Of codes and constructions

Since the 1960s IR scholars have produced an enormous body of literature on the connection between the cognitive processes of decision-makers and foreign policy outcomes, beginning a current with Leites's ‘Operational Code’ that became a torrent after Jervis's seminal 1976 book.Footnote ²⁷ Recent scholarship has refined the earlier idiographic case-study model by specifying that foreign policy actors use a schema, a ‘cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among these attribute’,Footnote ²⁸ by which they process and incorporate new information as they make decisions. Though there are semantic distinctions in the literature over what exactly a schema is and how it functions, there is general agreement that ‘many individual cognitive items are organised into larger knowledge clusters’,Footnote ²⁹ and that these clusters act as filters in the processing of information – new data must first pass through the schema in order to be used by the decision-maker, but the schema organises the new information in biased ways. While most of the current research on the psychopolitical structure of decision-making is rooted in contemporary cognitive science and adopts a methodology suited to positivism, scholars have also become interested in concepts that seem ‘fuzzier’ and more suited to humanistic research.Footnote ³⁰ As Hermann et al. say: ‘The importance of metaphors, analogies, heuristics, and even story lines or scripts in organizing cognition has been recognized and explored’,Footnote ³¹ and image theory now attempts to include the larger framing provided by narrative into discussions of the specific effects of particular images on the cognition of the decision-maker.Footnote ³²

While realists and rationalists look to psychology and cognitive science for their models of decision-making, scholars of a more constructivist bent have also been using narratology to evaluate the behaviour of states and policymakers. Ontological security theory (OST) merges insights drawn from sociology, literary theory, existentialist psychology, and feminist IR, and posits that states, like individuals, seek to maintain the continuity of their identity over time. States too experience the anxiety produced by the lack of a coherent framework of reality as a threat to their existential security.Footnote ³³ To avoid this anxiety they ‘generate routine foreign policies that help to reproduce a state's conception of Self-identity’,Footnote ³⁴ and these policies are made meaningful by their insertion in a larger narrative that situates the state in the world: ‘The biographical narrative represents the best approximation of what a state's actions mean to its sense of national “self”.’Footnote ³⁵

There are multiple national narratives which may be framing a leader's decisions and we cannot simply assume a simple story of cause and effect, since nations have multiple political traditions to draw on, each with their own corresponding narrative.Footnote ³⁶ Leaders themselves are also not always consistent in terms of how they think and talk over time,Footnote ³⁷ and may sometimes also use a particular narrative as a strategic toolFootnote ³⁸ though at other times the narrative is employed subconsciously.Footnote ³⁹ Scholars who concentrate on this implicit use of narrative have also drawn attention to the connection between political narratives and religious role identity.Footnote ⁴⁰ Leaders may see themselves as playing a role in a religiously inflected dramatic narrative, and will behave in part according to the attributes they ascribe to their particular role.Footnote ⁴¹ Moreover, this script may also involve attributing enemy-role characteristics to other states or political actors, in effect enlisting them as characters in a play within the heads of the first state's decision-makers, as when Iraqi insurgents were cast as ‘evildoers’ or ‘Indians’ by the George W. Bush administration.Footnote ⁴²

While there are many salient differences between approaches that draw rather directly from contemporary cognitive scienceFootnote ⁴³ and those social constructivists who pull mainly from the sociological tradition,Footnote ⁴⁴ their common origin in psychoanalysis makes the effort to highlight the ‘narrative connection’ less quixotic than it might appear. The ‘Operational Code’ approach, which is in many ways the grandfather of contemporary cognitive models, is grounded in the psychoanalytic theory of personality,Footnote ⁴⁵ and Steele's use of ‘ontological security’ is itself based in existentialist psychoanalysis.Footnote ⁴⁶ It is true that contemporary psychology has moved far from its roots in psychoanalysis, and a number of paradigms are distinctly hostile to the seemingly unscientific aspects of psychoanalysis. Still, the current ‘return to narrative’ of the two branches of IR theory can also be seen as a kind of homecoming to a common point of origin, though now with an appreciation that methodological pluralism can be a strength rather than a sign of lack of rigour.

I begin by laying out what Thucydides himself asserts to be the real cause of the war. This traditional interpretation is largely accepted by most IR scholars, even of the constructivist stamp, and it will therefore serve as the jumping off point for the rest of my analysis. I will then proceed to assess the character of Thucydides as a historian with respect to his proclivity to ignore or slight the religious dimension to the facts that he relates. In effect, I am trying to establish that Thucydides has a peculiar bias against reporting religious data, and that his omissions on the topic should lead us to question whether more religious data lies beneath his narrative than we would have thought.Footnote ⁴⁷ Given this bias, I will then proceed to examine the desultory religious information not specifically related to the origin of the war that Thucydides provides us. Even this scattered information reveals that religious norms do indeed play a causal role during the war, though Thucydides does not emphasise the point.Footnote ⁴⁸ Following this, I will at last get to the origins of the war, and discuss the religious significance of the two Spartan peace embassies that immediately preceded the opening of hostilities. Thucydides acknowledges a religious aspect to each of these missions, though he considers that religion is a tool of propaganda rather than a genuinely held belief in both cases. We are not required to make judgments about the depth of the Spartans’ conviction, however, since what we will see is that in both word and deed they follow (in part) the roles outlined by a religious narrative of their city. Whether the conjunction between their speech and action comes from a deeply rooted spirituality is beyond my ability to determine, but settling this question is not requisite for a narratological assessment of their actions or the origin of the war.Footnote ⁴⁹

Thucydides on the causes of the warFootnote ⁵⁰

Thucydides' statement at the end of the ‘archaeological’ section of his first book on the origin of the war would seem to place him squarely in the realist camp. It is worth quoting his most famous statement at some length:

He also reiterates this point somewhat later in the first book of his history, after the Spartans voted in July, 432 BCE that the Athenians had broken the ‘Thirty Years Treaty’, which had ended the ‘first’ Peloponnesian War in 445 BCE:

Finally, Thucydides sums up the results of the fifty years between the victories over Persia, and the commencement of hostilities in the present war (from 480/79 to 432/1 BCE):

These are the three most direct statements made by Thucydides regarding the causes of the war, and they should leave little doubt as to why Thucydides is taken to be the father of political realism.Footnote ⁵²

What Thucydides does not tell us

We are caught in an ‘evidence trap’ when attempting to find alternative explanations for the Peloponnesian War.Footnote ⁵³ Thucydides is our primary source for the war, and there are serious problems with relying primarily on a single source for any research.Footnote ⁵⁴ Simon Hornblower puts the dilemma thusly: ‘we can often do no more than correct Thucydides out of Thucydides. That is, we choose to play up what he chose to play down. Our justification for doing this, a perilously arrogant justification, consists in the little that we think we know about Greek religion. Occasionally we can point to an item of non-Thucydidean evidence as a control on Thucydides. But that is a rare luxury.’Footnote ⁵⁵ Hornblower overstates the problem somewhat, since we have over the course of the past hundred years accumulated a substantial amount of secondary documentary evidence, in the form of newly discovered ancient papyri (written texts), tablets, steles (a kind of pillar upon which public transactions were recorded), coins, and pottery.Footnote ⁵⁶ This evidence can be used to check or corroborate Thucydides' account, and we also have the writings of a number of other ancient historians whose narratives differ in part from his version of events. These differing stories can be checked against each other, and against the documentary evidence, allowing us to gain critical distance vis-à-vis Thucydides' reportage. This vantage allows us to see what Ernst Badian has termed Thucydides' ‘contempt for established Greek religion’, and which led Paul Veyne to conclude that the ‘most surprising feature of Thucydides' account is that one thing is missing: the gods of the time’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Simon Hornblower has shown that Thucydides fails to explain a substantial aspect of the war due to these oversights, whether intentionally or not. He adduces numerous examples, among which I will cite only two. First, Thucydides neglects to inform his reader about the religious aspects to the ‘first’ Peloponnesian war, which lasted from 462/1 BCE until the signing of the Thirty Years Peace in 445 BCE. Hornblower alleges that Sparta's role in the war is inexplicable without reference to the Delphic amphictiony, which was something akin to a pan-Hellenic religious council that oversaw the operation of the all-important religious sanctuary at Delphi (from whence spoke the oracle of Apollo – famed among other things for saying that Socrates was the wisest of the Athenians). The amphictiony was something like a democratic assembly – the cities which were represented there each had one vote, and decisions were passed by simple majority rule. In the first war Sparta directly acted against Athens only twice, and on both occasions it was a threat to her status in the Delphic amphictiony that prompted her to send out armies into the field. Thucydides mentions none of this in his treatment of this prelude to the main war.Footnote ⁵⁸ While one might certainly argue that these Spartan actions are motivated more by politics than religion, Thucydides slights the amphictiony in a way that both earlier and later Greek historians (like Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, respectively) did not. As Hornblower asks:

One might suspect that this lacuna is limited to Spartan motivations, and that it does not go far toward explaining Athenian actions. But Hornblower argues that Athens too has religion in mind, though Thucydides fails to tell us about it. In 426 BCE, in the midst of the war, and after a devastating plague had wracked Athens proper, the Athenians undertake a purification of the island sanctuary of Delos. Delos was the site of the origin of the Delian League, where Athens had organised the coalition of cities in their continuing war against Persia, and the members of this league later became the (somewhat unwilling) members of the Athenian Empire. In 426 the Athenians undertook a costly purification of Delos, which involved not only settling colonists there, but an extensive religious festival that required a substantial financial outlay. Hornblower contends that Athens’ action can be best explained by attending to the religious significance of Delos: Athens was attempting to recover from a devastating plague whose origins were believed to be sacred in nature, and as a pan-Hellenic sanctuary Delos was dear to the hearts and minds of many Greek cities. In addition to healing herself of the plague, the Athenians could hope to gain the favour of other cities by honouring a sanctuary that was revered by all.Footnote ⁶⁰ While one might again question whether the Athenians were motivated more by power than piety, the point is that Thucydides leaves us in the dark about these very important matters, which Hornblower summarises as ‘a religious war for the hearts and minds’ of the Greeks.Footnote ⁶¹

We are able to better assess the credibility of what Thucydides actually does say about religion when we bear in mind these interpretive caveats. As Hornblower, Badian, and Veyne have shown us, we have to treat his presentation of the religious data of the conflict with a healthy dose of scepticism. This does not necessarily require that we take a prior position on the salience of religious national narratives, however. The issue of Thucydides' reliability is distinct from the importance of religious narrative in the Peloponnesian War, and my contention that we need to treat Thucydides as an unreliable or hostile witness in religious matters does not rely upon the causal role of religion in the war. Though ultimately I will claim that religious narratives influenced the perceptions of the Spartan leaders (especially) on matters of foreign policy, and that we have ignored this largely because of Thucydides' influence, this is analytically separable from the general methodological caution needed in using Thucydides as a source of data.Footnote ⁶²

What Thucydides tells us about religion

Though Thucydides does not consider religion or piety as one of the true or real causes of the war, and while he often ignores the religious dimension of the events of his narrative, he also provides us with a wealth of evidence about the religious affairs of his day, perhaps to the detriment of his own causal account of the war. He gives us numerous examples of ‘pious’ conduct in the midst of the brutality of the war, and on most of these occasions he does not bother to dismiss the religious element as a mere pretext, as he does when he relates the first Spartan peace embassy to Athens (the Cylonian Affair, to be discussed below). The most significant aspect of this pious conduct is that it occurs in the midst of war, that ‘rough master’ (III.82). Thucydides shows us Greeks, both Spartans and Athenians, behaving in ways contrary to the dicta of rationality and power maximisation. By this I mean that the actions of the Greeks do not ‘maximize self-preservation and security through the pursuit of power’,Footnote ⁶³ and that instead we see them sacrificing these ends to the dictates of what they believe to be a higher law – the laws of the gods of their city. I will highlight two areas that Thucydides makes particularly prominent, though they do not enter into his broader explanation of causation in I.23 or elsewhere. Here, as stated above, I attempt to ‘correct Thucydides out of Thucydides'.Footnote ⁶⁴ First, he shows us the behaviour of the Spartans at war. While the speeches in Book I have described the Spartans as pious and fearful of reckless action, Thucydides shows us multiple instances of Spartan piety in their actual conduct of the war. Second, Thucydides shows the Athenians to be susceptible to pious actions in war, though perhaps not to the extent that the Spartans are. He gives us at least two notable occasions of Athenian piety: the trial and recall of Alcibiades in 415 BCE on charges of impiety, and the actions of the general Nicias at Syracuse in 413 which led, in part, to the destruction of the entire Athenian expedition to Sicily.

The Spartans conduct the war as if their gods watch every move. They believe that earthquakes are signs, and halt military conduct on at least three separate occasions (mentioned in Thucydides at III.89, VI.95, and VIII.6) when earthquakes strike. They are convinced that the great earthquake at Sparta (which occurred before the war began) was caused by their massacre of serf suppliants at a temple (I.128), and they believe that their setbacks in the early phase of the war were due to their violation of oaths that they had pledged to the Athenians (VII.18). They also turn back several armies from campaigns, when the soothsayers find the sacrifices to be unfavorable (V.54, V.55, V.116), and in general they are reluctant to fight on holy days or in the sacred month of Karneus (V.54, VII.73, VIII.9). Throughout the war, Thucydides shows us a Sparta that does not act solely according to the dictates of realpolitik, even when the lives of its soldiers are at stake,Footnote ⁶⁵ and much of the motivation to end the ‘Archidamian’ phase of the war (from 431–22) stems from the Spartan belief that the reversals they have suffered to that point are punishments from the gods for impiety.Footnote ⁶⁶

Thucydides also gives us evidence of Spartan piety in the speech of the ephor Sthenelaidas at the Peloponnesian Congress, and in the Spartan actions surrounding the oracle at Delphi. Sthenelaidas gives a masterful rhetorical performance in a brief and explicitly anti-rhetorical reply to the Spartan king Archidamus and the Athenian envoys to the Congress.Footnote ⁶⁷ Archidamus advises moderation in moving toward war with the Athenians, who themselves trumpet their prior military exploits as well as the power that they currently wield as a way of deterring a Spartan military response. Sthenelaidas bluntly claims not to have understood ‘the long speech of the Athenians’ but argues that they have nowhere denied their guilt in harming the allies of Sparta (I.86). For him it is enough to know that the Athenians are acting unjustly and that they require punishment. Therefore he enjoins the Spartans: ‘Vote therefore, Lacedaemonians, 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’ (I.86). It is significant not only that he refers to the gods’ approbation in the final sentence of his speech, but that he frames the entire matter of the dispute with Athens in terms of honour, justice, and piety. While there are tensions between these three concepts for Sthenelaidas they are linked together by his notion of Spartan identity, which casts the Athenians as impious aggressors who not only must be opposed from self-interest, but richly deserve punishment. This is a narrative of civic religious purpose in which Spartan national identity is inseparable from their concept of the sacred and the roles they believe it to entail.Footnote ⁶⁸

In the Spartan relationship to the oracle at Delphi we see further evidence of this. Thucydides tells us that even after deciding that war with the Athenians was justified the Spartans ‘sent to Delphi and inquired of the god whether it would be well with them if they went to war; and, as it is reported, they received from him the answer that if they put their whole strength into the war, victory would be theirs, and the promise that he himself would be with them, whether invoked or uninvoked’ (I.118). Apollo's blessing given, they still convoke another assembly of their allies, at which the Corinthians directly refer to the embassy to Delphi in their attempt to persuade the Spartans to fight: ‘the god has commanded it and promised to be with us … You will not be the first to break a treaty which the god, in advising us to go to war, judges to be violated already’ (I.123).

We can abstract from these discussions a generalised form of the Spartan national narrative and its religious bases. As Lebow puts the ‘stereotype’ of the Spartans: ‘The Spartans represent the traditional way of life based on subsistence agriculture in which apragomosune and hesuchia (rustic peace and quiet) were the highest goals to which people could reasonably aspire. Efforts to improve one's material lot were disparaged as hubris – considered an attempt to transcend human limits and become like the gods – and behavior that was dangerous to the individual and community alike. There was no escaping the cruelty of life, and sophrosune (self-control, but also acceptance of one's fate) is the highest form of wisdom.’Footnote ⁶⁹ This narrative, in which Sparta played the role of the disciplined and pious observer of the old ways, was juxtaposed to the role of an antagonist played by Athens. Moderation and piety were crucial to the identity of the role the Spartans allotted themselves, but these traits were defined in opposition to pleonexia – seen as greediness, grasping for more than one can hold, and the desire to take what belongs to others. In the Corinthian speeches at Sparta and in Sthenelaidas’ speech before the Congress we see how Athens is described as fitting this role; what is even odder is that Thucydides himself seems to attribute these same characteristics to Athens, though without applying moral condemnation as do the Peloponnesians.Footnote ⁷⁰ Thucydides depicts an avaricious Athens as the logical outcome of the geopolitical conditions set out in the ‘Archaeology’ that begins his text,Footnote ⁷¹ but the upshot of this description is that it accords with the Spartan self-narrative of Athens as an impious malefactor in need of correction.

That said, even the relatively secular Athenians are susceptible to religious norms, though more as a result of superstitious panics than as a normal pattern of conduct. On the eve of the preparations for the Sicilian expedition, the largest overseas military expedition ever undertaken to that date by Athens or any other state, the city was scandalised by the desecration of the Hermae, the small religious statues that protected the homes of Athenians. Many of these were damaged in one night, and suspicion fell on Alcibiades, who was to be the general in charge of the Sicilian expedition. Though he refuted the charges at the time and the expedition was allowed to begin its journey to Sicily, Alcibiades was later recalled and forced to flee Athenian jurisdiction, ‘accused of sacrilege in the matter of the mysteries and of the Hermae’ (VI.53). Though Thucydides tells us that Alcibiades was also feared because he might be a threat to the democracy, his recall was legally based on a charge of impiety, and Thucydides gives us no reason to doubt that many indeed believed him guilty of it. That the Athenians could recall the man they believed to be one of their best generals, merely on such grounds, indicates that they were not immune to the ordinances of their gods.

Most dramatically, we can see the Athenian mindset through the actions of the Athenian soldiers in Sicily, and of Nicias, the general who ends up presiding over the Sicilian adventure. After two years of fighting at Syracuse, the Athenian army is exhausted and near defeat. The army prepares to evacuate Sicily:

Shortly thereafter the Athenians are defeated in battle, and the entire expedition of fifty thousand men is lost. Thucydides himself supplies us with the religious motivation that partially causes the disaster, and we have seen how loathe he is to supply the religious dimension to anything. When faced with a life or death decision in which their rational self-interest dictates immediate flight, the Athenians instead listen to their gods. Thucydides critically notes that Nicias was ‘overaddicted’ to divination, but he also tells us that it was not merely Nicias’ whim that was at issue: the majority of the soldiers were also persuaded that the lunar eclipse was portentous. Nicias’ decision, then, was a widely popular one that met with the approval of the religious authorities as well as the army at large. With one voice, and in the face of imminent defeat, the army sat motionless for 27 days.

While neither of these cases reflects a general religious autobiographical narrative for the Athenians, they do attest to the power of religious ideas to influence Greek state behaviour, even in the most notoriously secular state of the era. Tellingly, however, Thucydides highlights Athenian examples of the efficacy of religious ideas mainly when things go wrong – perhaps as a subtle way of indicating that, to the extent that ‘divination and practices of that kind’ (VII.50) do make their way into political deliberations, they can only result in disaster.

Beyond Thucydides I: Cylon, Taenarus, and the curse of the Brazen Goddess

The war does not begin immediately after the Spartans and their allies vote that it should be commenced. Almost a year elapses, and in that time the Spartans send three embassies to the Athenians. Thucydides is sceptical about the purpose of these missions, telling us that Sparta spent its time ‘sending embassies to Athens charged with complaints, in order to obtain as good a pretext for war as possible, in the event of her paying no attention to them’ (I.126). But are these embassies merely pretexts which obscure the true cause of the war? Or are they ‘ancient curses which were clearly taken seriously and were themselves regarded as sufficient casus belli’?Footnote ⁷²

There is no need to elaborate the details of the first embassy as Thucydides relates it. Suffice it to say that the Spartans ordered the Athenians to ‘drive out the curse of the goddess’ (I.126), which related to an Athenian act of sacrilege from the sixth century BCE in which suppliants at a temple were massacred. Athens had publicly atoned twice previously for this act, once by exiling the perpetrators of the murders, and then again under compulsion by the Spartan king Cleomenes (at a time when Sparta exercised hegemony over Athens) by expelling the bones of the descendants of the perpetrators. Now the Spartans were demanding a third atonement, and Thucydides tells us exactly what he believes they are up to: ‘They were actuated primarily, as they pretended, by a care for the honor of the gods; but they also knew that Pericles, son of Xanthippus, was connected with the curse on his mother's side, and they thought that his banishment would materially advance their designs on Athens’ (I.127). So Thucydides claims that the Spartans use a religious argument for irreligious purposes, and that the embassy cloaks its attempt to weaken Pericles in the garb of pious rhetoric.

The Athenian retort is similarly described by Thucydides as a religious covering for political machinations. They demand that the Spartans themselves drive out not just one, but two curses. First, the Spartans must atone for a similar massacre of suppliants at the temple of Poseidon at Mount Taenarus, who also were killed against religious custom. Second, the Spartans are accused of impiety relating to the violation of another sanctuary, the temple of the Brazen Goddess (1.128). It is difficult to say whether the Athenians are responding seriously to the Spartan demands – would they have actually de-escalated the crisis had Sparta made atonement as demanded? – but we have reason to be wary of Pericles’ and Thucydides' scepticism about the sincerity of Sparta. The information that Thucydides reveals about the Spartan national character, coupled with the repeated Spartan actions that accord with a religious national narrative, suggest that Pericles and Thucydides may have seen what they wanted to see rather than what was actually in the mind of their opponent.

Beyond Thucydides II: the Megarian Decree

While the third Spartan embassy to Athens took the form of an ultimatum, demanding that the Athenians ‘leave the Hellenes independent’ (I.139), and leaving little room for compromise, the second embassy seems intended as a partial gesture of conciliation, at least according to the assessment of Donald Kagan.Footnote ⁷³ Again, there is an important religious dimension to the embassy, though it comes from the side of the Athenians on this occasion. The Spartans demanded that Athens lift the siege of Potidaea (a colony of Corinth, another member of Sparta's Peloponnesian League), recognise the independence of Aegina (another city-state subjected to Athenian rule in the decade before the outbreak of the war), and revoke the Megarian Decree. This last point was most important, according to Thucydides, as the Spartans made clear: ‘Above all, it gave her most distinctly to understand that war might be prevented by the revocation of the Megarian decree, excluding the Megarians from use of harbors in the Athenian empire and Athens’ market’ (I.139). Megara was a minor member of the Peloponnesian League. Why should this decree, excluding one small member of the Spartan alliance from some Athenian markets, have been so important, so much so that Sparta demanded its revocation as the sole condition to avoid war, and that the Athenians refused to budge at all, leading to the outbreak of a 27 year war?

Thucydides tells us a little, but he leaves much unsaid. He first merely states the Athenian complaint against Megara: ‘she accused the Megarians of pushing their cultivation into the consecrated ground and the unenclosed land on the border, and of harboring her runaway slaves’ (I.139). He later gives us a little more insight, when he quotes Pericles’ speech in reply to the Spartan demands: ‘I hope that none of you think that we shall be going to war for a trifle if we refuse to revoke the Megarian decree … this trifle contains the whole seal and trial of your resolution. If you give way, you will instantly have to meet some greater demand, as having been frightened into obedience in the first instance’ (I.140). So while Pericles thinks his audience may believe this is potentially a minor affair, he claims it will set a precedent of appeasement for the Athenians, who will then be constantly in the position of weakness in their negotiations with the Spartans.

But why did Athens enact this decree in the first place? Scholars differ over this point, even including the question of the date of the decree. Many even believe it occurred decades before 432 BCE, though the evidence seems to weigh against this conclusion, and most consider that it occurred sometime in 433 or 432 BCE.Footnote ⁷⁴ Many scholars, including Kagan, contend that Athens, and Pericles in particular, was trying to punish Megara for its participation in the Battle of Sybota, where the Athenians and their Corcyraean allies fought against the Corinthians in 433 BCE. This battle did not breach the peace between Athens and Sparta, and it was not alleged in any of the complaints that the Spartans leveled against the Athenians. Kagan and others claim that it was designed as a moderate measure by Pericles, in that it acted as an economic weapon to damage the wealth of Megara, but it stopped short of actual hostilities with the Peloponnesian League.Footnote ⁷⁵ But Kagan's thesis leaves at least one question totally unexplored. While he contends that Athens felt it had to punish Megara lest other states believe that they could assail Athenian allies with impunity, he fails to ask why the other cities that participated in this battle were not the targets for similar economic measures. Corinth, Elis, Leucas, Ambracia, and Anactorium were also involved, but none were the subject of economic retaliation by Athens. While measures against Corinth, a major power second only to Sparta and Athens, would have raised the spectre of an all-out war between Athens and the Peloponnesians, Athens took no action against the other four cities who fought against her. If she were trying to send a message, singling out Megara was probably not the best means of doing so, as she could easily have enacted the same measures against the other minor (non-Corinthian) cities.

A clue to why only Megara felt Athens’ wrath can be found in the decree itself. As G. E. M. de Ste. Croix leads us to see, the purpose of the decree may not have been economic at all, but might have been just what Thucydides tells us (if allusively): it was intended to punish a religious offense committed by the Megarians against the Athenians. What evidence can we muster for this? First, the Athenian answer to the Spartan embassy in Thucydides tells us that the Athenians had several complaints against the Megarians, among which was the cultivation of sacred ground. According to Ste. Croix, the same actions by the Megarians nearly a century later, in 352 BCE, led Demosthenes to refer to them as ‘the accursed Megarians’, and these later events are relevant to the period of 432 BCE ‘because they show the Athenians intensely concerned about a Megarian intrusion upon the hiera orgas (sacred ground), and prepared even to take vigorous military action to stop it, at a time when they clearly had no reason to provoke Megara needlessly and no ulterior strategic designs against her, and were not trying to gain political control of her’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Second, the Athenians of the fifth century had already shown themselves capable of acting on the basis of religious concerns. In 438 the philosopher Anaxagoras has been charged with asebeia (impiety) and had fled Athens, several years later the atheist Diagoras had been accused of the same charge for writing a book that attacked an Athenian mystery cult, and in 415 BCE, as we have seen, the Athenians became enraged at Alcibiades for his alleged role in the desecration of the sacred statues that adorn Athenian homes. Finally, Pausanias the ancient geographer claimed that ‘the Megarians who had cultivated the sacred land could never appease the wrath of the goddesses at Eleusis’, leading Ste. Croix to conclude: ‘We cannot simply assume that the Athenian complaint about cultivation of the sacred land at the time of the Megarian decree was a trumped-up charge, made with the deliberate intention of picking a quarrel with the Megarians and providing a pretext for the exclusion decree.’Footnote ⁷⁷ He goes on further to say that the decree should be viewed, ‘as a measure, not unreasonable in the circumstances, taken against men who were genuinely believed to be guilty of a form of asebeia, of a religious offense against the Two Goddesses’.Footnote ⁷⁸ This view of Ste. Croix's is not uncontroversial, and Kagan in particular is sceptical of his conclusions.Footnote ⁷⁹ But while we may doubt that the decree was exclusively religious in nature, as does Kagan, we know that religious matters played an important if undetermined part in these Athenian decisions on the eve of the war.

Weighing religion

How are we to assess the implications of these findings? First, it should be clear that I have not refuted, nor have attempted to refute the portion of the realist assumption that power, interest, and rationality matter. However, the rational pursuit of power and interest takes place within a framework or schema that is not itself subject to purely rational adjudication. Narrative plays a crucial role in how actors interpret new data that they receive about the world, and in how that data is incorporated into instrumental plans to achieve their purposes.Footnote ⁸⁰ Actors interpret the world through stories, and these stories use stereotypical images of self and other as a way of determining the salience and significance of events. These narrative structures place the self as the protagonist in a world that is variously hostile, competitive, or cooperative, depending on the particular framework that the actor possesses.Footnote ⁸¹ It is not that actors do not seek power, profit, and security, but that these motives cannot be understood without reference to the narrative structure in which they take place.

How to assess the relative weight of religious narratives as a cause in the origin of the Peloponnesian War? That the Spartans feared Athens is surely true, but as Kagan notes, Athenian power in the years 445–31 BCE (that is, after the first Peloponnesian War and the signing of the Thirty Years Peace) was actually stable, and Pericles did not pursue any aggressive policies toward the Spartan alliance. If Sparta decided on war, it was only after the actions of the Athenians could be taken as a breach of the treaty, and even then the Spartans were slow to move. Twice they afforded the Athenians the opportunity to avoid war, and in both of these embassies religious matters were crucially important. While the first, regarding the curse of the Goddess, may have been highly politicised, we cannot discount the fact that the Spartans framed their case in religious terms. Even in the most political matters, the Greek culture of argument required that grievances receive some justification from the religious sphere. That is, effective political rhetoric had to appeal to the religious conscience of its audience, and these appeals would hardly have been necessary unless many in the audience (in this case, the other Greek cities) actually believed them. It is also not necessarily the case that Pericles would have been eliminated as a political force had the Athenians responded positively to this embassy, as Thucydides simply asserts (I.127). Since the Spartan demand was left (deliberately?) vague, only requesting that the Athenians ‘drive out the curse of the goddess’, we have no compelling evidence other than Thucydides' statement that Periclean banishment was the only possible outcome. Perhaps the Spartans were intent on removing Pericles from power, and perhaps, given his family connection to the curse, this would have caused him some political embarrassment. Still, even if this were the result of the Athenians responding affirmatively to the demand, this does not lessen the importance of the Spartan religious narrative. Recall that Sthenelaidas and his ‘war party’ in Sparta had already framed the issue at the Peloponnesian Congress in terms of Athenian injustice; here again, in the embassy, they frame the issue in terms that are congruent with their earlier belief – that Athenian impiety is the cause of the present discontent in Hellas. That this fits with Sparta's perception of its security interests is not in doubt, but it is equally the case that the dominant view in Sparta sees Athens through the image of an unjust and impious aggressor. The Athenian response, per Pericles' advice, confirms both of these images and brings the Greek world one step closer to total war.

In the second embassy religion again was crucial, though on this occasion it was the Athenian rather than the Spartan religious narrative that was in play. If the Athenian action against Megara was sacred rather than secular, they might have been severely restricted in terms of the concessions they could make to Spartan demands. Pericles may have urged war at this point based on purely political grounds, as Thucydides tells us, but we should not allow his blindness to be our own. In particular, as Ste. Croix has shown, Athens took its religious obligations very seriously, and they may have led it down a path to war with Sparta when this was far from what was wished.Footnote ⁸² Athenians other than Pericles and Thucydides were as likely to view themselves as the protagonists in a sacred drama as the Spartans,Footnote ⁸³ and may have felt themselves unable to simply back down since more was at issue for them than ‘mere’ politics – religious self-identity entails different role expectations regarding the expected duties of the believerFootnote ⁸⁴ that may prove less tractable than disputes that involve merely instrumental goods.Footnote ⁸⁵ In short: there were many causes of the Peloponnesian War, and religious norms were important among these, though considerations of power and interest were clearly at play as well.