The Internal Commotion of Greek Culture: Jacob Burckhardt on the Defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War

Overview & Synopsis

This paper investigates Jacob Burckhardt’s interpretation, provided chiefly in the Cultural History of Greece, of the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Burckhardt thought that the flourishing of Greek civilization was promoted to a significant degree by three distinctive forces: the polis principle, the agonistic spirit, and the rise of individualism. At Athens, these guiding ideals were realized in exemplary fashion during the classical era. Through their interaction, however, they also came to have a destructive effect, which led to insurmountable internal contradictions within the Athenian polis and eventually caused the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. As I argue, this event had a tragic character for Burckhardt because in overthrowing Athens the rest of the Greek nation brought down the city that had realized the Greeks’ highest ideals in exemplary fashion. The defeat of Athens is thus symptomatic of a self-destructive momentum and reveals the impasse reached by Greek culture at the end of the 5th century.