ABSTRACT
Pericles' strategy for the Peloponnesian War, a war fought by the Spartans in order to achieve the dissolution of the Athenian Empire (Thuc. ii.8; viii.46*) was simple: to prevent that dissolution. In other words, what Athens had to do was merely to survive the assaults of her enemies. If she could do that, the war was won. Hence there is appropriate ambiguity in the word or words regularly used by Thucydides to describe Athens' war aims: perieinai (and perigignesthai) means to 'survive'- but there is also present the senseof'winning': the neatest rendering is 'winning through'' (cp. p. 135). Athenian policy was thus conveniently free from constraints of ideology: her own survival and that of her empire could be represented as a glorious enough goal, but there was nothing self-denying about it; by contrast, the liberation, which Thucydides (ii.8) says the Greek world expected to be brought about by Sparta, would in its turn logically preclude the exercise of hegemony by Sparta herself. We have seen (chapter 10 on Sparta) that this put Sparta in a dilemma: financially she was obliged to look to Persia for help, since she lacked the cushioning of a system of allied tribute; but Persia would not provide such help unless the aim of liberation was modified so as to exclude Greeks who were, or had been, in Persia's own possession. It is in the late fifth and early fourth centuries that the idea begins to emerge of the 'Greeks in Asia' as a separate category, 2 and the reason surely lies in the amount of thought that was given in this period to the precise scope of 'liberation'. In the early part ofThucydides we hear only (ii.8) of'Greece' being liberated, namely from Athens, but Alcibiades (viii.46) explores the extension of the idea to the Asiatic Greeks, and that meant collision with Persia, rather than with Athens.
