The Fall of the Athenian Empire-(A New History of the Peloponnesian War) Donald Kagan - (1987)

CONCLUSIONS 415
able to send 5 ,ooo hoplites to Plataea in 479 but could provide only
3 ,ooo to Nemea to defend its own territory in 394-' Some of the decline,
but surely not all, can be explained by social and economic changes
that deprived men of the wealth they needed to serve as hoplites. If
only half of the decline was caused by a fall in the population, that
would imply a decline in the number of adult males of some 20 percent
in less than a century. Sparta's population also declined during the
war, although this was not caused by great losses in battle or extensive
economic damage but appears to be part of a continuing decline related
to its peculiar social and economic institutions.' The hardships of war,
however, direct or indirect, took a toll in human life throughout the
Greek world from Sicily to the Bosporus.
Economic damage, too, was severe in many places. The loss of its
empire put an end to Athens' great public wealth and with it the
extraordinary building programs of the fifth century. Agricultural
damage took many years to repair. Megara suffered severely from
repeated destruction of its fields, and so, too, did the Aegean islands
that were subjected to frequent ravaging. Corinth, Megara, and Sicyon,
lsthmian states for whom commerce was important, were shut
off from trade with the Aegean for almost three decades, and during
most of the same tiine their trade with the West was at least severely
curtailed. The ready availability of Greeks as mercenary soldiers after
the war, especially from the Peloponnesus, also shows that poverty
was widespread.
The dangers and hardships of war heightened factional strife. Thucydides'
chilling accounts of the terrible effects of civil war, at first in
Corcyra and then in the rest of Greece, need no comment, and those
of Xenophon and Diodorus show that such horrors became more commonplace
as the war proceeded until "almost all Greece was moved"
6
Plataea: Hdt. 9.28; Nemea: Xen. 4.2.17. J. B. Salmon (Wealthy Corinth [Oxford,
1984], 165-169) argues that Corinthian population did not decline during the war. He
explains the decline of the number of hoplites to ],ooo at Nemea, where the battle
was fought almost within sight of the city of Corinth, by assuming that the young and
old men stayed in Corinth "to defend the city in case of defea['' (166) and that some
pro-Spartan Corinthians "who were called up for the Nemea may have declined to
turn out" (167). Those are rather desparate attempts at an argument, for the sources
say nothing of either assumption; yet both actions would be unusual, if not
unprecedented.
7
For a useful discussion of Spartan population decline seeP. Cartledge, Sparta and
Lakonia (London, 1979), 307-318.