United ancient Greece

Athens relied on grain shipments from the Black Sea because they knew they had no chance against the Peloponnesians in pitched battle, nor could they even successfully attack the Spartan camp at Dekelia. Once Persia is in the war, they can simply occupy the Eastern side of the Hellespont with an army and support it with a fleet; right off the bat, their reconquest of Ionia would deny Athens much of the Delian league revenue they relied on to keep in the war. Even if they didn't commit any forces of their own, the sheer amount of money they could provide their Greek allies meant that as in OTL they could continually rebound from one defeat after another.

But they did have a chance in pitched battles against Sparta, they were all hoplites with the same equipment and the same overall tactics. They could do nothing against the Spartans after 413 because the expedition to Sicily aignificantly crippled the Athenians, before then though it would have taken just some more capable land generals to make the difference.

The Persians, alongside the Spartans, did hold one side of Hellespont, nonetheless Thrasibulos and Alkibiades smashed through them repeatedly, from 410 to 407, when Athens’ forces were much reduced compared to a couple decades ago. And assuning Athens manages to hold onto Amphipolis, she’d have a surplus of revenue from the mines and be rich enough to buy the grain, if worse comes to worse and they can’t dislodge the Persians, although I think they could do so without that much effort under better circumstances.
 
But they did have a chance in pitched battles against Sparta, they were all hoplites with the same equipment and the same overall tactics. They could do nothing against the Spartans after 413 because the expedition to Sicily aignificantly crippled the Athenians, before then though it would have taken just some more capable land generals to make the difference.

The Persians, alongside the Spartans, did hold one side of Hellespont, nonetheless Thrasibulos and Alkibiades smashed through them repeatedly, from 410 to 407, when Athens’ forces were much reduced compared to a couple decades ago. And assuning Athens manages to hold onto Amphipolis, she’d have a surplus of revenue from the mines and be rich enough to buy the grain, if worse comes to worse and they can’t dislodge the Persians, although I think they could do so without that much effort under better circumstances.

The Spartan alliance had greatly superior numbers, and the Spartan contingent was better organized than other Greeks and famed for their courage in battle. If the Athenians had a chance in pitched battles against the Spartans, they would have fought them on the fields outside Athens, rather than let their homes and harvests burn.

The point isn't that Athens can't win battles against the combined strength of Sparta and Persia, but that they can't win enough long enough to make up for the massive disparity of power on land and sea alike. If it's on land and the Spartan armies can march to it, Athens isn't holding onto it, and if it's a naval objective, Athens will run out of money before the Persians have even finished with their pocket change.

If you argue that Athenian failure was only due to unnatural blunders, well, that cuts both ways, and without their own blunders, the Spartans would have inflicted much greater punishment on the Athenians much quicker. It'd be a pretty trashy TL where the outcome is dependent on one state running the war perfectly while the massively more powerful enemy alliance fucks up constantly, especially when the former is an ancient democracy with a penchant for exiling and killing their own best leaders.
 
If you argue that Athenian failure was only due to unnatural blunders, well, that cuts both ways, and without their own blunders, the Spartans would have inflicted much greater punishment on the Athenians much quicker. It'd be a pretty trashy TL where the outcome is dependent on one state running the war perfectly while the massively more powerful enemy alliance fucks up constantly, especially when the former is an ancient democracy with a penchant for exiling and killing their own best leaders.
The thing is that the Spartans are relatively fragile, as seen in OTL, due to their politico-social structure. If you can kill enough of the Spartiates at once, it's all over because they simply cannot replenish them effectively. So it's reasonably believable that the Athenians or one of their allies manages to pull off one Battle of Leuctra-equivalent, especially early on, that completely ruins the Spartans and causes their war effort to collapse. In fact, I had a thread about that a long while ago, after reading about one of the battles of the war in Thucydides that came off to me as being almost a Leuctra-equivalent, only to fall apart at the last minute for a variety of reasons. That being said, though, Athenian dominance over Greece probably wouldn't mean a united Greece, any more than Spartan or Theban domination did, and it probably wouldn't be sustainable, either. Athens needs to keep rolling sixes, while the default disorganized state of the peninsula means her enemies only need her to fail once...

All things considered, I'm not sure that anyone in Greece proper can unite Greece. It's just too difficult for one city to gather the necessary resources to take on all the other cities and possibly Persia and win. Macedonia had the advantage of being outside of Greece and looked down on...
 
The Spartan alliance had greatly superior numbers, and the Spartan contingent was better organized than other Greeks and famed for their courage in battle. If the Athenians had a chance in pitched battles against the Spartans, they would have fought them on the fields outside Athens, rather than let their homes and harvests burn.

The point isn't that Athens can't win battles against the combined strength of Sparta and Persia, but that they can't win enough long enough to make up for the massive disparity of power on land and sea alike. If it's on land and the Spartan armies can march to it, Athens isn't holding onto it, and if it's a naval objective, Athens will run out of money before the Persians have even finished with their pocket change.

If you argue that Athenian failure was only due to unnatural blunders, well, that cuts both ways, and without their own blunders, the Spartans would have inflicted much greater punishment on the Athenians much quicker. It'd be a pretty trashy TL where the outcome is dependent on one state running the war perfectly while the massively more powerful enemy alliance fucks up constantly, especially when the former is an ancient democracy with a penchant for exiling and killing their own best leaders.

They didn’t fight right away because Perikles’ strategy for the war was “let em come, who cares, we got ships and money, we don’t need to fight”. Once he was dead, Athens became much more aggressive, campaigning in Beotia, in Aetolia, in Sicily and off the coast of the Peloponnesus.

As @Workable Goblin said, Spartan society was extremely fragile, Sphacteria proves that just losing several hundreds of her citizens was enough to make her skin crawl, the helots were constantly breathing on her neck and all it took to shatter her power was one serious defeat on land. Now I’m not saying Athens’ mistakes were “unnatural”, but they were avoidable, and avoiding one or two of them could have very easily changed the outcome of the war. What if the Spartan army had been destroyed at Mantinea, as it almost happened? What if Athens had managed to hold onto Amphipolis? What if Demosthenes and Hippokrates had coordinated each other better at Delium? What if the Sicilian expeditions, both the first and the second, had gone better? Athens had enough allies in the Peloponnesus to bring down the Spartans, and her fleet was strong enough to fend off the Persians. Would she be able to unite Greece? In the long term, I don’t think so. Could she, however, win the Peloponnesian war? Of course she could.

You also underestimate Persia’s own fragility. Athens could very well be the one to support Cyrus the younger against Artaxerxes and make the Achemenind empire too distracted to be bothered by things happening in Greece. Let’s not forget Egypt and Cyprus were quite probelmatic too. Persia had a lot of money, but she sure could not waste it all on the Athenians, or else she’d have conquered Greece long ago.
 
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