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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Later in the war Alcibiades would exhibit a strong desire for the offensive, perhaps as a reaction to the senseless war of attrition in Attica that marked his first years of service. Some eighteen years after the Spartans first marched out to cut down the trees of Attica, a much older and by then treasonous thirty-seven-year-old Alcibiades, ensconced in Sparta, would advise his former enemies that such annual incursions were no way to wreck his homeland. Better, he told his new hosts, to create a permanent fort, thirteen miles from the walls of Athens at Decelea, and thus destroy Alcibiades’ own native soil year-round.50

  But all that was well into the future. For now, the teenager rode into battle against ravagers full of zeal and hope, confident after the first year’s assault that Attica had taken the best punch Sparta could offer—scarcely aware that both his country’s and his own greatest tragedies lay just months ahead.

  * Thetes (thêtes) were the poorest of the census classes at Athens and elsewhere—in wartime, mostly landless wage earners who either rowed in the fleet or accompanied the phalanx as skirmishers and light-armed troops.

  * At Athens, and perhaps elsewhere in the Greek world, ephebes of the upper classes, between the ages of eighteen and twenty, entered a period of mandatory training, often on the frontier and in transition to full-fledged infantry or cavalry service.

  CHAPTER 3

  DISEASE

  THE RAVAGES OF THE PLAGUE AT ATHENS (430–426)

  Anatomy of an Epidemic

  By the second season of the war, the struggle was not to be decided between spearmen or even ravagers and horsemen. It now seemed to hinge on how well, psychologically as well as materially, refugees could ride out a few weeks of enemy occupation. Thanks to Pericles’ strategy, for a second spring much of the population—perhaps well over 200,000—was crammed inside Athens for more than a month. The city of the Parthenon and theater of Dionysus was again to be a fetid refugee camp.

  The prior inaugural year of fighting had proved that such massive evacuation and relocation were practicable. Yet in this second season the city’s luck quite literally ran out. The combination of Mediterranean heat, overcrowding, lack of plentiful clean water, shelter, and proper sanitation, and the stress of war and invasion provided a suitable landscape for a mysterious and terribly destructive disease. When the epidemic passed, Thucydides would make an astounding summation of conditions in Greece as a whole during the three decades of the war: “What caused the greatest suffering and killed a considerable part of the population was the terrible plague.”1

  None of the other Greek city-states had ever experienced anything quite like the Athenian pestilence. Nearby hostile Thebes, the capital of the Boeotian Confederacy, had doubled its population since the outbreak of the war, due to the influx of refugees from the surrounding unwalled hamlets of Boeotia, many of which lay along the porous border and feared an Athenian invasion.2 Yet even if it was now twice its antebellum population, Thebes proper still probably had fewer than 50,000 residents, hardly enough population density to guarantee the easy contagion of an infectious disease. In any case, its smaller numbers of refugees were much more easily housed than the tens of thousands who camped out in Athens. Moreover, the refugees in Thebes did not dwell in a port that was a hub to the thousands of possible disease carriers in the eastern Mediterranean. Neither was it besieged and lacking open access to the countryside nor was it even much visited by travelers or traders. Overcrowding was the catalyst for the plague, but Athens was also a magnet for a wide diversity of peoples who might be disease carriers in a way not true of other hard-pressed landlocked states during the war.

  Modern militaries have concocted devilish brews of supergerms as would-be weapons of mass destruction against their enemies because they are lethal, cheap, of small weight and size, and can nullify the effect of conventional weaponry or superior manpower. Diseases also instill terror beyond their proven ability to kill, inasmuch as the agents of death are far more indiscriminate, invisible, and, as the poet Hesiod says, silent.

  Disaster was not supposed to strike Athens, at least at the moment. This was a city, after all, that had trumped adversity repeatedly. Athens had twice survived incineration by the Persians a half century earlier, during the invasion and occupation of 480–479, only in the war’s aftermath to evolve from ruins into the cultural center of Greece. In the postbellum tensions with Sparta, the citizenry had turned out en masse to build the Long Walls in a fevered state of anxiety, thus completing a vast circuit around Athens and Piraeus of over seventeen miles, four miles greater in circumference even than the famous ramparts that protected Constantinople.

  For twenty years Pericles had mobilized 20,000 laborers to create his architectural masterpieces on the Acropolis, the Parthenon and Propylaea, as well as massive public buildings and fortifications in the agora and the Piraeus. Despite all the worries about the supposedly terrible grand army of the Peloponnese, Athens had ridden out the first invasion of 431 well enough, and had watched the enemy trudge back home without a sense of accomplishment.3

  The contrast of previous Periclean grandness with the human depravity induced by the plague drew Thucydides’ interest in the disease and prompted his riveting account of the effects of the contagion in the second book of his history.

  Some perished in neglect, others despite plentiful attention. No particular treatment was discovered that worked, for what brought improvement in one case, made things worse in another. Both strong and weak constitutions alike proved unable to resist, all alike being taken away, although they were careful to seek treatment with strict attention. By far the worst part of the epidemic was the depression that followed when a victim realized that he was sick. The despair that came with the illness right away destroyed the power of resistance, and it left the sick even more likely to succumb. In addition, there was a terrible scene of citizens dying like sheep after they become ill from trying to help one another. This resulted in the greatest morbidity.4

  Himself a survivor of the infection, Thucydides juxtaposed a graphic narrative of the outbreak with Pericles’ solemn funeral oration over the first year’s dead soldiers, an encomium that had reminded Athenians of their city’s eminence. Apparently, the historian wished to emphasize the capriciousness of fate and the unpredictability of war—and so impress upon his readers the brutal nature of man when stripped of his precious culture and civilization, so vaunted in Pericles’ funeral speech, which had been delivered shortly before the plague’s outbreak. Thucydides believed that deleterious effects from the plague rippled out for years, sharply reducing the war-making potential of the Athenian military:

  Men did whatever they wished. They easily now dared to try what in the past they had done in private, inasmuch as they were seeing the rapid change that happened to those who were once well off suddenly dying while those formerly poor taking over their possessions. So the citizens felt it better to spend quickly and to live for pleasure, deeming both their bodies and their possessions as things of a day. Careful adherence to what was known as honor was popular with no one, inasmuch as it was doubtful whether anyone would be spared to attain it; instead it was generally felt that enjoying things in the here and now, and all that profited that, was both honorable and useful. Reverence of the gods or respect for man’s law there was neither to restrain anyone.

  After reading Thucydides’ macabre account of the social consequences of the plague, it is unclear, as the historian perhaps intended, whether the Athenians remained the Renaissance men just praised by Pericles in his famous funeral oration or were utter savages who fought with one another over funeral pyres to burn their dead. Clearly the few hundred men who fell during the first year of the war in patrolling the countryside and during sea duty off the Peloponnese earned praise and public funerals, while the next year thousands of men, women, and children died miserably in anonymous droves in the street, often rotting without burial or cremation.

  Thucydides had earlier described the miserable conditions inside
the city that were prompted by the monthlong evacuation of 431. Agrarian families had probably then reoccupied their farms for a year, only to trek back into the city during the next spring in about the same numbers. Most arrivals had no permanent shelter but camped out in open spaces and sanctuaries. Shacks dotted the base of the Acropolis. Some refugees lived in towers atop the city’s lengthy fortifications. Conditions were probably worse during these initial first two invasions, at least before the city made arrangements to construct more permanent shelters in the four-mile corridor between the city proper and the fortifications at the Piraeus. Athens, like Los Angeles, lies in a basin surrounded by three large mountain ranges. The sea lies almost five miles away, and there are only small rivers that flow near the metropolitan area—all of these conditions making it difficult to dump sewage in any nearby moving body of water that could wash effluent out to sea.

  Shanties offered no real relief from the summer heat and stood in stark contrast to the abandoned spacious country homes of the more affluent refugees. Later Plato would argue that Greeks should have two residences, urban and rural, to reinforce the social fabric of the polis. But he was reacting against the turmoil of wartime Attica, when estate owners were reduced to refugee status under Periclean strategy, and the urban poor scarcely knew what life in the long-suffering countryside was like. By the time the war broke out, over 20,000 Athenians had almost nothing to do with farming.5

  Those who once had the nicest estates in Attica within a few days occupied the worst, which explains the particularly hostile opposition to Pericles’ policies from refugee landowners. Aristophanes remarked often on the ridiculous scene in wartime Athens, a city brimming with exasperated rural folk at every juncture who resorted to squatting in birds’ nests and casks. Much of the turmoil resulted from this radical change in fortune: the wealthy were now on the bottom rail and veritable visitors in their own city—guests of the radical poor, who wanted the war, were losing little in it, and might see profit accrue from nonstop naval service.6

  The outbreak of the mystifying disease occurred sometime in late May 430. Athenians started to die mysteriously in droves during the forty days the Spartans ravaged, the longest of all the Peloponnesian invasions, which might have put even greater stress on the cramped refugees in the city. Thucydides’ description is somewhat vague about the chronology of the outbreak. He says only that the plague (called a nosos) descended upon the city while the Spartans were ravaging in Attica.

  The disease probably prompted them to cut short their devastation; they heard frightening rumors of the havoc inside the walls and from the countryside could see clouds of funeral smoke in the city. Still, the second invasion turned out to be the longest of all the Spartan inroads—forty days in all, in which they covered the most ground in Attica and sought to do thoroughly what they had not completed the year before. Most likely fear of approaching the rich Athenian plain near the disease-ridden city induced the Spartans to roam far to the south to devastate the seaside districts of southern Attica and the hinterland around the mines at Laurium.

  The Spartans had learned that the invasion of 431 had done nothing to weaken Athens or its empire, and had figured on a much longer campaign the next year. This sojourn of tens of thousands of rural folk inside the city also indirectly helped to spread the disease, which in turn had the paradoxical effect of cutting short what must have been planned as the most devastating and comprehensive ravaging campaign of the Archidamian War.7

  The fact that the disease broke out “not many days after” the Spartans neared the plain and was raging by the time they left suggests that less than a month after the disease first touched Athens, it had reached epidemic proportions. Indeed, it swept the city, and even inadvertently infected the Athenian fleet. Disease-carrying but symptom-silent fighters set sail from the Piraeus to raid the Peloponnese and to press home the siege at Potidaea in the north, in part to be away from the misery of the infected city. When they attacked the Peloponnese town of Epidaurus in reprisal for the Spartan-led invasion, local inhabitants were said to have been sickened from proximity to the soldiers.8

  Many contemporary Athenians believed that the plague was no accident. Surely, they thought, it was a direct result of deliberate Spartan efforts to infect them in a time of war. There was something to their paranoid logic: plagues of such virulence were almost unknown in classical Greece, which prompted Athenians to consider almost any explanation to account for such a terrible and rare occurrence. Some Athenians may have remembered folktales of their hero Solon, who a century earlier had easily stormed the nearby city of Cirrha after putting a powerful purgative into the town’s stream water, thereby sickening enough of the defenders to cause capitulation. The Athenians themselves may have polluted the city’s water supply when they departed ahead of Xerxes’ occupying troops in late summer 480. In a hot Mediterranean climate, where water was always scarce, enemy pollution of fountains, cisterns, and rivers was a nearly constant fear during times of war. Military handbooks would later recommend such contamination of water supplies as an effective way of stymieing hostile forces by bringing on either illness or thirst. In Sicily the Athenians themselves later sought to ruin the terra-cotta pipes that conveyed water to the besieged city of Syracuse.9

  So the outbreak of 430 seemed to coincide roughly with the arrival of enemy troops in Attica. Odd timing, was it not? The conspiracists had even more ammunition. The disease first attacked those who drew water from cisterns in the port at Piraeus that were rumored to be poisoned by the enemy. The outbreak never infected the cities of the Peloponnese, instead following both Athenian troops up north besieging Potidaea and sailors off the Peloponnese. The crowds did not bother to ponder the obvious criteria of overcrowding at Athens and its singular congestion; rather, in despair, they must have thought something along the lines of “We are sick, they are not; therefore, they must be responsible.”

  After news of the outbreak, some communities in the Peloponnese apparently began to build impressive temples to their gods precisely because they had been spared this awful nightmare. Wisely, the Peloponnesians deliberately stayed away the next year and instead spent the spring of 429 besieging Plataea, on the other side of Mount Kithairon, keeping a mountain range between them and the infectious disease.

  In prophecies, the epidemic was connected with the fulfillment of an old, hotly debated warning that “a Dorian war will come and with it a plague or a famine.” In his denial of these theories, Thucydides nevertheless has an understandable propensity to record the popular myth of Spartan culpability, the idea of water contamination, the resurrection of old prophecies, and the general de facto immunity of the Spartans from the disease, almost as if he is not quite sure himself whether such a natural event that was so obviously militarily efficacious could be entirely accidental.10

  The Limitations of Medicine

  What, then, exactly was the disease? Today the generic word “plague” conjures up bubonic plague, especially the terrifying epidemics of the Black Death in Medieval Europe and Renaissance Italy, and the images of fleas, rats, and horrific pustules. In fact, the use of the English term is inexact inasmuch as the Athenian epidemic was most likely not bubonic plague, despite disagreements about its etiology.

  Classical scholars and physicians who collate Thucydides’ account with other plague narratives and contemporary symptomatology, have spent over a century in bitter disputes about the nature of the epidemic. At various times they have postulated a mass outbreak of typhus, typhoid fever, measles, influenza, smallpox, scarlet fever, or—somewhat more fancifully—various hemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola, leptospirosis, tularemia, anthrax, dengue fever, and ergotism.11

  The arguments are complex. Often analysis hinges on the esoteric. Few can agree whether the plague-bearing species of rat (there seems to be no word in Greek for Rattus rattus) even existed in ancient Greece or whether the ancient word for “heart” (kariia) sometimes really meant the mouth of the stomach or, reaching even
farther, whether surviving stone busts of Thucydides himself reveal the telltale pockmarks of smallpox infection. Although Thucydides provides detailed descriptions of an array of terrible symptoms—fever, inflammation, eye problems, sore and bloody throat, sneezing, hoarseness, chest pain, cough, intestinal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, skin eruptions and ulcers, thirst and dehydration, general weakness and fatigue, gangrene in the extremities, permanent brain damage—it is not easy for modern medical sleuths to connect the precise meaning of his Greek vocabulary with either a formal ancient or a contemporary medical lexicon.

  Since ancient medicine was empirically based—it could offer diagnoses and prognoses based on past careful clinical observation of symptoms, rather than through scientific identification of microbes at the cellular level—there was no formal ancient catalog of diseases anything like our own clinical classifications of viruses and bacteria. Perhaps the most likely explanation of the plague, if it was not a form of malignant confluent smallpox, is that it was caused by an organism now extinct, or at least one that has evolved over two millennia in ways that make it no longer deadly.

  Any infectious disease that achieves about a 30 percent lethality rate among a pristine population probably provides immunity to survivors. If it depends on frequent person-to-person contact, it needs a fresh supply of thousands of urban hosts to spread and survive. Thus the plague may well have burned itself out in the singular conditions of wartime Athens. As Thucydides notes, it returned only sporadically after its initial deadly appearance, even when the conditions inside Athens once again became as bleak as those of 430, especially after the Spartan occupation of Decelea (413).