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

CONCLUSIONS 415
losses on land made the Athenians reluctant to risk other land battles. 19
Offensive actions should be taken only at sea or launched from the
sea. The great Cimon had fought on those principles, winning victory
after victory without great loss and without defeat. Pericles, therefore,
simply carried previous trends to their logical conclusion when he
committed the Athenians strictly to what we may call "the Athenian
way of warfare. " 20
Cimon, however, pursued a policy that complemented his strategy.
He maintained friendly relations with powers that were superior in
hoplites and not vulnerable to defeat by sea power. Pericles would
have liked to do the same, but when his attempts to deter war failed,
he reverted to the traditional strategy, taking it even one step further
by refusing to use a land army even in defense. That left him with no
hope of disabling the enemy but only of punishing the Spartans and
their allies to a greater or lesser degree and discouraging them from
continuing the fight. The narure of the enemy made "the Athenian
way of warfare" inadequate, and Pericles' strategy was a form of wishful
thinking that failed.
For a state like Periclean Athens in 431, satisfied with its siruation,
not wishing to expand but merely to protect what it has and capable
of keeping an enemy at bay, the temptation to stand on the defensive
and avoid the risks of offensive actions is great. Such a plan has much
to recommend it, but it also has important dangers. It tends to create
a rigid way of thinking that we might call "the cult of the defensive.""
Such a cast of mind leads men to apply a previously successful strategy
to a siruation in which it is not adequate, but it may have other disadvantages
as well. Its capacity to deter potential enemies from provoking
a war is severely limited. Deterrence by standing behind a
strong defensive position and thereby depriving an enemy of the prospect
of victory assumes a high degree of rationality and a strong imagination
on his part. When the Spartans invaded Attica in 4 3 1, they
must have thought that they were risking little. Even if the Athenians
refused to fight, even if they persisted in that refusal for a long time,
both of which seemed unlikely and unnatural, the Spartans would risk
19 Such as those at Coronea in 446 (see Kagan, Outbreak, IlJ-124) and Delium in 414
(see Kagan, Archidamian War, 28o-286).
20
1 adapt the term from B. Liddell Hart, The British Way oJWaifare (London, 1932).
21
1 adapt the term from what some modem students have called "the cult of the
offensive," which dominated European military circles in the years before the First
World War.