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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Athenian soldiers went into battle for the next twenty-three years, from 426 through 404, with the knowledge that their parents, themselves, their children, or their friends had suffered from the disease, which might return to kill thousands without warning at any given time. The dread of epidemic must have hung over the combatants for much of the war. When the Spartans and Argives considered a peace treaty in 420, they wrote a codicil stating that either side might be exempt from some of the agreed requirements if they were at the time suffering from a plague.37

  The ripples of the plague also lapped over into both contemporary and later classical literature. The playwright Sophocles, who purportedly became involved in the cult of the healing god Asclepius when it arrived in Athens in 420, had presented his magisterial Oedipus Rex perhaps just five years after the outbreak to an audience that had recently lost tens of thousands. The play begins with the city of Thebes beleaguered by a sudden epidemic that accompanies crop disease, stock losses, and general infertility. All such calamities the Athenians in the audience would have recognized as recent burdens brought on by either the plague or the invasions of Spartan ravagers—and feared that they could return at any minute. Whereas Thucydides focuses on scientific descriptions of the epidemic and either ignores or ridicules folk stories, the religious background to the plague is central to the plot of Sophocles’ drama: the Thebans must suffer collective punishment for the unknown incest and unacknowledged parricide within its royal family.

  In the play, traditional religion—the wisdom of Apollo and the seer craft of Teiresias—provides the proper way to discover both the etiology of and the cure for the disease. Athens, in Sophocles’ mind at least, may have lost over a fourth of its population not from overcrowding or poor hygienic practices but because of an absence of traditional piety. He seems to suggest that it is hubristic to assume that logic alone—perhaps the contemporary city’s sophistic elite or Pericles himself were to be equated to his all-too-proud Oedipus—can simply cut through the disease and thus find rational causes and answers for what ultimately must remain divinely inspired problems. Oedipus is rational, imperious, and—like Pericles—in way over his head against a foe that is beyond the calculation of hoplites and triremes.

  Such later writers as Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, and Josephus also wove vivid descriptions of plagues and natural disasters into their work, often with striking echoes of the Athenian epidemic: an African origin, rural flight into cities, mysterious causation, no cure, and social chaos as the dividends of mass dying. In a more historical context, the Byzantine chronicler Procopius used Thucydides to provide an equally striking description of the social calamity that followed an epidemic (most likely the bubonic plague) that struck Constantinople in spring 542 and for a time killed perhaps as many as 10,000 people a day. The Athenian disaster proved to be the locus classicus to later Western historiography that chronicled such disastrous outbreaks, as if any subsequent description must entail a Thucydidean account of the social chaos that inevitably followed such mass death.38

  Still, for the first years of the war, the Spartan invasions neither achieved economic ruin nor prompted the hoped for decisive battle, even as thousands of Athenians perished from disease. Because neither the traditional arenas of agricultural devastation and hoplite battle nor the plague led to decisive victory, each side prepared to redefine its strategy. Athenians would no longer stay within their walls and die. Sparta could not merely send out its massive armies in a vain search for enemy hoplites. Instead, new men in fresh theaters turned up to conduct a dirty war never quite seen before in Greece.

  This novel way of waging the Peloponnesian War would suit audacious leaders like Alcibiades quite well.

  CHAPTER 4

  TERROR

  WAR IN THE SHADOWS (431–421)

  After a one-year hiatus arising from fear of the plague, the Spartan alliance resumed invading Attica in 427, even as its Boeotian partners pressed on with the siege of Plataea begun during the epidemic at Attica. Yet in these first years of the conflict, not all Athenians were dying from the pestilence or patrolling the Attic countryside in futile efforts to repel Peloponnesian ravagers. Thousands in the imperial fleet, infected or not, were determined to make Sparta and its friends pay for their attacks and to experience something of the humiliation that they had inflicted on others both out in Attica and inside Athens.

  In Plutarch’s words, as a result of these raids against Spartan territory there was for the Athenians some “consolation to be had from what their enemies were suffering.” If prewar observers had worried that the internecine conflict between Athens and Sparta might be far different—far more lengthy—than past Greek wars, they were soon to be proven prescient.1

  The first years of hostilities (431–423) more or less bore this gloomy antebellum prognosis out: the Athenians avoided battling Spartan infantrymen, while Peloponnesian ships were usually not willing to meet the Athenian navy in any major engagement. The stage was set for “asymmetrical,” “fourth-dimensional,” or “postmodern” war—conflict in which an array of political, social, and cultural factors, rather than conventional military doctrine or traditional combatants, determines how one side chooses to harm its adversary. Some pretty uncouth killers would now step out of the shadows of the Greek world to do what traditional generals and admirals could not. Both sides would employ fear in unconventional ways, reminding us that terror is a method, not an enemy, a manifestation of how a particular belligerent chooses to wage war rather than some sort of independent entity that exists apart from men, money, and places.

  Peter Krentz has made the point that hoplite battle was not the primary means of fighting by counting up all the examples of deception and surprise attacks, often by night and fought by nonhoplites.* His thirty-seven instances in the Peloponnesian War dwarf the two large, set-piece hoplite encounters at Delium and Mantinea, and the smaller clashes of phalanxes at Solygia and Syracuse. Similarly, W. K. Pritchett collated forty-three examples of night attacks during the Peloponnesian War, engagements that were antithetical to the old idea of drawing up armies in broad daylight to settle the issue through infantry clashes.2

  Such nontraditional hostilities broke out immediately in spring 431. Predictably, they intensified once the stalemated conventional war turned to distant theaters beyond the annual invasions of the Attic countryside, involving a host of surrogate forces that were not evenly matched. The tragedy here was that rarely was the fighting symmetrical or the outcome in these localized engagements in doubt. It was lamentable because only evenly matched and conventional combatants were likely to adhere to the old Hellenic idea of rules and protocols that tended to preclude gratuitous killing, given the uncertainty on both sides of victory and thus the shared need to worry about their own treatment after defeat. But in the backwaters and hinterlands of Greece, away from public duels in the plains, the Athenians and Spartans, and an array of their odious henchmen, usually did not meet the main forces of the enemy but instead found in particular locales and for brief moments unquestioned superiority in numbers. In those cases, the lives of the weak and innocent depended entirely on the particular attitude of a particular commander on a particular day, the likelihood of mercy diminishing as the war escalated ever more.

  The New Killers

  FOR THIS TYPE of war there was no need for either the cumbersome personal armor of the hoplite infantryman—breastplate, greaves, shield, helmet, spear, and sword—or the costly state investment in triremes (170 to 200 seamen in an expensive galley). True, hoplites were used on ships, for raiding, and at sieges, but they increasingly often lightened their panoplies and questioned their traditional training as misguided for such a new theater of warfare. Instead, novel types of combatants were emerging—the light-armed warriors, known variously to Greeks as the “light-guys” (psiloi), the “peltasts” (because they carried the small crescent-shaped shield known as the peltê), or simply the “naked” (gymnoi) and “unarmored” (aoploi or anoploi). Traditi
onally, light-armed corps contingents were only loosely organized and used primarily in pursuit and ravaging. These were less frequent arenas where hoplite formations were either absent or already in shreds, and thus lighter, more nimble warriors could out-maneuver armored combatants, who were vulnerable outside of rank.

  Before 431, Athens, for example, whether due to its enormous fleet, which required the full service of the poorer and landless population, or because it trusted in naval engagements abroad and hoplite and cavalry defense at home, never organized an official body of light-armed troops. Instead, its older and younger citizens might tag along on expeditions to nearby Megara or Boeotia in hopes of plundering or ravaging under the aegis of heavy infantry. The Peloponnesian War would change all that. By the last decade of the war, even Athens was regularly hiring and deploying its own light-armed forces, with enormous implications for the future of Greek warfare.3

  Originally, light-armed troops were identified as the “other” in the sense of both geography and expertise and thus were often concretely and metaphysically outside the Greek city-state. In Greece proper they were the poorer without land who could not afford body armor, much less a horse, and usually brandished a spear or javelin and only a cheap wooden or leather shield. Outside of the mainland, on the periphery of the Greek world, the light-armed were more specialized and often tribal warriors adept at fighting in rough terrain with little or no experience in, or need of, facing down phalanxes.

  Peltasts were originally a Thracian specialty, quick tribal fighters without much body armor other than their crescent-shaped shields, often leather caps, and long thrusting spears or throwing javelins. Early in the war both Athens and Sparta hired such Thracian mercenaries, and they played key roles in the Athenian victory over the Spartans at the island of Sphacteria (425) and Brasidas’ success against Athenian subject states in the Chalcidice (424). Yet by the end of the war Greek troops that had copied the Thracian equipment and tactics were deployed far more frequently than hoplites.4

  Slingers were a specialty from the island of Rhodes, while the best archers were imported from Scythia and Crete. In the same manner that superior cavalry roamed the plains of Thessaly and Macedonia, so too areas of the Greek-speaking world that had never fully embraced the agrarian protocols of the polis saw no reason to deploy heavy infantry to dispute their extensive plains. Rather, they found it cheaper and more effective to fight in the hills or to hit, run, and raid, a fact well illustrated by the multifaceted force that Thucydides says the Athenians sent to Sicily in its first wave. Besides hoplites and sailors, there were 700 poor Athenians equipped as marines, 480 archers (including 80 Cretan experts), 700 slingers, and another 120 light-armed Megarians—in other words, 2,000 light-armed troops, or about 40 percent of the 5,100-man hoplite force itself. And of the total manpower sent on the 134 ships of the first armada to Sicily, hoplites made up less than 20 percent of the roughly 26,800 sailors and combatants. Even earlier, the Athenians had deployed slingers in Acarnania in hopes of matching the irregular troops of their unconventional enemies there. Similarly, the Boeotians called them in before finishing off the trapped Athenian garrison at Delium in 424. Light-armed warriors—not hoplites in phalanxes—turned up everywhere in the Peloponnesian War.5

  What was the attraction of such missile fighters? In a word, they could kill from afar. Through long training and expertise, they achieved lethality without the expense of either heavy armor or ships. When slingers, for example, had access to aerodynamic small lead projectiles of between twenty and thirty grams, rather than rougher clay pellets or stones, they could easily outdistance archers and hit targets at some 350 yards. Heavily armored men in rank with shields raised would be largely invulnerable to a rain of pellets, but how often did that occur in the Peloponnesian War, when most infantry fighting was outside the phalanx?

  As the war progressed, the use of these nonconventional troops only increased. Even the reactionary Spartans drafted a corps of both bowmen and cavalry by 424. Their sudden turn to these forces only came after the disaster on Sphacteria, and the Athenian use of Pylos and Cythera as forward bases in Peloponnesian territory. After the failures in Attica, and the inability to match Athens at sea, the Spartan leadership at last grasped that their own crack hoplites were not the answer. This recognition sent shock waves throughout Sparta, a state dependent on a homogenous hoplite elite now revealed to be unable to win the war it had started.6

  Radical social and cultural effects followed widespread use of the light-armed killers in their new unconventional war. Because Greek military service had for so long been predicated on class—the nature and size of land owned rather than military efficacy per se determining how citizens fought—the turn to the poor and the skirmisher called into question all the existing protocols of centuries past. This military revolution risked overturning the very social accords of the Greek city-state, and is best appreciated in retrospect from the fourth century when nostalgic elite Greek thinkers deplored the legacy of the Peloponnesian War, especially the importation of foreign killers who were as deadly, but not nearly as respected or honored, as hoplites.7

  It is a truism of most Western militaries that their peacetime bureaucracies are centered around heavy conventional infantry forces that are designed to fight their counterparts of a similar nation-state. In contrast, reliance on irregulars and special forces not only calls such assumptions into question but temporarily elevates a type of warrior who is himself uncomfortable with any protocols and thus the logical target of social and class disdain.

  The dichotomy is as old as Homer himself, whose Iliad of the late eighth century B.C. relegates the archer and the irregular to a decidedly inferior social caste. Achilles or Ajax, spearing in the melee, seems the more resolute, honest fighter than the cowardly (although lethal) archer Paris. Contemporary hostility to the terrorist, guerrilla, and insurgent—who, armed with rocket-propelled grenades, land mines, and suicide bombs, can raise havoc with the billion-dollar armored divisions of the nation—is not unlike ancient lamentations over the newfound power of the bowmen, catapult, or light-armed skirmisher who lacked the respectability of the hoplite infantryman. Unlike hoplites, ancient skirmishers, again like modern insurgents, were more likely to target civilians, whether on Corcyra or in the small Boeotian hamlet of Mycalessus. There is no record in earlier Greek history of a hoplite phalanx murdering civilians, and little evidence that hoplites killed many combatants who ran away from battle.

  Tit for Tat

  Periclean strategy would prove enormously expensive and far-reaching—and, ironically, far more intricate than the much simpler “offensive” plan of meeting the Spartans in pitched battle. Almost immediately on news of the first Spartan invasion of Attica, the Athenians sailed southward to plunder the coast of the Peloponnese. Perhaps they remembered that a quarter century earlier, during the First Peloponnesian War, their legendary general Tolmides had been so brash as to burn the Spartan dockyards at Gythium and ravage the Peloponnesian coastal plains. Now they at least sensed that the muster of the Spartan allied army and its subsequent march into Attica made it likely that back home there was little territorial defense of the seaboard of the Peloponnese. The modus operandi of the allied Athenian armada of some 100 ships was simple, requiring only ships, bases to supply food and water for the fleet, and circumspect commanders who would select the most vulnerable hamlets and villages and not tarry too long, blood drunk on easy killing and plunder.8

  What was the ultimate Athenian purpose behind such operations, strategies that had, in fact, been tried numerous times earlier during previous conflicts with the Peloponnesians in past decades? It was obvious: disrupt commerce on land and sea, destroy war matériel, demoralize the enemy home front, and demonstrate that the Spartans either would not or could not protect their friends. All the while they were to assure a long-suffering Athenian public back home that despite the avoidance of pitched battle their military was not as inactive or cowardly as it seemed.

>   Over the course of the long war there were somewhere around fifty-five clear-cut naval engagements, land battles, and sieges—instances of conventional fighting, in other words, with an identifiable beginning and an end aimed at tactical objectives. In contrast, the sheer instances of towns, states, and regions attacked by the Athenians in the first few years of the conflict were in the many hundreds, and represented almost constant engagement, as their fleet sailed around the Peloponnese, throughout the Corinthian Gulf, along both the northwestern and the northeastern coasts of Greece, and freely in the southern Aegean. This was raiding and killing, not formal war as previously defined by the Greeks.

  There is no accurate record of how many were killed or lost in such operations. A partial chronological tally of the targets from 431 to 421 burdens the reader: Sollium, Astacus, Thronion, Acte, Methone, several towns in Elis, Aegina, Epidaurus, Troezen, Halieis, Hermione, Prasiae, Aetolia, Amphilochia, Acarnania, Oeniadae, Leucas, Corcyra, Anactorium, Melos, Cythera, and Crommyon. Thucydides points out that the second seaborne punitive expedition of 430, led by Pericles himself, was in some respects as large as the first armada that set sail for Sicily.