Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (22 page)

prompted a new dirty war.

In the ancient Greek world, we can find clear examples of both

preemptive and preventive strategies. The generally recognized stron-

ger Spartans crossed the Athenian border in 431 claiming they had the

right of preventive invasion to start the Peloponnesian War. Sparta was

convinced not that Athens was about to attack it that year but rather

that, as Thucydides relates, without such a first strike, the unstoppable

growth of a hostile Athenian empire would soon lead to Sparta’s in-

evitable decline. The Spartans were justifiably terrified: “They then felt

that they could endure it no longer, but that the time had come for

them to throw themselves heart and soul upon the hostile power, and

break it, if they could, by commencing the present war.”16

102 Hanson

In the same manner, shortly before the Spartan king Archidamaus

reached Attica, his ally Thebes attacked the nearby Boeotian city of

Plataea. Again, the Thebans were not so worried that the tiny city was

about to help launch an Athenian attack. Instead, the attackers figured

that Athenian-backed democratic movements in Boeotia, charged by

the zeal and wealth of imperial Athens and the example of an indepen-

dent Plataea, would eventually weaken the relative position of Thebes.

In fact, a frequent tactic of ancient Greek armies was to attack with-

out warning a nearby suspicious city-state and destroy its wal s, as the

unfortunate history of the much-invaded polis of Thespiae attests. Per-

haps the defense of preemptive attack was best articulated by the Theban

general Pagondas moments before the battle of Delium (424 BC): “People

who, like the Athenians in the present instance, are tempted by pride

of strength to attack their neighbors, usual y march most confidently

against those who keep stil , and only defend themselves in their own

country, but think twice before they grapple with those who meet them

outside their frontier and strike the first blow if opportunity offers.”17

Epaminondas’s strike of 369 should be seen more as a preemptive

than as a preventive war. True, while Sparta had been defeated a little

more than a year earlier at Leuctra and was not planning for an im-

mediate invasion of Boeotia, it was nevertheless busy invading the

territories of other city-states while rebuilding its own forces. Indeed,

Sparta had just entered Mantineia in summer 370 to undermine the

establishment of a new united democratic polis. Thebes was seen by

other Greek states to be the traditionally weaker power, and it could

reasonably be expected that the Spartans would soon, as they had done

in the Peloponnesian War, attack first, in an effort to try to reverse the

verdict of Leuctra and reestablish the Spartan supremacy of the 380s.

While the defeat at Leuctra in midsummer 371 proved the beginning

of the end for Spartan power, much of the enduring trauma was psy-

chological, as the army itself probably suffered not much more than

1,000 combined Spartiate and al ied hoplites kil ed. That was a grievous

loss, but nevertheless, 90 percent of the composite army survived and

made it back to the Peloponnese. Most city-states would have agreed

with Epaminondas that the Spartan danger to the Boeotian confederacy

The Doctrine of Preemptive War
103

from the traditional y more powerful Sparta in 370 was stil real and in-

deed imminent, rather than long term and theoretical.

The Longer-term Aims of Epaminondas

It was the plan of Epaminondas—no doubt subject to some opposition

from his fel ow Boeotarchs—to preempt Sparta by invading the Pelo-

ponnese, and then to take the unprecedented step of advancing into the

Laconian homeland. The unusual decision to accept the invitation of

the Mantineians and embark on a winter invasion suggests two further

considerations. First, Epaminondas probably felt that Sparta might soon

strike wel beyond its invasion of the territory of Mantineia, perhaps

during the campaign season the ensuing late spring or summer. Hitting

the Spartans first, whether near Mantineia or in Laconia itself, by leav-

ing in winter would preclude that, and offer some measure of surprise.

The Boeotians’ conjecture was strengthened when other states in the

Peloponnese sent money to defray the cost of the preemptive invasion.18

Second, at some point in early 370, if indeed not before, the invasion

was envisioned as part of a larger expedition to reorder the Pelopon-

nese by humiliating or defeating the Spartan military, assuring the new

Arcadian cities of Mantineia and Megalopolis of Boeotian protection,

freeing the helots of Messenia, and founding the new city of Messene

on Mt. Ithome. All that would require months abroad, and made it

preferable to leave in winter so that the army of mostly farmers could

return to Boeotia by at least harvesttime 369.19

Despite the meager contemporary descriptions of the Boeotian inva-

sion, we can assume that Epaminondas desperately sought to draw the

Spartan phalanx out to battle; and then, barring that, to cross the Eurotas

River and storm the Spartan acropolis and physical y destroy the center

of the Spartan rule. His desire was not the defeat but the apparent end

of the Spartan land empire in the Peloponnese. But once those immedi-

ate goals failed and the Boeotians proved unable either to annihilate the

Spartan army or to capture the city, in the new year 369 Epaminondas

ignored the legal end of his tenure as general. He instead kept the army

in the Peloponnese and, after brief deliberations in Arcadia, moved on

to his second objective of freeing the helots of Messenia, apparently in

104 Hanson

the belief that the end of Messenian serfdom eventual y might emascu-

late Sparta, which he was so far unable to destroy outright.20

This was a far more ambitious goal. It required his army to cross

the spurs of Mt. Taygetos in early winter, rid Messenia of its Spartan

garrison, marshal the serfs into work forces, immediately begin the

construction of a vast new city, and assume that Messenian national-

ists would be reliable democratic allies, all while holding the forces of

King Agesilaus to his rear at bay. The apparent dream of Epaminondas

was a confederation of three huge Peloponnesian citadels at Man tineia,

Megalopolis, and Messene, all fortified and democratic, that, under

the guidance of Thebes, would constrain Spartan adventurism while

slowly eroding the power of the Spartan state, shed of its helot labor-

ers and subservient allies. Although Epaminondas was not adverse to

making occasional alliances of convenience with oligarchic states in

the Peloponnese, he seems to have assumed that the new confederated

democracies in Arcadia and Messenia would, by their natural political

interests, remain intrinsically hostile to Sparta and sympathetic to kin-

dred democratic Boeotia.21

Aftermath

Was Epaminondas’s preemptive attack of 370–369 successful in the

long run?

If it was intended solely to stop four decades of serial Spartan inva-

sions of Boeotia, the answer is unequivocally yes. The Spartan army

never again went north of the isthmus in force to attack another Greek

city-state. If the strike was aimed at undermining the foundations of

the Spartan Empire and its power, the goals were likewise unambigu-

ously achieved. While the Spartan army still on occasion defeated re-

gional rival states in battle, most notably in the famous “tearless battle”

and rout of the Arcadians in 368, Sparta’s land empire in the Pelopon-

nese slowly dissolved with the creation of the autonomous states at

Mantineia, Messene, and Megalopolis, coupled with the freeing of the

Messenian helots and the loss of Spartan farmland in Messenia. In its

twilight, Sparta struggled to remain one among equal Peloponnesian

powers, but, as a strategically insignificant state, Sparta was notably

The Doctrine of Preemptive War
105

absent thirty years later in the pan-Hellenic effort to stop the Macedo-

nians at Chaeronea.22

Second, did the invasion of 369 end the war outright with Sparta?

Hardly. The oligarchy and empire of Sparta had created a sort of

stability within the Peloponnese since the Athenian war ended at

the close of the fifth century. Following the Theban liberation of the

helot and allied cities from Spartan domination, an upheaval ensued

that prompted three more Boeotian invasions of the Peloponnese in

369, 368, and 362, before culminating in the final indecisive battle of

Man tineia (362). At that engagement Epaminondas was killed at the

moment of Boeotian victory. As the historian Xenophon famously re-

marked, “There was even more confusion and upheaval in Greece after

than before the battle.” Diodorus used the occasion to offer his eulogy

of Epaminondas in the context that his death meant an end to the brief

Theban hegemony altogether.23

Apparently the original visions of Epaminondas, at whatever point

they were reified, may not have been merely to keep Sparta out of

Boeotia but also to reorder the Greek world in such a way as to preclude

any chance of Spartan reemergence, an undertaking that would have

meant for distant Thebes an almost continual military presence in the

Peloponnese. Such a mammoth enterprise would have required capital

reserves, some sea power, and political unity—requisites beyond the

resources of a deeply divided, rural democratic Thebes. Epaminondas

himself seemed finally to have grasped the limits of Boeotian power

and the growth of political opposition to his grandiose plans abroad

when in 362 he aimed once again at invading Laconia and capturing

the Spartan acropolis, as if his previous accomplishments of freeing

the helots and establishing fortified democratic cities were not having

the desired effect of promptly ending Sparta altogether as a player in

regional Greek politics.24

Autonomia
—local political independence—was a Hellenic ideal held

even higher than
dêmokratia
. Once the democratic federated states of

Arcadia gained their independence from both Sparta and Thebes, there

was no assurance that their assemblies, out of gratitude to Epaminon-

das, would continue to privilege the Boeotian alliance. By 362 Epami-

nondas was invading the Peloponnese not just to finish off Sparta but

106 Hanson

also to fight Mantineia, the democratic ally whose plight had prompted

his initial invasion nearly a decade earlier.

Apparently by 362, the Mantineians had calculated that a now weak-

ened, nearby, and Doric Sparta was a better pragmatic, balance-of-

power ally than was an aggressive Boeotian hegemon to the north.

Thebes had served to ensure democracy to the Mantineians and weak-

ened its traditional ally, Sparta; the Mantineians in turn reciprocated by

judging an aggressive, though kindred, democratic Thebes far more a

bother to the traditional autonomy of the Greek city-state.

Lessons from Epaminondas’s Preemptive War

Where Does This End?

While successful preemptive war may result in an immediate strategic

advantage, the dividends of such a risky enterprise are squandered if

there is not a well-planned effort to incorporate military success into

a larger political framework that results in some sort of advantageous

peace. By its very definition, an optional preemptive war must be short,

a sort of decapitation of enemy power that stuns it into paralysis and

forces it to grant political concessions. In democratic states, such a con-

troversial gamble cannot garner continued domestic public support if

the attack instead leads to a drawn-out, deracinating struggle, the very

sort of quagmire that preemption was originally intended to preclude.

Like it or not, when successful and followed by a period of quiet, pre-

emption is often ultimately considered moral, justified, and defensive;

when costly and unsuccessful in securing peace, in hindsight it always

looks optional, foolhardy, and aggressive.

Epaminondas grasped the paradox that he was fighting against both

the Spartans and time, given uncertain public opinion back home, and

thus, once he failed to destroy the Spartan acropolis and its political and

military elite, he turned to two contingency plans that might neverthe-

less have ended the hostilities with a permanently weakened Sparta on

terms favorable to Thebes with a definitive cessation of fighting. Had

Epaminondas before venturing into Messenia been able to cross the Eu-

rotas and burn Sparta, defeat its remaining hoplites inside Laconia, and

The Doctrine of Preemptive War
107

free al the Laconian helots as wel , it is very likely that Sparta would have

disappeared altogether as a major polis in the winter of 370–369, without

need for further invasions of the Boeotian army in subsequent years.