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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  None of these contingents would have attacked Athens singularly. But now they swarmed in on two guarantees of their safety: the army was huge and thus invincible, and both the red-cloaked Spartans and the feared horsemen of Boeotia were to run loose at the vanguard in Attica. Who knows all the crazy thoughts that raced through the minds of these opportunists: Might Athens surrender and its plush city be left ripe for plunder? Might its chagrined hoplites march out and meet catastrophe in a glorious Peloponnesian victory? Might twenty thousand farms supply enough plunder to enrich an entire generation? Thucydides wrote of the general Hellenic consensus on the eve of the war—of course well before states had much experience with victorious Spartans as overlords—“It was clearly on the side of the Lacedaemonians.”28

  Despite the enemy’s hopes that the overseas tributary allies of Athens would revolt on news that Spartans at last ranged freely a few miles from the Athenian Acropolis, or that the Athenians would cease their blockade of Potidaea, not many subjects believed that Athenian power was in any way eroding. And fewer still felt that their own future would necessarily be any better under Spartan hegemony. Even fewer neutral states sent their young men to join the Spartan crusade. In the chaotic world of some fifteen hundred autonomous city-states—where a few stone ramparts were all that sometimes kept invaders on the horizon out of the agora—it always made better sense on rumors of war to pause, take a deep breath, put aside ideological zeal, and carefully size up the respective strengths of potential allies and enemies before committing to battle. The vote of the Peloponnesian League to go to war was taken in August 432; the army didn’t reach the borders of Attica until May 431. For eight months—almost exactly the period of the “phony war” on the Franco-German border between the invasion of Poland and the attack through the Ardennes (September 1939 to May 1940)—Sparta not only prepared to muster an allied army but, more importantly, hoped for a final resolution that might bring concessions from Athens.29

  The Peloponnesians’ trek northward to Athens from Sparta followed much the same route as the modern highway. It is a scenic way that, after leaving the Isthmus at Corinth, traverses the Megarid to the high cliffs above Salamis. Then the route passes the sanctuary of Eleusis, before crossing over the slopes of Mount Aigaleos at the modern suburb of Daphni and finally descending into the plain of Athens. The road is not an easy, level march, and it is made worse by the heat of late spring and the scarcity of water along much of the way. What did tens of thousands of Peloponnesians think of as they hiked along the cliffs that tower over the straits of Salamis, where a half century earlier the grandfathers of both sides had united to preserve Greek liberty?

  The mob that advanced was itself larger than all but a handful of Greek city-states, carrying along tons of iron, bronze, and wooden arms and armor, unsure whether the cliffs above would be patrolled by Athenian rangers. However, in this initial invasion before reaching the formal border of Attica, King Archidamus first turned to the northeast. He sought to enter Attica instead by a circuitous route near the northwestern garrison at the tiny hamlet of Oenoë and then to descend into the outlying demes on the lower slopes of Mount Parnes.

  There the invaders were immediately confronted with a myriad of more mundane problems, from cavalry patrols and rural Athenian garrison troops to confusion about delegating the tasks of agricultural devastation. Thucydides reports that Archidamus had been slow in mustering in the Peloponnese, slow in collecting the final army at Corinth, and was now slow—or perhaps bogged down—in Attica itself. In the leader’s defense, no Spartan king had ever been put in charge of such a massive coalition army, a force far larger than any commanded later by either Philip or Alexander, both masters of sophisticated logistics. Second, Sparta had never been known for audacity beyond the borders of Laconia; every Spartan commander, with the exception of the rare Brasidas, Gylippus, or Lysander, was at one time or another dilatory in bringing troops to battle, fearful that helots were free rather than farming.

  Despite an array of siege engines, the invaders failed to take the Athenian base at Oenoë, which was well fortified, stoutly defended, and a nexus for frequent Athenian patrolling. Soon a frustrated Archidamus moved on, slowly descending to the Eleusinian and Thriasian plains. There he settled in near Acharnae. This was the largest rural deme of Attica, less than ten miles from the walls of the city proper, and its occupation meant a brazen challenge for Athenians to put up or shut up.

  The Acharnians, crusty growers who provide the eponymous title of an Aristophanic comedy criticizing the war, may have normally contributed as many as 3,000 hoplite soldiers to the Athenian army. So they were influential folk, farming a large and fertile district of Attica near the slopes of Mount Pentelikos, not far from the city proper. Many made their living by burning charcoal and knew something about fire in the countryside. In Archidamus’ mind, the property of these touchy farmers should be the first Athenian soil targeted, a test case of sorts: the furious Acharnians would either force the others to fight or cause so much dissension inside the walls as to undermine civic support altogether for Pericles’ strategy. In Plutarch’s words, they surely would march out to battle if for nothing other than “angry pride.”30

  Despite the cynical Spartan attempt to reveal the fragility of democracy in time of war, Pericles held firm and reined in the Acharnians. In desperation Archidamus ravaged their vineyards and orchards and, when no enemy phalanx marched out, moved out of Acharnae. Pericles had kept sending out offensive cavalry patrols; he may have anticipated the present need, because he’d beefed up the cavalry to 1,000 mounts on the eve of the war. He also made sure not to convene any meetings of the assembly where rival demagogues—the fiery Cleon especially—might excite the mob in these times of stress. In Plutarch’s words, he “shut the city up tight” and “gave little thought to the slanderers and malcontents.”31

  For all the supposed political turmoil, the Spartans had, ironically, created a weird, novel political cohesion inside the walls. The poor were busy manning the fleet to attack the seaboard of the Peloponnese to pay them back for their ravaging of Attica. The middling hoplite farmers were angry, but safe inside the walls without the need to confront crack Spartan infantrymen. The wealthy every day were bravely riding out to harass enemy ravagers and did a superb job in curtailing the despoiling of the countryside.32

  Frustrated by this repeated inability either to ruin the countryside or to prompt a battle, after a few days Archidamus moved farther on, to the region between Mount Pentelikos and Mount Parnes. From there the Spartans exited Attica through the northern borderland of Oropus. The army ended up in neighboring and friendly Boeotia before trudging back home a few weeks after it mustered.

  In prewar discussions it was little remarked upon that Athens, in fact, had a two-front war on its hands: Peloponnesians to the south, Boeotians on the north. Already, in the first days of the fighting, the Athenians were learning that not only could opportunistic Boeotian raiders plunder with near impunity from the nearby border but also that the Spartans could not really be bottled up in Attica and denied safe exit. They needed only to march on through to Boeotia, rest, replenish their supplies, and then if need be take a circuitous route home that bypassed Attica altogether.33

  Theory Versus Practice

  For all the size of the first attacking army, at least two-thirds of Attica was nevertheless left unravaged. In contrast, even if all 1,000 Athenian horsemen had scoured the countryside at once, in theory the cavalry offered a pitiful deterrent. There was only a single defender for every 200 acres of cultivated land. Yet, because the Spartans concentrated on particular hot-button targets in Attica, such as the deme of Acharnae, large bands of cavalry could keep the enemy from fanning out too far from the main body. On this first inroad it seems that Archidamus’ dilatory progress and his decision to concentrate mostly on those rich demes within sight of the walls of Athens were designed to provoke rather than ruin the Athenians.

  Again, what is striking about b
oth ancient and modern Attica is its vast size, over one thousand square miles, making it one of the largest rural territories of any polis of the ancient Greek world. If half the arable land of Attica was cultivated in olive orchards (e.g., about 100,000 acres, with 50 to 100 trees per acre), there might have been planted anywhere from 5 to 10 million trees! Ravaging all these groves was an impossible task of complete destruction, especially after the initial invasion of a purported 60,000 Peloponnesians, when the enemy probably mustered only about 30,000 in four subsequent inroads. In a few weeks’ time, a single hoplite or even a light-armed ravager could hardly hope to cut down, on average, 250 trees, especially when the countryside was still alive with horsemen and a few angry recalcitrant farmers.

  Because Attica was so large, an entire corpus of Greek literature attests that even in peacetime many Athenian rustics had never ventured into the city at all. This parochialism was not surprising, since some farms were fifty miles distant from the Acropolis and a long hike away.34 Athenian strength cannot be calibrated only through its silver mines, fleet, and income from overseas tributary allies. Like Sparta and Thebes, much of Athens’ financial power accrued from its large rural territory and population. For all the attention paid to gold, silver, and manpower, the real players in the ancient Greek world—Sparta, Athens, Thebes, and Corinth—were precisely those states that controlled the largest or most fertile tracts of farmland, the ultimate source of all wealth in early, preindustrial societies. Even today, despite the unchecked urban spread of Athens, its new sprawling rural airport, and thousands of impressive country homes, there are still tens of thousands of acres in small valleys and plains that are hard to reach and often quite isolated, from the foothills of Mount Parnes to the interior plains and vales of Laurium, some fifty miles to the south.

  Earlier, before the campaign had even begun, King Archidamus—in Thucydides’ history a tragic Hamlet-like character who hesitates before striking—had outlined to the Spartan assembly his doubts about systematically ravaging the entire Athenian plain and his belief that Greek farmers would still negotiate rather than see smoke arising from their farms. So he voiced his concerns on mostly strategic, if not psychological, grounds: “Do not consider their land anything other than a hostage to hold, and it is a better hostage the better it continues to be cultivated.”35

  Later a popular theme of historians was cataloging those areas of Attica—Decelea, the plain of Marathon, the Academy (the future site of Plato’s school), and various private estates with the so-called sacred olive trees—that despite five annual invasions were never attacked and thus perhaps never evacuated. Rumors had it that the Spartans might also skip rural property of some elites who might thus come under suspicion of philo-Laconism or sympathy with right-wing Spartan oligarchy. And if farms like those of wealthy Pericles were spared, it would only inflame public opinion and divide the citizenry over issues of comparative sacrifices under such an unpopular tactic of forced withdrawal. Something besides mere destruction of crops was going on in the mind of Archidamus.36

  At news of their coming—the Athenians had several days’ notice from spies and scouts—the reaction was immediate for those in the path of the ravagers. From public documents on stone, it seems that even before the war the Athenians had made some arrangements to evacuate property from rural shrines, as if they anticipated just such an eventual Spartan invasion. Thucydides, who was sympathetic to the landowning class and may have witnessed firsthand the evacuation, wrote in graphic detail that many rural Athenians carted their belongings inside the walls of Athens. There they hunkered down and counted on cavalry patrols to pick off isolated parties of ravagers.

  Urban crowds gathered to argue and fight over the wisdom of withdrawal, something unheard of for almost a half century, since the legendary general Themistocles had organized the flight to the adjoining islands and the nearby Argolid in consequence of the southward advance of Xerxes from Thermopylae. Thucydides’ description of this heartbreaking trek into the city is one of the most moving in his history:

  After listening to Pericles’ exhortations, the Athenians were won over and so brought in from their fields their children, wives, and all their household furniture, even stripping the very woodwork from the homes themselves. They sent their sheep and draft animals to Euboea and the nearby islands. But the evacuation was a difficult thing for them to endure because for most they had always been accustomed to live in the country.

  Later he adds, “They did not find it very easy to evacuate their homes, especially because it was not that long ago since they had reestablished their estates after the Persian Wars. So they were depressed and took it hard to have to abandon their homes and shrines.” This sudden entry of thousands of rural folk into the walls of Athens between 431 and 425—the catalysts of the plague of 430—caused a radical shift in Athenian society itself. Heretofore most farmers and rustics had kept away from the city. Now they were everywhere. Literature of the war, especially Aristophanes’ comedies, for the first time in the history of Athenian letters began to see things from the mostly forgotten view of the other Greeks outside the walls.37

  “I Really Hate the Lacedaemonians”

  The sheer work involved in ruining grain fields might explain stories from later Greek history that sometimes armies brought along special wooden tools, so ravagers might more easily beat and break down the still-green grain shoots. Buildings required even more work, making us wonder whether the laments of lavish estates lost always ring true. Houses, as was true in much of Greece until the mid-twentieth century, were built of mud brick with tile roofs. It was not so simple to knock these nonflammable structures down. The only sure method was to torch their interior wooden support beams and hope for collapse. That, too, was a time-consuming challenge, especially when most of the accessible woodwork and doors that could be used for fuel had already been stripped and evacuated. The paltry remains of the foundations of some prominent classical Athenian farmhouses have been excavated in vulnerable places on the spurs of Mount Pentelikos, the coast at Vari, and near a strategic pass on Mount Parnes. None of them seem to reveal damage or destruction from the later fifth century, suggesting that they either were not seriously attacked or were skipped altogether.38

  As Spartan infantrymen in small patrols tried to protect the ravagers from Athenian cavalry, the mob of destroyers sought to plunder all that they could carry and eat as they burned and cut. But soldiers, ancient and modern, are trained to fight, and thus infantrymen make less effective looters, engineers, or peacekeepers. The war had surely started, but the initial theater of operations involved no pitched battles, clashes at sea, great sieges, or even terrorist raids, and thus for many Greeks this was already a strange sort of fight, especially given the huge army of Archidamus and the even larger numbers of Attic residents who retreated into the walls.

  In the comedies Acharnians (425) and Peace (421), Aristophanes presented smart-alecky Athenian farmers as wiser than their leadership and slowly radicalized in their anger at the enemy, their own political leadership, and the war in general. These unsung stalwarts were furious that beloved estates were allowed to be overrun by enemy vandals. “I really hate the Lacedaemonians,” the hero-farmer Dicaeopolis (“Just City”) laments in Acharnians, “for in my case too there have been vines cut down.” There are plenty more admissions in contemporary literature that the Spartans did not do too much damage, at least in these brief initial annual invasions. Thucydides describes the agony of the losses and yet alludes to areas of Attica that were either not touched at all or not systematically destroyed. In the seventh book of his history, he flatly declares that “the invasions had been short” and had not stopped the Athenians from “making full use of their land during the rest of the year.” But how, then, could he later conclude that Athenians made “full use” of Attica before and after a huge Peloponnesian army arrived to ruin it?

  As is his wont, Thucydides’ generalizing conclusions (e.g., little damage) are often at odds
with the gripping description of ravaging presented in his narrative (e.g., apparently lots of ruin). And his contemporary observations are sometimes reemphasized, modified, or even contradicted later in his text, as in the later revision he did not always change his working draft to reflect his final conclusions at war’s end.

  An anonymous fourth-century historian agreed. The author—his work is known only as the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, named after papyrus fragments found at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt—declared that Attica “was the most lavishly furnished area in Greece.” The reason was that “it had suffered but slight injury from the Lacedaemonians” during the invasions of the Archidamian War.39 The phrase “slight injury” perhaps implies that 60,000 ravagers in 431 could do little amid 200,000 acres of farmland.

  For all the comic poet Aristophanes’ emotional and wrenching descriptions of ruined vines and trees, remember that his first extant play was not produced until the year of the last invasion, 425. Was he a realist observer or a fictive playwright playing on the anger of the recent past? Moreover, an equal number of his passages suggest that much of the Attic countryside did not suffer serious damage. In Sophocles’ famous Oedipus at Colonus, a tragedy produced after both the agriculture devastation of the Archidamian War and the occupation of Decelea by the Spartans in 413, the playwright could call the Attic olive “a terror to its enemies” that “flourished most greatly in this land.” The Sophoclean olive of Attica was a tree that no young or old man could “destroy or bring to nothing.” Audiences in the theater would have found such an ode a cruel joke if they had gazed out at millions of stumps in the countryside.40