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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The Shadow of Pericles

  As a popular leader of a radically democratic state, Pericles realized that perhaps a quarter of his voters—his core poorer constituents—owned little or no land. Half the citizens of Athens rowed in the fleet or worked in his program of public works to create his majestic imperial city. As the indignant philosophers and elites complained, the poorer thetes would not personally suffer directly from an attack on farmland that they did not own.* Many urban dwellers knew very few Attic farmers. Perhaps they rarely even saw them in town. Instead, they could profit greatly as paid rowers to patrol and to protect the sea-lanes. Out of that domestic self-interested political calculus of sacrificing native agriculture also arose the best way collectively to defend the maritime empire of Athens.

  Yet Pericles was not merely cynical or eager in wartime to divide his own people along political lines. He also grasped two other essential shortcomings about Spartan strategy on the eve of the first invasion of 431. First, it was not an easy task for tens of thousands of parochial folk to leave their own harvests, march from over 150 miles distant, live off the land in transit, and systematically destroy in a few days some 200,000 acres—especially when Athenian rural garrisons and cavalry patrols made invaders in small groups and out of formation easy prey. Later the Athenians believed that if they could just knock the Boeotians, who provided cavalry support for the ravagers from the Peloponnese, out of the war, the invasions would cease altogether. Horsemen apparently fought horsemen to keep the Athenian cavalry from riding down vulnerable ravagers.

  The Spartans also came in such numbers that their army seemed too formidable to achieve its aim of prompting battle, and likewise almost too large to feed.14 Just to supply so many thousands while in Attica was a logistical nightmare and was predicated entirely on how quickly they could get to Athenian grain while it was ripe and either unharvested in the field or not yet transported into Athens. Modern studies have suggested that during the five invasions the Peloponnesians would have consumed in aggregate grain equal to an entire annual Attic wheat and barley harvest. By June 431 there may have been altogether almost 400,000 Peloponnesians and Athenians either out in the Attic countryside or inside the walls of Athens—a vast, mostly nameless mob of desperate folk at war that warrants almost no mention in our ancient sources.15

  Pericles had warned about the perils of facing the national army of the Peloponnesians: even had the Athenians won a single pitched battle against such enormous numbers of hoplites, such a dramatic victory still would not have decided the war. To meet such an army in pitched battle was a “terrible thing” to contemplate, in which even a miraculous victory might have little strategic effect. It is difficult to know whether Pericles feared the sheer size of the Peloponnesian allied army or the presence of Spartans themselves, who probably made up only 10 percent of the aggregate force, or some 4,000 to 6,000 hoplites. Later, in 406, King Agis brought an army of almost 30,000 troops right to the walls of Athens. But the Spartans marched only on a moonless night, and were not willing to fight a battle within bowshot of the city. In turn, the Athenian phalanx had no desire to meet them distant from the protective support of archers on the ramparts.16

  As Spartans tried to cut down olive trees in Attica, Athenian marines and light-armed troops, albeit in far fewer numbers, could be ferried to the coastal towns of the Peloponnese to harass through raiding and plundering. Such tactics had been used years before in early battles between Sparta and Athens. In fact, for the first decade of the war, the Athenians conducted raids all over the Peloponnese. They stormed small hamlets where the grain harvests were collected and vulnerable. Pericles’ raiders achieved such terror and disruption that a popular tale circulated that the Athenians had done more agricultural damage in the Peloponnese than the Peloponnesians had in Attica.17 It was just such a ravaging expedition much later against the seaboard of Laconia in summer 414 that outraged the Spartans enough to cause them to renew the war. They claimed that such audacity in attacking their sacred soil at a time of reconciliation was an insult to their pride, thus prompting them formally to annul the provisions of the Peace of Nicias and at last restart full-scale hostilities against Athens.18

  Very soon the Athenians would exploit the helot paranoia of Sparta. If the Spartans’ own Peloponnesian agrarian allies had harvest concerns that limited the amount of time they could be away from their crops, the Spartans worried not about unattended fields but rather about unattended field-workers. They fretted constantly that nearby peoples like the Argives or Arcadians were just waiting to promote helot rebellion to facilitate their own aspirations for independence.19

  For all these reasons, the Athenian leadership had convinced everybody except the farmers themselves that the Spartans would not seriously damage the heartland of Athens—and most certainly not force the Athenian state to either come out to fight or capitulate. Even the rebellious maritime subjects of Athens, who in the past had believed that invading Attica might allow them to revolt from a distracted Athens, finally came to agree. In seeking Spartan support for their revolt of 427, after four Spartan invasions, the Mytileneans of Lesbos at last shrugged, saying that the “war will not be won in Attica” but waged and won on the seas rather than by burning and cutting crops.20

  Such visions of a naval victory took two decades to evolve at Sparta. In the meantime, the key, Pericles realized, to beating these Dorian reactionaries was to keep everyone inside the walls—no easy task with thousands of hotheaded Attic farmers. He must in addition guarantee that the trade routes were safe and the Athenian triremes vigilant for signs of maritime rebellion. Later, ambivalent states in the Peloponnese like Argos and Mantinea might come over to the Athenian side, and so surround Sparta with nearby enemies. Boeotia, as had happened between 457 and 447, might also be invaded and once more be made a democratic ally.

  But all that was in the future. For now, in the spring of 431, Pericles had the more immediate problem of dealing with a 60,000-man enemy army on the horizon. So he reminded his citizens that trees and vines—unlike men—could regenerate when cut down. He announced to his grumbling compatriots, “If I thought I could persuade you, I would have you go out and waste them with your own hands.”21

  But, of course, he could never convince such yeomen of Attica. A few months before Archidamus arrived, the Athenians watched Euripides’ Medea, a play in which their countryside was praised as “the holy land that is un-wasted”—a reflection of how comforting that boast was to most Athenians. Indeed, there is a special word in the Greek language, aporthêtos (“unplundered”), that reflects this almost religious pride in land that has been untouched by the enemy due to the courage and strength of its hoplite citizenry. In this context, did the Spartan failure in Attica between 431 and 425 to win the war or concessions prove that the strategy of agricultural devastation was no longer of much value in a conflict as multifaceted and long as the Peloponnesian War?

  Not quite. Later in the war, the reactionary practice of ravaging still continued to spark resistance, internal strife, capitulation, or hunger at places like Corcyra, Acanthus, Mende, and Melos. But then, unlike the exceptional case of Athens, none of those places had extensive fortifications connected to a well-protected port, reserve capital, secure supplies of imported food, an empire and fleet, and a relatively united democratic population.22 In addition, Greeks would come to appreciate devastation as a tactic of economic warfare in its own right, rather than a catalyst to pitched battle.

  The Great Gamble

  If King Archidamus and his Peloponnesian army completely underestimated the problems of ravaging Attica and the nature of Athenian countermeasures, Pericles himself also failed to grasp three fatal flaws in his own otherwise cogent strategy of attrition. First, he assumed that a city built for 100,000 urban residents might accommodate—without problems of housing, water, and sanitation in the Mediterranean heat of late spring and summer—an additional population of some 100,000 to 150,000 rural refugees for a month or m
ore. He was in error. Thousands of refugees would be without permanent shelter. They would quickly overtax the fountains, latrines, and sewers of the city. And the evacuees would grow angry at having been forced to leave their homes, and soon become uncomfortable with city folks—most of whom they had never seen before and probably did not like.

  Pericles planned to turn the most majestic city of the Greek world into one enormous and squalid refugee camp in an age before knowledge and proper treatment of microbes—a radical policy that had been attempted during neither the Persian nor the First Peloponnesian War. Anyone who has spent summers in modern Athens can appreciate the afternoon heat that descends on the city and the air that grows stagnant—lying as it does in a basin surrounded and cut off by the ranges of Mounts Aigaleos, Parnes, Pentelikos, and Hymettus and without either a major river or the seashore in its immediate environs.23

  Later a tired Pericles himself confessed to a worn-out and angry assembly, “The plague was the one event that proved greater than our foresight.” There is more tragic irony here: the earlier construction of the Long Walls (461–456) was in line with Themistocles’ notion of ensuring that in the future Athenians could avoid pitched battle, stay in the city, and thus not have to flee en masse to the nearby islands. In fact, that earlier traumatic evacuation of Athens in 480, by dispersing the population among nearby Aegina, Salamis, and Troezen, mitigated the chances of overcrowding and plague. What Pericles needed perhaps was not so much a military strategist as a public health expert. Meanwhile, he appeared as foolish as Archidamus did wise. A chance pestilence proved the strategic insight of the former disastrous—and the banal ideas of the latter inspired.24

  Second, Pericles gambled that the Athenians—a people that had once marched out to Marathon to beat an army three times its size and had sunk a numerically superior Persian fleet at Salamis in sight of the Acropolis—could now sit idly by without damage to their national psyche while thousands of enemies swaggered in to challenge their martial prowess. Of course, farmers would soon grow irate that their homes were overrun. But the collective population at large would also have to stomach the even more odious idea that none of their men would dare to fight an enemy a few miles from the walls.

  War is never merely a struggle over concrete things. Instead, as great generals from the Theban Epaminondas to Napoleon saw, it remains a contest of wills, of mentalities and perceptions that lie at the heart of all military exegeses, explaining, for example, why a Russian army that collapsed in 1917 on its frontier held out in its overrun interior during World War II, or how a completely outnumbered and poorly supplied Israeli army between 1947 and 1967 overwhelmed enemies that enjoyed superior weaponry and a tenfold advantage in military manpower.

  So once the Athenians had established the precedent that enemies could occupy their homeland with the near assurance that they would not or could not be forcibly removed, would not an inevitable sense of collective self-doubt and insecurity follow? Again, would other enemies—or Athens’ own critical and large Aegean subject states, such as Chios, Mytilene, and Samos—feel that Athens either could not or would not any longer respond to attack? How exactly could a proud empire prevent insurrection on distant island subject states, when it would not even defend its own soil? Most potentially rebellious Greeks were not versed in tactical nuances and thus did the simpler moral arithmetic in terms something like “Did our masters, the Athenians, fight or in fear stay behind the walls?”

  Years later, on the eve of the Sicilian expedition, one of the arguments that the sophist Alcibiades used to convince the Athenians—a citizenry that had lost a quarter of its population to the plague and had its land occupied on five occasions—to attack Syracuse was that by nature Athens was suited only to aggressive strategies and would cease to exist if it opted for a passive posture. Perhaps one reason why Alcibiades’ often fallacious logic struck a chord was that the hotheads in his audience could recall Archidamus’ early invasions—when the Athenians had stayed still, and such passivity had brought them the plague, the death of Pericles, and no clear-cut advantage for ten years.

  Ultimately, if Athens entered a conflict against the greatest land power in the Greek world, it had to destroy either the Spartan army or the system—the entire foundations of helotage—that allowed such a professional military to train and march abroad. There is little indication that Pericles, at least at the outset, ever envisioned such bold offensive strokes as organizing a Panhellenic coalition to descend into Laconia, or even a way to pay for the fighting if it went beyond five years. Again, wars do not really end until the conditions that started them—a bellicose government, an aggressive leader, a national policy of brinkmanship—are eliminated. Otherwise there remains a bellum interruptum, much like the so-called Peace of Nicias, when Athens and Sparta agreed to a time-out in 421, before going at each other with renewed and deadly fury in 415.

  Third, Pericles assumed that a leader of his rhetorical talents, political experience, and moral authority could rein in both conservative farmers and democratic extremists and do so systematically and steadily until the Spartans gave up. His surviving busts in stone, like those of a similar war leader, Lincoln, appear almost serene. His hoplite helmet is pushed to the back of his ample forehead, a visage reflecting concern with monumental issues, while indicating neither arrogance nor insecurity.

  For over thirty years, Pericles as the most important statesman at Athens had exercised just such Olympian moral clout, and thereby lent a sense of political consistency and continuity unusual for an ancient democracy that functioned without constitutional checks and balances on the majority votes of a fickle assembly. His savvy mix of radically egalitarian sympathies and aristocratic gravitas helped him lead—but not indulge—the volatile mob who could vote to enslave, murder, or forgive rebellious allies as it saw fit on any given day.

  True, Pericles in theory was only one of ten annually selected generals—who were elected by a public show of hands in the assembly and could be reelected each year. Yet his age, experience, character, and rhetoric gave him such wide public support that by sheer force of will he was able to persuade his colleagues either to hold or postpone assemblies of the people, and thus to facilitate or stymie outbursts of popular expression.25

  To an approving Thucydides, “in name a democracy, Athens became a government ruled by its first citizen.” Whether such a blanket encomium was entirely an accurate reflection of how politics really worked in Periclean Athens is unclear, especially given Thucydides’ propensity to denigrate the Athenian assembly as a “mob” or “crowd” of poorer and less educated people. But a more salient consideration was that Pericles was now about sixty-four years old. There must have been doubts about whether he possessed any longer the physical stamina to meet the greatest challenge in the history of the democracy.26

  What ultimately would betray the great leader were as much lapses in logic as physical exhaustion and age. Pericles was to be proved wrong on all three of his gambles about the coerced evacuation from Attica. The sudden plague that broke out during the second year of the invasions (430) wiped out thousands of the frontline military infantrymen of Athens. It killed or sickened tens of thousands more, thus taking more lives than could any Spartan phalanx, reminding us that in most wars more usually die from disease than enemy iron. He drove his citizens inside the walls to ensure thousands their salvation, but instead guaranteed destruction to far more. Civic tension broke out among various interests that was never completely resolved, but soon manifested itself in precipitate and poorly thought-out offensive operations, and eventually in the two political coups of 411 and 403. To the conservative historian Thucydides, Pericles’ demise was a tragic loss and led to an endless cycle of lesser demagogic figures: Cleon, Alcibiades, Hyperbolus, Cleonymus, and Cleophon, who all played one faction off against the other in cynical pursuit of personal power.

  Enemy at the Gates

  None of these repercussions was anticipated in late May 431. Then a huge
allied army of Peloponnesians, consisting of thousands of hoplites, cavalrymen, and light-armed troops—two-thirds of all available troops in the Peloponnesian alliance—mustered at the Isthmus of Corinth. The mass then slogged its way northward on the first of what would turn out to be five late-spring invasions of Attica over the ensuing decade.

  The attack was, in fact, somewhat late. Despite hearing a litany of Peloponnesian complaints against the Athenians during the summer of 432, then obtaining a vote that the Athenians were in material breach of the peace, and finally receiving recent word that their allied Boeotians had preempted them by attacking the Athenian protectorate city-state of Plataea in early March 431, the Spartans nevertheless waited months to advance into Attica. Ostensibly, they had to time their arrival with the ripening of the barley and wheat fields, those crops most important to an ancient city and the easiest to destroy by burning.

  In such a huge countryside as Attica, replete with different elevations and microclimates, there might be as much as a two-month divergence in ripening times. Thus, finding some combustible dry grain was no guarantee that the crop just a few miles away would also be mature and vulnerable. Ancient armies usually carried three days’ rations or so, and thus counted on the harvests of the invaded to supplement what little food they brought along. That Archidamus had actually mobilized such a large army composed from so many small communities was miraculous, given the fact that most rural folk of the Peloponnese had no desire to march away and leave their women and children to care for their own ripening crops. Indeed, even if the huge army marched ten abreast, it stretched out for over fifteen miles, as it slowly wound its way northward into Attica. Its belated advance into Attica formally started the Peloponnesian War. As the Peloponnesians at last crossed the border, a Spartan herald returned from a failed last-minute peace mission to Athens, sighing of the enormous army that crossed into Attica, “This day will be the beginning of great misfortunes to the Hellenes.” And so it was.27