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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  All this skepticism makes sense. The first decadelong phase of the conflict, referred to as the Archidamian War, actually saw little real fighting inside Attica. The Peloponnesian invasions were fast becoming a phony theater. Tempers flared, but few died in actual combat. After the first invasion of 431, the enemy came only four more times. Perhaps they stayed no more than 150 cumulative days during the entire decade between 431 and 421! None of these subsequent ravaging expeditions were as large as the infamous inaugural attack of 431, although the first two invasions were considered the most massive and together delivered a one-two punch that inflicted deep psychological wounds on the rural people of Athens. To put it another way, between 431 and 425 the marvelous Spartan army was used against the Athenians in Attica only three of the first eighty-four months of the war.41

  Perhaps Pericles’ war of attrition, funded by capital reserves, really would wear down the Peloponnesians after all, causing faction among such a loosely connected alliance that lacked the money and unity of the Athenian empire.42

  Habits Die Hard

  An exasperated king Archidamus came back a year after the first inroad and tried to be more systematic in his second attempt at destruction. In 430 he remained about ten days longer, perhaps because his army was about half the size of the massive force of the year before and far easier to feed. He now set out beyond the Attic plain, moving into the coastal regions as far south as the mines at Laurium. Thucydides believed that the longer stay, coming after an initial inroad, and the more area that was devastated at this time, made the Athenians later feel that it was the worst of the five invasions, prompting them to prepare to send envoys down to Sparta to talk about a possible armistice.

  Perhaps Archidamus reckoned that in some strange way his show of force might precipitate a revolt of Athens’ island subjects who saw their master tied down in Attica. Thucydides says little more of this second invasion of late May 430 or even of the next two subsequent attacks of 428 and 427, other than that the enemy now tried to destroy crops that had been bypassed or had grown out again, presumably vineyards and orchards that had sent out new shoots. Apparently King Cleomenes, not Archidamus, led the fourth invasion of 427. He made a systematic effort to cover Attica, as well as retracing Archidamus’ earlier trail, aiming to hit farms that were in the midst of recovery.43

  Fear of the plague had scared the Spartans off from a planned third annual invasion in 429. They instead abruptly headed to Boeotia to besiege the Plataeans. In 426 they also kept away, purportedly because of an earthquake. The real reason was probably apprehension of a recent renewed outbreak of the pestilence. If the key to agricultural devastation was repeated ravaging to wear out a rural population and prevent repair and renewal in the hinterland, then the Spartans’ crusade—eventually conducted under the tenure of three different kings, Archidamus, Cleomenes, and Agis, son of Archidamus—was proving to be an utter failure. No Spartan commander was ever able to regroup and mount a second attack in the same year. That persistence might have at least shown that they were serious about either ruining the countryside or making it impossible for farmers to return during the growing season. Why the Spartans kept coming into Attica without altering their tactics is one of the great mysteries of the Peloponnesian War; after 430 they apparently felt that Athenian evacuation was exacerbating the effects of the plague and ruining the city, inasmuch as it was clear that they were neither destroying the food supplies of the city nor cutting off access to the countryside.

  The fifth inroad of 425, led by the young Agis, was a disaster. It lasted only two weeks. The grain was too green to be either consumed or burned. But, more importantly, the invaders were hysterical at news that 292 Lacedaemonians—among them 120 elite Spartiates—had been captured off the coast of the Peloponnese at Sphacteria and held as hostages in Athens.

  In none of these invasions did the Peloponnesian grand army disrupt the mining operation at Laurium and thus cut off the source of Athenian silver coinage. After 425 the Spartans would not reenter Attica for the rest of the Archidamian War in fear of Athenian threats that their prisoners would be executed if an army ever again crossed into Attica. The Attic war was now for all practical purposes over.

  Like most campaigns, it was one thing to talk grandly of a walkover of the enemy’s homeland, and quite another to see it through. No one in May 431 could have dreamed that in a mere six years hostage taking—brought about by the surrender of crack Spartan hoplites no less!—could prevent an army of thousands from even crossing the border of Attica. Even before the capture of the Spartan hostages, the reluctant Peloponnesian allies complained to their Spartan leaders that they were busy with their own crops and, despite witnessing almost no combat, were in “no mood for campaigning.”44

  If what had once been a parochial tool to incite hoplite battle was now to be an integral tactic in causing general economic dislocation, there is no sign that armies discovered any new technologies to destroy cropland more effectively with special fuels, arms, or troops. True, in some cases like the seaside town of Acanthus in northern Greece, which was dependent on the export of its wine, fear of the loss of its vintage by armies arriving shortly before the harvest could bring concessions. But with the rise of walled cities in the fifth century, a town that had brought in its grain often ignored enemy provocations and worried more about siege troops than ravagers.45

  A good example was Pericles’ retaliatory plan of semiannual invasions of the nearby farmland of Megara, to the south. After the departure of the Peloponnesians, when it was clear no sizable army was around to face his Athenians in battle, he mobilized his hoplites. Ten thousand ravagers in vengeance devastated the nearby Megarid, a plain centrally located on the Peloponnesians’ route into Athens. Although the grain harvest was already in, such a large and unmolested force must have done some short-term damage to local farms on the borders of Attica; the area is remarkable in modern times for its large olive groves. But, again, the real purpose was psychosocial and political. Pericles’ bullying army wished to vent its rage at an enemy who weeks earlier had helped to attack Attic farms, to humiliate the Megarians for aiding the transit of enemy invaders, and to cause civic dissension that might lead to a democratic and thus friendly change of government curtailing the Spartans’ ability to march freely into Attica.

  Yet for all the ceremony of Pericles’ massive force of ravagers (“the greatest army of the Athenians ever brought together”), Megarians kept inside their walls and stayed allied to Sparta. Thucydides adds that by 424 the Athenians had invaded Megara twice every year. If he is right, that means an incredible fourteen invasions with an infantry force that might on some occasions have numbered 10,000 soldiers in the field, ironically a testament to the difficulty of even large forces over time to starve a people out or obtain concessions.46

  Contemporaries remark frequently about the five Peloponnesian forays into Attica, but almost never about the fourteen Athenian invasions of Megara during the same period. In terms of simple manpower, the Athenians may have sent collectively 140,000 ravagers into the narrow Megarid (fourteen invasions of 10,000 troops each), about the same as the number of Peloponnesians who cumulatively ravaged Attica (five invasions of about 30,000 troops), but unleashed on a smaller geographical area. Yet neither strategy brought the enemy to its knees, much less resulted in a decisive pitched battle.

  New Strategies

  The spartans learned that they needed to stay in Attica year-round in a fortified garrison—the dreaded strategy in the second phase of the war that would come to be known as epiteichismos (“forward fortification”)—where the aim was to loot, keep farmers away from their fields, and create a clearinghouse for plunder and booty. Consequently, the Spartan garrison at the fort of Decelea, thirteen miles from the walls of Athens, fortified in 413, caused more material harm to Athens by disrupting commerce, interrupting communications with the supply depots on nearby Euboea, encouraging the flight of slaves, and keeping farmers from their fields, than all
the futile earlier efforts at chopping and burning trees, vines, and grain during the Archidamian War.

  The young King Agis, who had led the last failed Spartan invasion of 425, came back over a decade later to Decelea as a mature commander who now had the resources, insight, and the firsthand experience to craft a tactic that avoided the pitfalls of his prior failed invasion. The fortification of Decelea—urged throughout the war by an array of Spartans and allies—proved one of the brilliant strategies of the entire conflict. It made the Spartans’ effort at rural plundering immune from the cycles of the agricultural year and offered a permanent redoubt and refuge from counterattacks and cavalry patrols. With a year-round base, the invaders could arrive well before the harvest and stay after it was over, depending on constant plunder, theft, and stout walls for their sustenance and protection.47

  But Decelea was a decade in the future, after the Spartans at last vacated Athens in 425. In some ways the idea was a fluke, growing only out of the reaction to the earlier flawed strategy of annual invasions, recent promises of Persian money, and the depletion of Athenian manpower brought on by the disaster at Sicily. Usually the Spartans abhorred forward basing, and thus entrusted such risky operations to expendable lesser-bred mavericks like a Lysander or Gylippus, who might better lead ex-helots and mercenaries than precious Spartiate hoplites.

  For the German military historian Hans Delbrück, such total war evolved into a more complex strategy of attrition waged against the moral and economic capital of a state rather than the more straightforward idea of annihilation in which an army seeks to destroy through hammer blows its counterpart in the field. Why waste lives battering away at like forces when softer and more important resources could be targeted over a longer period and at much less cost? Could a Greek polis really win a war by ignoring the main infantry forces of its adversary in the field? Pericles thought so. The morality of waging exhaustive war was a new and unsettling enterprise for Athens and Sparta, as both sides lacked accessible hard targets and thus soon sought to prevail through ruining civilian resources and attacking third parties.

  Yet by not coming out to fight, did Pericles guarantee the death and ruin of the civilians of Athens, both inside and outside the walls, in a vain hope of wearing down his adversaries in a new total war? It was Periclean strategy, after all, that defined the new war as battle not between hoplites or even sailors but rather soldiers against the property of everyday folks. This moral quandary also remains with us today, and it has been raised in connection with the controversial careers of William Tecumseh Sherman, Lord Kitchener, and Curtis LeMay, who all argued that battle is ultimately powered by civilians and thus only extinguished when they cannot or will not pledge their labor and capital to those on the battlefield.

  Was it a more moral and effective strategy to burn the slave estates and ruin the property of the plantation class of Georgia, which had fueled secession, or to have Ulysses Grant kill thousands of largely young and non-slave-owning youth in northern Virginia in open battle? Far worse still, was Curtis LeMay a war criminal who burned down the cities of Japan, killing tens of thousands of civilians with his napalm-fed infernos? Or, in effect, did he shorten the war and punish those in Tokyo’s household factories whose labor produced the planes, shells, and guns without which the Japanese imperial army could never have murdered thousands of innocent Koreans, Chinese, and Filipinos and killed so many American servicemen?

  Hans Delbrück was not interested in such abstract moral questions. It was the efficacy of the respective strategies that mattered to him. Delbrück wrote in a defeated Germany not long after the horrors of the trenches of World War I and was searching for a less costly strategy of battle mixed with more comprehensive economic, cultural, and psychological tactics that might still achieve Germany’s strategic aims. He concluded that Pericles had hit upon a formula of success, a strategy that defined deadlock as victory—without ruining armies of young men in the process. Had Pericles lived, had the plague not broken out, and had the Athenians not jettisoned their strategy, Athens could not have been defeated militarily and might have obtained far earlier roughly the peace it found in 421—without thousands of its citizens dead, its army humiliated in Boeotia, and its strategic possessions in the north in enemy hands. For Delbrück such a stalemate, in the manner of Frederick the Great’s lengthy campaigns, would have eventually won the war for Athens, since its greater capital reserves gave it a resiliency unknown at Sparta. That latter polis, as Thucydides repeatedly stated, had gone to war precisely “in fear” of the growth of Athenian power.48

  What, then, had the blinkered Spartans accomplished in Attica during the initial phase of the war? Nothing and everything. Although they had been at war with Athens for nearly seven years, their army had spent an aggregate of less than five months in Attica, and the Spartans’ chief strategy of annual agricultural devastation had achieved none of its objectives. It was not cheap to send thousands of farmers into distant Attica. If the Peloponnesians paid their army at the going rate for military service—150 aggregate days for about 30,000 men at a drachma per day per soldier—the total cost of Archidamus’ five invasions was about 750 talents (about $360 million in modern purchasing power), more even than the yearly tribute income of the Athenian empire, or about the cost to put 250 ships at sea for three months. The outlay was bearable for a rich state like Athens. (It spent almost 4,500 talents on sieges and seaborne operations in the first seven years of the war alone!)

  Yet for the rural Peloponnesians, who had little capital at the outbreak of the war and were used to brief campaigns settled by hoplite collisions, going into Attica for the first years of the war was an exorbitantly high price to pay. When the Corinthians clamored for the Spartans to start the war, the chief method that they outlined to pay for military expenses was to tap the rich reserves at the Panhellenic sanctuaries of Olympia and Delphi. How else, after all, could a state that used iron spits for money ever purchase ships, hire crews, or buy food in an open market? For a Greek world that put a high premium on honor and status, the Spartans had demonstrated that they were walking about freely on the sacred soil of Attica while their hosts were huddled inside their walls.49

  A Most Remarkable Athenian

  This war in the fields was more than grand strategy and most certainly was not fought by anonymous thousands. During these annual devastations of Attica a young Athenian noble—acclaimed the most handsome youth in Athens—was slowly emerging from the chaos of war and plague. Alcibiades was just about nineteen when the Peloponnesian War broke out. Months earlier he may have served as a mere teenager with the cavalry at Potidaea during the antebellum siege of that recalcitrant Athenian subject state. By 429 he had returned home to cavalry service and was no doubt in Attica at twenty-one—a hero since he had been wounded at Potidaea and honored with the award of valor despite being saved with his armor by his mentor, Socrates.

  Alcibiades’ lineage was Kennedyesque. He would be emblematic of the entire glory and tragedy of the fifth-century Athenian imperial state, which started the war with such high hopes among a generation that inherited the pride but not the sobriety of their fathers. Pericles, after all, had been credited with achieving nine battle victories when the war broke out, and knew well that his majestic temples and the brilliance of Athenian drama conducted below the south slope of the Acropolis were the dividends of decades of hard-fought wars. Alcibiades, in contrast, grew up in the latter 440s and 430s, when the earlier conflicts with Boeotia, Sparta, and the rebellious allies were for the most part over—and the largess of empire already manifest in a bustling port, rampant construction, and a vibrant city full of the likes of Sophocles, Socrates, and Euripides.

  From his mother, Deinomache (“Terrible in Battle”), Alcibiades claimed membership in the Alcmaeonids, the most powerful and controversial of the centuries-old Athenian aristocratic clans. His father, Cleinias, had died during the earlier Athenian hoplite catastrophe at Boeotian Coronea (447), after being prominent in
establishing the fiscal architecture of the entire system of Athenian imperialism in the Aegean. Three-year-old Alcibiades was entrusted to his distant cousins, the brothers Ariphron and Pericles, who taught him something of the manifest destiny of an ascendant democratic Athens.

  Little is known about Alcibiades during his twenty-first through twenty-sixth years, when he may have been constantly on patrol in the Attic countryside as a member of the Athenian cavalry. No account exists about how he avoided the plague that killed his guardian Pericles. Only his early personal life was of much interest; after his return from the siege at Potidaea in the second year of the war, a number of salacious stories immediately spread about his raucous carousing. In between his summers of rural mounted service he drank and argued with Socrates, often became the subject of sexual gossip, and apparently embraced a long family tradition of combining his own aristocratic background with opportunistic democratic politics.

  Alcibiades’ sizable family estate in the Athenian plain was probably ravaged by the Spartans, even as he remained true to the Periclean policy of abandonment of Attica while he rode down enemy ravagers on patrol. After the Spartans ceased their annual incursions, Alcibiades nevertheless reminded the Athenians of their duty to protect the sacred soil of Athens. They were to adhere, he stressed, to the old annual oath that the ephebes took on behalf of their alma mater, swearing “to regard wheat, barley, vines, and olives as the natural boundaries of Athens.”*