THE FIRST YEARS, 431-427 B.C.
In a war between the chief military and the chief naval power in Greece a decisive issue was unlikely to come speedily. Sparta relied on the old traditional strategy of Greek warfare. She hoped by invading Attica and devastating the crops to induce such war weariness in the Athenians as to make them sue for peace, un less they could be provoked first to fight the one pitched battle which must end the war. In the numbers, as in the discipline and efficiency of the troops, Athens was markedly inferior to the Peloponnesian-Boeotian levy. The flaw in this strategy was that Athens, unlike other Greek cities, could not be starved into sub mission. For her food supply she was independent of the prod uce of Attic soil. The old king of Sparta, Archidamus, realized this, and warned his folk that the war would be bequeathed to their children. But the Spartans were confident of speedy victory.
Upon this confidence Pericles based his own strategy. He was fighting for the status quo ante bellum, for the survival, not for the aggrandisement, of the empire. To the enemy's "Strategy of Annihilation" he opposed his own "Strategy of Exhaustion" which should give the foe no opportunity of any success in battle. Upon invasion by the enemy the country-f olk took refuge within the walls of the "linked-fortress" Athens-Peiraeus. So Athens became "an island," impregnable to attack. The great fleet should secure the empire against disaffection within and attack without, and, offensively, was to raid the Peloponnesian coast. Meanwhile every spring and autumn the Athenian land army should waste the Megarid when the Peloponnesians were busy with their own crops at home, and compel Megara to renew her former alliance with Athens. All access from the Peloponnese by land into Attica would then be denied the enemy, and the dangerous Boeotian army on the north, invaluable allies to a Spartan force in Attica, would not dare cross the Cithaeron-Parnes range unsupported. So the baffled enemy should offer acceptable terms of peace.
This Periclean strategy also had elements of grave weakness, quickly revealed, mainly psychological. The Athenian temper proved unequal to the strain. The Spartans, though disappointed of their hopes, stuck doggedly to the war. Then chance struck Athens a heavy blow. In June 43o B.C. plague, imported by merchant vessels from Egypt or Libya, seized on the city, and the crowding of the refugees within the walls in the glaring summer heat spread the infection horribly. No adequate provision of housing or sanitation had been made. Reinforcements sent to the army blockading Potidaea carried the pestilence on the troop ships, and here too the mortality was great. No other Greek city of any importance suffered. The devastation of the fields and the ravages of the plague overcame Athens' will to endure, de spite all Pericles' noble oratory. There were as yet no compensa tory successes. Megara, though starving, refused to submit. The naval raids round Peloponnese, one conducted on a great scale by Pericles himself, were futile pinpricks. Sparta cared nothing for them. It was Athens which first became "exhausted," thanks to the Periclean strategy. Even her great financial superiority at the beginning of the war began rapidly to vanish. Pericles, in fact, in framing his strategy, had been too fearful of the "casualty list," always a matter of grave peril to any statesman in a Greek democracy. And, himself an admiral of repute, he had been curiously blind to the opportunities afforded an army, even ad mittedly inferior, by co-operation with a powerful fleet to harass and distract the enemy. A strong expeditionary force based on Cythera, which should have been seized at once (actually the island was taken first—and uselessly—in June 424 B.C.) would at least have kept Peloponnesian armies out of Attica, and have encouraged Athenian hopes. Pericles flung away the strategical chance offered him in the proper use of naval predominance.