military and recalibrate the U.S.-led world order.

This article appeared originally at Strategy Bridge.

[1] Thucydides, The Landmark Thucydides, trans. Richard Crawley, ed. Robert B. Strassler, (Simon & Schuster, 1996), 1.86.

[2] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner, (Penguin, 1986), 1.80-88

[3] For more see Gregory Crane, 1998, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism, (University of California Press, 1998).

[4] Edmund F. Bloedow, ‘Sthenelaidas the Persuasive Sparta,’ Hermes, Vol. 115, No. 1, (1987), pp. 60-66, 61

[5] Paul Cartledge, Spartan Reflections, (University of California Press, 2003), 60

[6] Thucydides, History, 1. 73-75, also see Gregory Crane, 1998, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism, (University of California Press, 1998), p. 264-273.

[7] Patricia Weitsman, Waging War Alliances, Coalitions, and Institutions of Interstate Violence, (Stanford University Press, 2013).

[8] Thucydides, History, 1.86.

[9] Mary Frances Williams, Ethics in Thucydides: The Ancient Simplicity, (University Press of America, 1998), 97-98.

[10] Thucydides, History, 7.19

[11] Thomas Figueira and Sean R. Jensen, ‘Governing Interstate Alliances,’ and John Serrati, ‘Government and Warfare,’ in A Companion to Ancient Greek Government, Hans Beck (ed.), (Oxford University Press, 2013).

[12] D. C. Yates, ‘The Archaic Treaties between the Spartans and their Allies,’ Classical Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 1 (May, 2005), pp. 65-75

[13] James Capreedy, ‘Losing Confidence in Sparta: The Creation of the Mantinean Symmachy,’ Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, Vol. 54, (2014) pp. 352-378, p. 353

[14] Capreedy, ‘Losing Confidence,’ 359, see also Thucydides, History, 4. 134.