A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

by Victor Davis Hanson

  * The so-called First Peloponnesian War (461–446), during which Athens more often confronted Corinth and Thebes than Sparta, ended in stalemate and an envisioned thirty-year peace treaty between Athens and Sparta.

  † An ephor was one of five elected “overseers” at Sparta; their task was to monitor the conduct of other public officials and, most importantly, audit the military and political activities of the two Spartan kings.

  * The infamous Spartan fort in Attica, which from 413 to 404 served as a clearinghouse for booty plundered from Attica; see the Glossary of Terms and the time line on pages this page–this page.

  * For the various regional and ethnic names associated with Sparta, see “Sparta” in the Glossary.

  * These Athenian silver coins, worth four drachmas (in terms of modern American currency, over $300), were stamped with the helmeted head of Athena and on the reverse side her iconic owl.

  CHAPTER 2

  FIRE

  THE WAR AGAINST THE LAND (431–425)

  To Kill a Tree

  The Spartans Voted to fight in autumn 432 but waited to begin hostilities for some six months. During this phony war, their agrarian allies the Thebans first attacked the small town of Plataea even as various envoys shuttled between Athens and Sparta. But once spring came and the favorable conditions for traditional invasion arrived, thousands of Spartans realized that they had to either move or apologize for the reckless preemptive act of their Theban ally.

  The Spartan idea was to marshal the Peloponnesian League, invade Attica, destroy farmland, and hope that the Athenians came out to fight. Barring that, the strategy fell back on the hope that food lost at harvesttime would cause costly shortages at Athens and that the humbling presence of Spartans near the walls of the great imperial city would encourage its restless subjects to revolt. And barring that, the Spartans could at least say they were in Attica and the Athenians were not in Laconia.

  But the hide of permanent plants is tougher than men’s. Orchards and vineyards are more difficult to fell than people, as the Peloponnesians quickly learned when they crossed into Attica in late May 431. Attica possessed more individual olive trees and grapevines than classical Greece did inhabitants. Anywhere from five to ten million olive trees and even more vines dotted the one-thousand-square-mile landscape. The city’s thousands of acres of Attic grain fields were augmented by far more farmland throughout the Aegean, southern Russia, and Asia Minor, whose harvests were only a few weeks’ sea transport away from Athens. What, then, were the Spartans thinking?

  Partly in pursuit of that answer, a few years ago I tried to chop down several old walnut trees on my farm. Even when the ax did not break, it sometimes took me hours to fell an individual tree. Subsequent trials with orange, plum, peach, olive, and apricot trunks were not much easier. Even after I’d chainsawed an entire plum grove during the spring, within a month or so large suckers shot out from the stumps. Had one wished to restore the orchard, new cultivars could have been grafted to the fresh wild shoots. Apricot, peach, almond, and persimmon trees proved as tough. Olives were the hardest of all to uproot. It was even more difficult to try to set them afire. Living fruit trees (like vines) will not easily burn—or at least stay lit long and hot enough to kill the tree. Even when I ignited the surrounding dry brush, the leaves were scorched, the bark blackened, but no lasting damage was done.

  Thucydides observes that the Spartans, during their fourth invasion of Attica in 427, needed to recut those trees and vines “that had grown up again” after their first devastations a few years earlier—a phenomenon of regeneration well recorded elsewhere of other such attacks on agriculture. It was difficult enough to bring an army into Attica, but harder still to accept that its destructive work needed redoing within four years. Someone who attempts any of these tasks of destruction—even without enemy horsemen loose on the counterattack—soon understands that when an ancient Greek author formulaically described troops as “ravaging the land” (dêountes/temnontes tên gên), he probably really meant something like “they attacked, but could not easily destroy the land.”1

  But wait: did not the Greeks live on bread, not just wine and oil, and thus in fact were not the Spartans easily torching all the city’s critical grain that they did not consume on the spot? After all, burning a ripening grain crop for the Spartans in Attica should have been far easier than chopping trees or vines. Gazing out at thousands of acres of swaying dry wheat stalks, one might think that a single ember could make the entire task ridiculously easy. But even igniting grain is not always so easy, for a variety of reasons. If one ignites a dry barley field, in place of the expected sudden inferno, the small fire sometimes burns only a little before the flames quietly go out. The stalks are often greener than they look—and spaced farther apart than what meets the eye.

  When and how one burned a field seemed to make the difference between conflagration and sporadic fires. Other factors involved atmospheric conditions and the stage of maturity and the moisture content of the grain fields. The same is true of burning permanent crops of trees and vines. Exasperated growers today sometimes rent five-hundred-gallon propane flamethrowers to guarantee that their brush piles will not go out prematurely. And even seemingly dry piles of dead fruit trees are sometimes impossible to ignite.

  Even when one is not wearing armor or dodging arrows and javelins, the art of agricultural combustion is a tricky business. Therein lay one of the many paradoxes of traditional Greek land warfare in the decades before the Peloponnesian War: the tactic was just as frequently predicated on anticipated, rather than real, damage. Trees and vines, after all, are permanent crops, whose damage does not entail merely the loss of a yearly crop but rather the investment of a lifetime, with clear psychological implications to touchy farmers in harm’s way.

  This paranoia of the property-owning—and especially tree- and vine-owning—agrarian is what prompted an anonymous contemporary Athenian reactionary to note, “Those who are farming and the wealthy among the Athenians are more likely to reach out to the enemy, while the commons know that nothing of their own will be burnt or cut down, and so live without fear and don’t ingratiate themselves with the enemy.”2 The comic playwright Aristophanes also remarked on the strange patriotic calculus that arose in a fortified Athens: the most prominent stewards of a state’s hallowed soil—hoplite infantrymen—were the most likely to avoid conflict, while the shiftless poor were more eager to fight its country’s enemies.

  In an agricultural landscape, ravaging crops was an affront to the spiritual and religious life of the polis, besides a potential threat to its economic livelihood. Of course, if a state was landlocked and unwalled, if a community was caught napping, and if the enemy came at precisely the right time, an entire grain harvest might be torched with not much effort. Such a loss surely could bring on near and immediate starvation—and on occasion it did. Yet more often in the ancient world that near-perfect scenario would require too many ifs. Thus, neither Spartans in Attica nor Athenians in Sicily ever completely destroyed the agricultural landscape of their adversaries.3

  Man’s creation of cement and steel for roads and factories possesses none of the beauty or the age or the mystique of the olive among Mediterranean peoples. That the olive is an evergreen tree in a hot climate; that it possesses enormous powers of regeneration; that it can grow almost anywhere without constant attention or great amounts of water and fertilizer; that it reaches great age; that its fruits provide everything from fuel to cooking oil to food—all that combines to surround the tree with a nearly religious awe to match its undeniable utility, both now and in the past. That majesty explains why myths surrounded the supposedly indestructible olive growing on the Acropolis and why drama praised the tree as symbolic of Attica itself. The olive tree, in other words, was a fat target, full of symbolic capital.

  Land and Soldiers

  Hoplite infantrymen outside Sparta were originally mostly farmers—and, like most other ancient Greek citizens, proud of it;
as Aristophanes reminds us, “The farmers do the work, no one else.”4 In a preindustrial world in which it often required nine people to farm to support ten, agriculture was the linchpin of all social, economic, and cultural life. Working the soil defined a man’s spiritual existence, from the cultivation of ancestral trees and orchards to the stewardship of revered rural shrines and the preservation of his father’s home, which he wished to pass on to his son.

  Despite the images of the majestic Parthenon, the sophisticated symposia of Athens, or the crack phalanx of professional Spartan killers, most Greeks were nevertheless food producers. Thus, in multifaceted ways the war was conditioned on precisely that fact. Agriculture is the real landscape of the Peloponnesian War, the source of the food that would fuel the combatants, the home to most of the participants, and indeed often the very locus of the fighting itself.

  The rural Greeks were not quite animists who believed that their trees and animals were divine spirits. Yet they accepted that their countryside was alive with lesser deities who protected rivers, springs, trees, and shrines. Such mystical immanence was one reason why agriculture was more than just the art of producing food. The Athenian philosopher, historian, and warrior Xenophon summed up “the best life” as one of farming, which gave man “the greatest degree of strength and beauty.” In moral and practical terms, agriculture made “those who work the soil brave, the best citizens, most loyal to the polis.” When soldiers evacuated their farms, their anguish arose not merely from the fear of economic losses; rather, the provocation was intended to be as much a matter of wounded pride and generational shame as material damage.5

  When Aristophanes’ characters are portrayed as bottled up in Athens during the Spartan invasions, they sigh that they wish to return to their ancestral farms, see individual trees and vines they have planted, and visit sacred shrines. These scenes were not fantasy creations of a comic poet. During the evacuation Aristophanes had grown familiar with the lives of some of the 20,000 Attic farmers who owned and farmed much of the 200,000 acres that surrounded Athens. They were the doughty rustics who formed the nucleus of the traditional army that in the fifth century alone had beaten the Persians at Marathon, crushed the feared Boeotians at the battle of Oinophyta, and fought shoulder to shoulder alongside the Spartans at Plataea and in Messenia. The best way to prompt these “most loyal” men of an agrarian militia to come out and fight was to assault these symbols of what it meant to be a free landowning citizen—and there were still thousands of these stout farmer-citizens even in 431 in a maritime and imperial Athens.

  Whatever the impracticality of the Spartan strategy, King Archidamus and his generals at least realized the spiritual stakes involved. The major Athenian playwrights—Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes—all at one time or another either boasted about the sanctity of Attica or lamented its suffering from enemy devastators.6 Their anguish during the war reflected a long Greek tradition: during most intramural Greek land warfare between 700 and 450, the sight of a few ancestral olive trees hacked by an ax was enough to draw the angry hoplites who owned them into battle. Wars between property owners can start over perceived rather than real grievances, over a few scarred trunks rather than thousands of acres of obliterated orchards. When a modern visitor examines the scrub and maquis on the rocky borders between Attica and Boeotia or Argos and Sparta, he might wonder why such sophisticated societies started a war over the ownership of such seemingly worthless ground.

  The reactionary Spartans were not completely unhinged, then, when on arrival in Attica in late spring 431 they thought that the Athenians would march out in suicidal fashion and form in the phalanx once they experienced fire and sword. True, the Spartan phalanx itself instilled terror and seemingly would have scared off any potential adversaries. But in nearly 75 percent of the cases of hoplite battle, defending Greek armies defeated the invaders and thus were confident in a home-field advantage—so strong was the psychological edge for property owners when defending their own sacred soil.

  So accepted a tactic had ravaging become that it was institutionalized in the clauses of farm leases and peace treaties. Devastation of farmland was deeply ingrained in the popular culture, and a general staple of ethical discussion. Catchphrases amplified this almost annual experience of attacking permanent crops, in the form of boasts to make “cicadas sing from the ground” or threats “to turn cropland into a sheep walk” if demands were not met.7 Much of the logic of war, in other words, had been static for centuries in a rural society of unfortified hamlets. Apparently very few in the Peloponnese realized that all the rules were about to disappear as Greece was on the eve of the first true military revolution in the history of Western civilization.

  Only a quasi police state that had no real money, no walls, no lively intellectual life, no notion of upward mobility, and no immigration could naively assume that a parochial tactic that worked with wayward rural neighbors of the Peloponnese could bring down the greatest state in the history of Hellenic civilization. It was even worse than that: throughout the fifth century Athens had constructed the most massive municipal fortifications in the Greek world precisely to guarantee supplies of imported staples and in part to create immunity from agrarian warfare. In one of the most understated passages in Thucydides’ history, the Corinthians remonstrate with their Spartan allies, saying, “Your methods, compared to those of the Athenians’, are old-fashioned.”8

  In reality, most of the conservative Greeks also shared the Spartan naïveté—that it would be a win-win situation for the invaders. Surely they would either kill Athenian soldiers or starve out their families. Before the Spartans and their allies actually reached Attica, Thucydides, for example, wrote that they had supposed that they could defeat Athens “in a few years should they ravage its territory.” Neutral observers had agreed about the cheery prognosis: “If the Spartans should invade Attica, some thought that the Athenians could hold out for a year; others two; but no one longer than three years.” Thucydides does not tell us who those “some” were; they were probably his oligarchic Athenian friends and aristocratic sources in Sparta who—unlike the historian himself—never quite grasped the revolutionary nature and resiliency of a radically democratic Athens. It was only later and after a long decade into the war that the Spartan general Brasidas reflected on how wrong such old and simplistic ideas were. He admitted such to his troops in the field years after the outbreak of the war: “We were wrong in the idea we had of war back then, when we thought that we would be able quickly to destroy the Athenians.”9

  Forgetting the earlier evacuation and abandonment of the Attic countryside before the massive invasion of Xerxes’ Persians in September 480, most Spartans instead were wedded to the idea that the Athenians would react as they had a decade earlier to Darius’ initial landing at Marathon in 490, some twenty-six miles northeast of the city. During that first Persian invasion of Greece, thousands of Athenian farmers donned their armor and rushed out to protect the soil and prestige of Athens—winning lasting fame as the “Marathon battlers” who had saved the city in a single stroke.

  The invaders also drew confidence from a more recent example: fifteen years earlier, when faced with the Spartan invasion of 446 during the First Peloponnesian War, the Athenians had seen a Spartan king and his army turn around right at the border, thus providing an eleventh-hour reprieve for both their troops and their farms.10 Accordingly, in May 431, older Athenians had good reason to think that the Spartans might once more be cajoled or bought off to make a ceremonial demonstration of force before withdrawing as they had before. On the eve of the war, the edgy Corinthians confidently urged the Spartans to invade “without delay.”11

  The campaign was envisioned by the Spartans themselves as one of a season or two: burn some grain and cut down some vines and trees, wait for 10,000 Attic farmers to pour out to battle, and witness the professional infantrymen of Sparta, supported by thousands of other allies, make short work of them. After all, sixteen years earlier the Bo
eotians had expelled the Athenians from their homeland and ended their war outright through a single devastating defeat of the Athenian army at the battle of Coronea (447). No one expected the Athenian defenders to fight quite like the Boeotians had at Coronea, but many thought they would at least fight.

  Athenian allies in the Aegean would become emboldened by the sheer audacity of Spartan troops near the walls of Athens and quickly revolt. The city would then sue for peace. Sparta would dictate terms: perhaps freedom for Greek subjects to leave the Athenian empire and guarantees of neutrality for “Third World” states. Further Athenian concessions would be made: surrender of border forts, reduction of the fleet, or alliance with Sparta. Everyone could pretty much go back home with the issues of prestige, honor, and status clearly resolved on the battlefield. A few Greeks might have appreciated Spartan past efforts to depose Athenian tyranny and the bravery of the Spartan army fifty years earlier at the battle of Plataea, when it stopped the Persians cold, and thus found its surprising present posture as the liberator of the city-states from Athens somewhat credible.

  This inflexible strategy was the first of a chain of tragic miscalculations, as even the commander of the Peloponnesian invading forces at last realized before the march began. “The Athenians have plenty of other land in their empire, and can import what they want by sea,” the Spartan king Archidamus warned in a Lord Grey—type “the lamps are going out” speech. He added ominously, “Let us not be caught up in the hope that the war will be over if we just ravage their countryside. I fear instead that we shall leave war as a legacy to our children, so unlikely it is that the Athenians will prove slaves to their land or like amateurs they will become shocked by the war.”12

  The Athenians at the very outset realized, albeit accidentally, that the only way they would lose the war would be when an enemy accomplished what Lysander eventually pulled off twenty-seven years later, when he sailed into the Piraeus and finally sat atop the Acropolis. The Athenians made an arrangement to set aside the enormous sum of 1,000 talents—in today’s dollars about $480 million—in an emergency reserve defense fund to draft more troops and build more ships in case the Spartans sent a fleet against the Piraeus. In fact, in 429 the frustrated Spartans attempted just such an incursion, and their daring maritime attackers nearly succeeded in getting close to the harbor before being driven off from Salamis and back to Corinth.13