Egyptian airfields before its neighbors were expected to invade Israel.
But in contrast, any contemporary strike on Iranian nuclear facilities by
a stronger Israeli military, in the manner of its 1981 bombing of the Iraqi
reactor at Osirak, would be widely criticized. It would be interpreted
The Doctrine of Preemptive War 101
as the first act of a more dubiously preventive war, undertaken on the
more controversial premise not that Iran was planning an immediate
launch against Israel but that Teheran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon,
coupled with its much publicized promises to end the Jewish state,
would someday mean a dramatic threat to Israeli security and a future
weakening of its unquestioned military superiority in the region.
Of course, the fine distinction between the rare preventive war and
the more common preemptive war is not always clear. What consti-
tutes an imminent threat is always in dispute and in the eye of the be-
holder. Nearly every state that initiates actual hostilities denies that it
is acting offensively and claims that it is simply forced to go to war for
its own self-defense, the initial details of the hostility soon becoming
largely irrelevant. When the Bush administration chose to focus just
on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction threat to justify the preventive
invasion of Iraq, despite the U.S. Congress in October 2002 authoriz-
ing twenty-three writs for the removal of the Hussein regime in Iraq,
world opinion and soon American public opinion turned against the
controversial war. The subsequent absence of stockpiles of dangerous
weapons meant the most publicized official justification for a war to re-
move a genocidal tyrant had proven false. Yet even after such stockpiles
were not found, criticism largely mounted only in summer 2003, when
the administration could not maintain peace after a brilliant three-
week victory over the Baathist regime once a terrorist insurgency had
prompted a new dirty war.
In the ancient Greek world, we can find clear examples of both
preemptive and preventive strategies. The generally recognized stron-
ger Spartans crossed the Athenian border in 431 claiming they had the
right of preventive invasion to start the Peloponnesian War. Sparta was
convinced not that Athens was about to attack it that year but rather
that, as Thucydides relates, without such a first strike, the unstoppable
growth of a hostile Athenian empire would soon lead to Sparta’s in-
evitable decline. The Spartans were justifiably terrified: “They then felt
that they could endure it no longer, but that the time had come for
them to throw themselves heart and soul upon the hostile power, and
break it, if they could, by commencing the present war.”16
102 Hanson
In the same manner, shortly before the Spartan king Archidamaus
reached Attica, his ally Thebes attacked the nearby Boeotian city of
Plataea. Again, the Thebans were not so worried that the tiny city was
about to help launch an Athenian attack. Instead, the attackers figured
that Athenian-backed democratic movements in Boeotia, charged by
the zeal and wealth of imperial Athens and the example of an indepen-
dent Plataea, would eventually weaken the relative position of Thebes.
In fact, a frequent tactic of ancient Greek armies was to attack with-
out warning a nearby suspicious city-state and destroy its wal s, as the
unfortunate history of the much-invaded polis of Thespiae attests. Per-
haps the defense of preemptive attack was best articulated by the Theban
general Pagondas moments before the battle of Delium (424 BC): “People
who, like the Athenians in the present instance, are tempted by pride
of strength to attack their neighbors, usual y march most confidently
against those who keep stil , and only defend themselves in their own
country, but think twice before they grapple with those who meet them
outside their frontier and strike the first blow if opportunity offers.”17
Epaminondas’s strike of 369 should be seen more as a preemptive
than as a preventive war. True, while Sparta had been defeated a little
more than a year earlier at Leuctra and was not planning for an im-
mediate invasion of Boeotia, it was nevertheless busy invading the
territories of other city-states while rebuilding its own forces. Indeed,
Sparta had just entered Mantineia in summer 370 to undermine the
establishment of a new united democratic polis. Thebes was seen by
other Greek states to be the traditionally weaker power, and it could
reasonably be expected that the Spartans would soon, as they had done
in the Peloponnesian War, attack first, in an effort to try to reverse the
verdict of Leuctra and reestablish the Spartan supremacy of the 380s.
While the defeat at Leuctra in midsummer 371 proved the beginning
of the end for Spartan power, much of the enduring trauma was psy-
chological, as the army itself probably suffered not much more than
1,000 combined Spartiate and al ied hoplites kil ed. That was a grievous
loss, but nevertheless, 90 percent of the composite army survived and
made it back to the Peloponnese. Most city-states would have agreed
with Epaminondas that the Spartan danger to the Boeotian confederacy
The Doctrine of Preemptive War 103
from the traditional y more powerful Sparta in 370 was stil real and in-
deed imminent, rather than long term and theoretical.
The Longer-term Aims of Epaminondas
It was the plan of Epaminondas—no doubt subject to some opposition
from his fel ow Boeotarchs—to preempt Sparta by invading the Pelo-
ponnese, and then to take the unprecedented step of advancing into the
Laconian homeland. The unusual decision to accept the invitation of
the Mantineians and embark on a winter invasion suggests two further
considerations. First, Epaminondas probably felt that Sparta might soon
strike wel beyond its invasion of the territory of Mantineia, perhaps
during the campaign season the ensuing late spring or summer. Hitting
the Spartans first, whether near Mantineia or in Laconia itself, by leav-
ing in winter would preclude that, and offer some measure of surprise.
The Boeotians’ conjecture was strengthened when other states in the
Peloponnese sent money to defray the cost of the preemptive invasion.18
Second, at some point in early 370, if indeed not before, the invasion
was envisioned as part of a larger expedition to reorder the Pelopon-
nese by humiliating or defeating the Spartan military, assuring the new
Arcadian cities of Mantineia and Megalopolis of Boeotian protection,
freeing the helots of Messenia, and founding the new city of Messene
on Mt. Ithome. All that would require months abroad, and made it
preferable to leave in winter so that the army of mostly farmers could
return to Boeotia by at least harvesttime 369.19
Despite the meager contemporary descriptions of the Boeotian inva-
sion, we can assume that Epaminondas desperately sought to draw the
Spartan phalanx out to battle; and then, barring that, to cross the Eurotas
River and storm the Spartan acropolis and
physical y destroy the center
of the Spartan rule. His desire was not the defeat but the apparent end
of the Spartan land empire in the Peloponnese. But once those immedi-
ate goals failed and the Boeotians proved unable either to annihilate the
Spartan army or to capture the city, in the new year 369 Epaminondas
ignored the legal end of his tenure as general. He instead kept the army
in the Peloponnese and, after brief deliberations in Arcadia, moved on
to his second objective of freeing the helots of Messenia, apparently in
104 Hanson
the belief that the end of Messenian serfdom eventual y might emascu-
late Sparta, which he was so far unable to destroy outright.20
This was a far more ambitious goal. It required his army to cross
the spurs of Mt. Taygetos in early winter, rid Messenia of its Spartan
garrison, marshal the serfs into work forces, immediately begin the
construction of a vast new city, and assume that Messenian national-
ists would be reliable democratic allies, all while holding the forces of
King Agesilaus to his rear at bay. The apparent dream of Epaminondas
was a confederation of three huge Peloponnesian citadels at Man tineia,
Megalopolis, and Messene, all fortified and democratic, that, under
the guidance of Thebes, would constrain Spartan adventurism while
slowly eroding the power of the Spartan state, shed of its helot labor-
ers and subservient allies. Although Epaminondas was not adverse to
making occasional alliances of convenience with oligarchic states in
the Peloponnese, he seems to have assumed that the new confederated
democracies in Arcadia and Messenia would, by their natural political
interests, remain intrinsically hostile to Sparta and sympathetic to kin-
dred democratic Boeotia.21
Aftermath
Was Epaminondas’s preemptive attack of 370–369 successful in the
long run?
If it was intended solely to stop four decades of serial Spartan inva-
sions of Boeotia, the answer is unequivocally yes. The Spartan army
never again went north of the isthmus in force to attack another Greek
city-state. If the strike was aimed at undermining the foundations of
the Spartan Empire and its power, the goals were likewise unambigu-
ously achieved. While the Spartan army still on occasion defeated re-
gional rival states in battle, most notably in the famous “tearless battle”
and rout of the Arcadians in 368, Sparta’s land empire in the Pelopon-
nese slowly dissolved with the creation of the autonomous states at
Mantineia, Messene, and Megalopolis, coupled with the freeing of the
Messenian helots and the loss of Spartan farmland in Messenia. In its
twilight, Sparta struggled to remain one among equal Peloponnesian
powers, but, as a strategically insignificant state, Sparta was notably
The Doctrine of Preemptive War 105
absent thirty years later in the pan-Hellenic effort to stop the Macedo-
nians at Chaeronea.22
Second, did the invasion of 369 end the war outright with Sparta?
Hardly. The oligarchy and empire of Sparta had created a sort of
stability within the Peloponnese since the Athenian war ended at
the close of the fifth century. Following the Theban liberation of the
helot and allied cities from Spartan domination, an upheaval ensued
that prompted three more Boeotian invasions of the Peloponnese in
369, 368, and 362, before culminating in the final indecisive battle of
Man tineia (362). At that engagement Epaminondas was killed at the
moment of Boeotian victory. As the historian Xenophon famously re-
marked, “There was even more confusion and upheaval in Greece after
than before the battle.” Diodorus used the occasion to offer his eulogy
of Epaminondas in the context that his death meant an end to the brief
Theban hegemony altogether.23
Apparently the original visions of Epaminondas, at whatever point
they were reified, may not have been merely to keep Sparta out of
Boeotia but also to reorder the Greek world in such a way as to preclude
any chance of Spartan reemergence, an undertaking that would have
meant for distant Thebes an almost continual military presence in the
Peloponnese. Such a mammoth enterprise would have required capital
reserves, some sea power, and political unity—requisites beyond the
resources of a deeply divided, rural democratic Thebes. Epaminondas
himself seemed finally to have grasped the limits of Boeotian power
and the growth of political opposition to his grandiose plans abroad
when in 362 he aimed once again at invading Laconia and capturing
the Spartan acropolis, as if his previous accomplishments of freeing
the helots and establishing fortified democratic cities were not having
the desired effect of promptly ending Sparta altogether as a player in
regional Greek politics.24
Autonomia—local political independence—was a Hellenic ideal held
even higher than dêmokratia. Once the democratic federated states of
Arcadia gained their independence from both Sparta and Thebes, there
was no assurance that their assemblies, out of gratitude to Epaminon-
das, would continue to privilege the Boeotian alliance. By 362 Epami-
nondas was invading the Peloponnese not just to finish off Sparta but
106 Hanson
also to fight Mantineia, the democratic ally whose plight had prompted
his initial invasion nearly a decade earlier.
Apparently by 362, the Mantineians had calculated that a now weak-
ened, nearby, and Doric Sparta was a better pragmatic, balance-of-
power ally than was an aggressive Boeotian hegemon to the north.
Thebes had served to ensure democracy to the Mantineians and weak-
ened its traditional ally, Sparta; the Mantineians in turn reciprocated by
judging an aggressive, though kindred, democratic Thebes far more a
bother to the traditional autonomy of the Greek city-state.
Lessons from Epaminondas’s Preemptive War
Where Does This End?
While successful preemptive war may result in an immediate strategic
advantage, the dividends of such a risky enterprise are squandered if
there is not a well-planned effort to incorporate military success into
a larger political framework that results in some sort of advantageous
peace. By its very definition, an optional preemptive war must be short,
a sort of decapitation of enemy power that stuns it into paralysis and
forces it to grant political concessions. In democratic states, such a con-
troversial gamble cannot garner continued domestic public support if
the attack instead leads to a drawn-out, deracinating struggle, the very
sort of quagmire that preemption was originally intended to preclude.
Like it or not, when successful and followed by a period of quiet, pre-
emption is often ultimately considered moral, justified, and defensive;
when costly and unsuccessful in securing peace, in hindsight it always
looks optional, foolhardy, and aggressive.
Epaminondas grasped the paradox that he was fighting against both
the Spartans and time, given uncertain public opinion back home, and
thus, once he failed to destroy the Sp
artan acropolis and its political and
military elite, he turned to two contingency plans that might neverthe-
less have ended the hostilities with a permanently weakened Sparta on
terms favorable to Thebes with a definitive cessation of fighting. Had
Epaminondas before venturing into Messenia been able to cross the Eu-
rotas and burn Sparta, defeat its remaining hoplites inside Laconia, and
The Doctrine of Preemptive War 107
free al the Laconian helots as wel , it is very likely that Sparta would have
disappeared altogether as a major polis in the winter of 370–369, without
need for further invasions of the Boeotian army in subsequent years.
In contrast, the democratization of the Peloponnese was a longer-
term project. If successful, it meant the slow recession of the Spartan
oligarchic empire, as it could never reconstruct its Peloponnesian alli-
ance under its own auspices, given the presence of three huge fortified
rivals and its own ineptness in the art of siegecraft.25
Second, the end to Messenian helotage would eventually require
the Spartans to produce more of their own food and would insidiously
erode the notion of a state-supported military caste, whose preemi-
nence in hoplite battle had in the past substituted for a lack of man-
power. The vestiges of local Laconian helotage apparently did not
supply enough food to ensure successful continuation of the tradi-
tional elite Spartan military culture.
When Epaminondas died, his military goals had been largely achieved,
even though there was no longer much Boeotian support, after his
death, for once more invading the Peloponnese to complete his original
intention of destroying Sparta itself. This suggests that the tragedy of
Epaminondas may have been his inability to recognize that by 362, the
Thebans had already achieved his objectives in permanently weakening
Spartan influence. In some sense, Epaminondas’s continued efforts in
the Peloponnese were merely trying to hasten, in somewhat dangerous
and ultimately unnecessary fashion, the end of Spartan hegemony that
was already inevitable given his prior labors. If Thebes was unable to
continue its military preeminence after the death of Epaminondas, at
least the diminution of Sparta proved permanent.
Means and Ends
Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome Page 17
