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.

摘要

将伯罗奔尼撒战争概念化为雅典和斯巴达之间的两极霸权斗争仍然很流行，特别是在国际关系学者中。然而，启发了这一观点的修昔底德对战争的描述被批评为使其他希腊和非希腊演员的角色及其对战争发展的影响黯然失色，从而过度简化了战争的复杂性。根据这一批评，本文建议将伯罗奔尼撒战争置于公元前 5 世纪希腊城市与波斯帝国之间权力斗争的长期演变的背景下，强调波斯因素是如何持续的，即使在希腊 - 波斯战争的结束，以影响希腊和东地中海的战略星座，推动希腊城市进入复杂的战略计算。它重构了雅典人对其城市大战略的分歧，并分析了伯里克利的战争战略如何反映波斯存在的战略不确定性和复杂性。作为希腊城市和波斯帝国长达一个世纪的权力博弈的一个篇章，伯罗奔尼撒战争是一个复杂的事件，两极霸权斗争等流行概念很难解释，正如本文将展示的那样。