Athens–Sparta Rivalry

The Athens–Sparta Rivalry figures in the essays as a warning about what happens when powerful members of a confederacy let victory and mutual suspicion displace common purpose. After the Greeks’ success against Persia, Athens and Sparta became rivals and then enemies; their hostilities did one another more harm than Xerxes had done, and culminated in the Peloponnesian War, which ended with Athens ruined and enslaved. Later, their jealousy of the rising Achaean League helped frustrate another attempt at Greek unity.## From Allied Victory to EnmityThe rivalry emerges in the aftermath of the war with Xerxes. The account, drawing on the historian Abbé Millot, presents the Greeks’ failure to use peace to reform their union as a lost opportunity: rather than establish closer ties after their success, Athens and Sparta grew inflated by their victories and glory. They passed from rivalry to enmity, and mutual jealousies, fears, hatreds, and injuries produced the Peloponnesian War. The reversal is stark: the two cities inflicted infinitely more mischief on one another than they had suffered from Xerxes, and Athens, which had begun the war, ended in ruin and slavery.## Rivalry Within the ConfederacyThe Amphictyonic confederacy supplies the institutional setting for this history. Its member cities retained the character of independent, sovereign states and equal votes in a federal council, which had authority over common welfare, war, disputes, fines, and the use of confederate force. Yet formal equality did not eliminate the ambitions of the strongest members. After the war with Xerxes, the Lacedaemonians sought to expel cities accused of disloyalty. Athens opposed the measure because Sparta would lose fewer partisans and thereby gain control of public deliberations. The episode makes the rivalry more than a clash of temperaments: each city measured common policy against the influence it could gain or lose. Meanwhile, smaller members, though nominally equal, became satellites of the leading powers.## The Achaeans and the Renewed ContestThe same antagonism reappears when the Achaean League rises after the Amphictyonic confederacy falls under Macedonian power. The Achaeans reunited cities and expanded across almost the whole Peloponnese, while Macedonia, occupied by internal dissensions, could not readily stop them. A wider Greek confederacy seemed within reach. Sparta and Athens, however, grew jealous and envious of the Achaeans’ rising glory, damping the enterprise. The rivalry thus outlived the earlier conflict: even when the prospect of unity belonged to another league, the older powers’ competition again obstructed it.## Political MeaningThe essays use these episodes to argue that a confederacy cannot rely on nominal equality or shared danger to restrain powerful members. Athens and Sparta’s failure to consolidate victory against Persia left their antagonism free to turn inward; their later jealousy likewise weakened a new effort at union. The contrast between the council’s extensive formal authority and the cities’ persistent competition underscores the central lesson: institutions that address sovereign members may proclaim common purposes without securing common action. In this account, the rivalry helps explain why Greek divisions repeatedly invited calamity and why a closer union is treated as necessary to preserve collective security.