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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  In 411, for example, 200 were murdered on Samos, another 400 exiled, and the lands and houses of the rich confiscated, all to be followed months later by a second round of killing those suspected of fomenting oligarchic revolution. In 412, civil strife returned to Lesbos. A decade and a half after the horrific Athenian executions on the island, the Spartan and Athenian fleets once more vied to support their own local surrogates. And in 412 Chios also revolted and for the next two years was racked with nonstop civil unrest. The rebellious island was convulsed by executions of its democratic supporters of Athens, then constantly plundered by Athenian forces from their permanent fort at Delphinium, all while massive slave revolts went on in the countryside and the entire population was beset by famine.29

  Ethnic cleansing on a massive scale was commonplace to “purify” sanctuaries, eliminate suspicious populations, or steal land and redistribute it to friendly peoples. Thus, all the Aeginetans were forcibly removed by the Athenians from their island in the first year of the war. The Athenians also exiled the entire population of the island of Delos in 422. In 415 Melos was ravaged, starved, sacked, conquered, and its population rounded up, all the adult males being killed, women and children enslaved. Little is known of the ultimate fate of the Athenian colonists who were settled in their place, since at war’s end Lysander brought back some Melian natives, and these must in turn have completed the cycle of violence by either exiling or killing the Athenian interlopers who had farmed their island for a decade. Such nightmares were repeated at Mytilene, Naupaktos, and Scione.30

  Finally, there was simply war as the Greeks had always known it, the border disputes that went on throughout the great conflict, now and then heightened by the allegiance of one of the parties to the larger Spartan or Athenian cause. How many were killed, wounded, or enslaved in these mostly forgotten tangential wars on the frontiers does not interest Thucydides much. But now and again in his history he matter-of-factly hints that thousands here, too, were lost in often quite enormous expeditions.

  A good example was the massive muster of King Sitalces of Thrace, the erstwhile ally of Athens, who in winter 429 invaded the Chalcidice and Macedon. He may have raised the largest land army of the entire war—some 100,000 infantry accompanied by a huge cavalry force of 50,000 mustered from thousands of miles of Thracian territory—which for a month overran much of northern Greece and threatened states as far south as the pass at Thermopylae.

  By the same token, a coalition of Syracusans and Italians in 425 invaded nearby Messana and attacked Rhegium. Much of northern Sicily and southern Italy was subsequently engulfed in an ongoing border conflagration. In summer 419 the Argives mustered a formidable army and marched into Epidaurus, ravaging the countryside and causing enough havoc eventually to draw in the Spartans, prompting in part the battle of Mantinea the next year. Perhaps the largest invasion of the entire period was the Carthaginian attack on Sicily shortly after the Athenian defeat (410–404), a savage war that saw tens of thousands of dead, far more even than the losses incurred during the Athenians’ massive and failed efforts. In some sense, the Punic attack on Sicily was predicated on the idea that the island was still reeling from the failed Athenian invasion and thus ripe for attack.31

  The Indirect Approach

  Both Athens and Sparta had no thought-out, consistent policy of overthrowing neutral states, much less a general sense of how to thwart each other’s war-making potential by attacking to the rear. But a few remarkable men emerged in the first decade of the war to refine these unconventional methods of winning the war. Key to the new strategy was one salient fact: Athens and Sparta alike depended on both servile labor and manpower from dependent subjects.

  Athens had thousands of chattel slaves who served as arms carriers for hoplites, rowers in the imperial fleet, miners of silver, and farmhands in Attica, in addition to workers in allied states who provided the grain and timber so critical to the engine of the Athenian empire. Sparta was in an even more vulnerable position. It sat on a volcano of angry helots, perhaps 250,000 indentured servants in both Laconia and Messenia, by whose field work the Spartan state was fed, and its some 10,000 elite warriors freed from the drudgery of farm labor to drill year-round.

  Quickly two capable generals, the Athenian Demosthenes and Sparta’s Brasidas, grasped that in theory the enemy could be robbed of its wherewithal to make war should the thousands who worked for either empire be induced to revolt or be killed. The problems with such an audacious strategy, however, were multifold. It required expeditions deep into the heart of enemy-held territory—lengthy and often isolated deployment abroad, plus some sort of permanent base or fortification to serve as a clearinghouse for booty and a refuge for runaway slaves. Inciting the slaves also evoked internal opposition from traditional generals who had no confidence in such unconventional strategies and were not sure that servile revolts might not backfire into a Panhellenic notion of radical equality, given the presence of slaves in every military. Yet precisely out of that calculus arose the strategy of epiteichismos, or the fortification of forward bases, and the creation of light, mobile armies that could work well with cavalry troops and easily be transported by sea.

  For a man like Brasidas or Demosthenes, the world was not, as in the past, divided between slave and master but, rather, between those either pro-Athenian or pro-Spartan. A helot was a better friend to Athens than a free Spartan was; and the Athenian slaves that later fled to Decelea were seen as Spartan assets, not the free men inside the Long Walls some thirteen miles away. Cleon might have smelled of tanned leather, but he, not Nicias, better understood the weakness of the Spartan empire.

  It was a terrifying thought for Athenians to land in a far corner of the Peloponnese and in the heart of darkness, so to speak, two hundred miles from home—and attempt to overturn the very basis of the Spartan state. The Pylos campaign of 425 in some ways is analogous to the long-range patrols of Major General Orde Wingate, whose much-celebrated Chindits in 1943–44 conducted hair-raising raids deep behind Japanese lines in Burma to disrupt supplies and communications, but in the process suffered terrible losses without systematically thwarting the main enemy forces. The Athenian maverick general Demosthenes was an archetypical Wingate himself; in 425 he landed in the southwestern Peloponnese at the small harbor of Pylos. Almost immediately he constructed a small fortification to serve as a base to harass Spartans in Messenia and offer refuge for runaway helots.

  Prior to Pylos, Demosthenes had had a checkered record in such unconventional warfare—disaster in Aetolia followed by military success in Ambracia—despite mobilizing indigenous peoples to bring about an Athenian presence in strategically valuable locations. Such operations were fraught with peril. They relied on surprise and good communications in an age when intelligence was rudimentary and generals often had little reckoning of the exact time or distance involved in operations. Even after his stunning success at Pylos, Demosthenes would fail utterly to raise insurrection the next year in Boeotia in the Delium campaign—and then engineer an even more foolhardy night attack on Sicily, before being executed by the Syracusans after the general surrender of the defeated Athenians. But whether due to luck or timely support from Cleon, in 425 his audacious plan of hitting the Spartans in the rear bore stunning results that reversed the course of the war in just a few weeks.

  In spring 425 an Athenian fleet of some 40 ships under the command of Eurymedon and Sophocles set out toward western Greece and beyond with two main goals. They sought to restore Athenian prestige in Sicily (eroding after setbacks following its first invasion of 427) and to cut off easy commerce around the Peloponnese, and thus provide support for the democratic factions on Corcyra. Demosthenes accompanied the fleet. He had only a vague mandate from the assembly “to employ the ships, if he wished, around the Peloponnese.” That afterthought almost led to the outright defeat of Sparta, as a series of unlikely events unfolded to bring an unforeseen bonanza to the Athenians.32

  A sudden storm prevented the
generals’ progress toward Corcyra. Demosthenes was able to persuade the fleet first to dock at Pylos, a small promontory on the southwest Peloponnese. There he apparently had plans to fortify a base and harass Spartan-held Messenia. As the high command waited out the storm, Demosthenes persuaded the idle crews to build a wall around the base, despite the absence of tools and iron. After the weather improved and the fleet departed, Demosthenes was at least left with an ad hoc defensible position and a small fleet of five ships. For one of the few times in Greek history, a permanent Athenian force was now acting independently on Spartan-held territory nearly two hundred miles from home. Demosthenes was apparently counting on the notorious inability of Spartans to take fortified positions, the spontaneous support from helots in the region, and the resolve of the Athenian navy to keep out Spartan ships operating in their own homeland.

  “A Most Amazing Thing”

  Even more miraculous events followed from such daring. The terrified Spartans cut short their invasion of Attica. They proved more afraid of a few hundred Athenians in the Peloponnese than tens of thousands of them in Attica. But instead of immediately storming Pylos, the Spartans landed 420 hoplites on the nearby island of Sphacteria. They hoped that by garrisoning the island and deploying a fleet, they could cut off the tiny base of some 600 enemy sailors at Pylos from land and sea support, and starve its hoplites and light-armed troops into submission.

  The Spartans mounted one assault against Pylos, led by none other than the brilliant Brasidas. But they quickly retreated and then found themselves confronting the Athenian fleet that promptly returned from Corcyra with 50 allied ships. The attackers were now the attacked, with little chance for success even in home waters. After defeating the Spartan fleet and driving it off, the Athenians blockaded Sphacteria, prompting hysteria back at Sparta. The elites in the Spartan assembly were now terrified that some of their leading warriors were trapped on a desolate island off the coast of Messenia, surrounded by the Athenian fleet, with a magnet garrison for runaway helots nearby.

  Sphacteria was hardly a Stalingrad. The 420 hoplites on the island represented only about 5 percent of the Spartan state’s hoplite strength. Besides the fact that many of those on Sphacteria might have been well connected, much of the Spartan mirage rested on the appearance of invulnerability. Thus even a small loss near home—or, worse, the annihilation of a small force in the field —could send ripples of instability throughout Messenia, where a few thousand patrolled tens of thousands.

  After a brief truce, both sides hunkered down. They were still unsure whether in this new war of attrition it would be more difficult for the Athenians to maintain a large blockading fleet and expeditionary force now totaling some 14,000 men in Spartan territory or for the Spartans adequately to supply their hoplites when cut off from their mainland. But soon it was Sparta who sued for a general cessation of hostilities. Athens refused—in a tragic preview of what would happen numerous times later in the war after climactic Spartan reverses. Both sides then pressed on with the struggle that took on cosmic importance in a manner that was not true of even the thousands who had battled earlier at Potidaea, Plataea, and Mytilene.

  After recriminations at Athens over the failure to accept the armistice and the ensuing stalemate so far from home, the assembly voted Cleon full powers to join Demosthenes, and thus along with the admirals in the region to take Sphacteria. As Thucydides put it, “The sensible men were delighted: for they figured that they were bound to obtain one of two good results—either they would be rid of Cleon, which they preferred, or if they were disappointed in this matter, he would beat the Spartans for them.”33

  Cleon met up with Demosthenes. In the meantime, the latter had made a probing raid on Sphacteria, accidentally set the island’s dense brush afire, and thus inadvertently removed much of the cover that had helped hide the fact of the shockingly small Spartan garrison. Now, upon arrival of Cleon’s auxiliaries, the two generals attacked the island. They used their missile troops to good effect in the newly cleared landscape, killed 128 Spartans, and took 292 prisoner, among them 120 of the Spartiate elite. Few Athenians perished. As Thucydides recorded, “The battle was not a hand-to-hand affair.” Cleon had boasted that he would solve the problem in twenty days. And that is precisely what happened; “a most amazing thing,” Thucydides concluded, more so than any event of the entire war.

  Nothing in the conflict—except for the stunning Athenian naval victory at Arginusae (406) two decades later—was so inexplicable as a disreputable Athenian politician boasting about defeating the Spartans in the Peloponnese and then sailing down to accomplish just that in a matter of days. Not much later, the aristocratic Thucydides himself would fail utterly to save Amphipolis, despite knowing far more about the Thraceward region than Cleon did about the southwest Peloponnese.

  Suddenly the psychology of the entire war was changed. Spartan hoplites, the mythical heroes who had perished to the man at Thermopylae, did not lose infantry battles. And on the rare occasion they did, at least they never surrendered, especially to Athenians. “Of everything that happened in the war, this came as the greatest surprise to the Greeks. For none believed that the Spartans would ever hand over their arms, either out of hunger or any other necessity, but rather would keep their weapons and fight as long as they were able until they died.”34

  The mystique of Spartan invincibility was now shattered. Worse still, the entire Spartan state was held hostage in fear that their 120 elite Spartiates, in this new style of war, might be executed at Athens should they not meet the terms of a new armistice. The next year Athens would lose 1,000 dead at the battle of Delium and have another 200 taken hostage by the Thebans. Yet the loss of so many men and the knowledge of Athenian captives in Boeotia had little effect on the democracy, which could neither be intimidated nor blackmailed. Athens had far more manpower resources than did Sparta and had never invested in the mythology of hoplite infallibility.

  The Spartans now ceased their invasions of Attica out of fear of execution of the prisoners. They did not return until their hostages were recovered and the Athenians were reeling from the disaster in Sicily—for over a decade, between 425 and 413. The tiny fort at Pylos was to remain a thorn in the Spartans’ side for some seventeen years, as it was not handed over during the so-called Peace of Nicias, and its Messenian garrison fell only in 409, after a period of Athenian retrenchment following the losses in Sicily and the Aegean.

  The Other

  The role of slaves in the war has until recently often gone unappreciated—odd, considering that both Herodotus and Thucydides pointed out that the richest city-states in the Greek world, such as Athens, Syracuse, Chios, and Naxos, possessed thousands of chattels.35 But in the Peloponnesian War they began to play at least several critical roles in the fighting, especially during the latter years of the conflict as the manpower reserves of both sides were increasingly depleted.

  Given that there may well have been over 100,000 hoplites who took part in the war (the aggregate heavy-infantry strength of Argos, Athens, Corinth, Sparta, Syracuse, Thebes, and the major cities in Asia Minor), at least half that number of slave baggage carriers may have at one time or another gone out on infantry campaigns. Furthermore, by the end of the conflict nearly one in five rowers in the Athenian navy may well have been a slave—perhaps as many as 10,000 or so oarsmen—with even greater numbers serving in the allied and Peloponnesian navies. At the climactic last sea battle of the war at Aegospotami, Athens had over 180 ships, and this was only a decade after losing more than 40,000 imperial sailors and marines on Sicily. Only the drafting of slaves could have ensured rowers for such an enormous deployment in the city’s eleventh hour. Naval outlays had nearly ruined Athens; but the expense was not so much in building triremes as in manning them. When it cost as much in one month to row as to build a warship, the recruitment of slaves became the only way of cutting costs.

  Thousands of slaves changed sides during the war, markedly affecting the pulse of the war
, both by serving in the military forces of their masters’ adversaries and robbing their former owners of critical manpower. Thucydides, for example, thought that over 20,000 slaves fled from the Athenian countryside to the Peloponnesian base at Decelea, and implies that such a loss had a terrible effect on the economy and security of Attica in the last decade of the war. How many helots made their way over to Pylos during the seventeen-year Athenian occupation is not known, but the number of runaways must have been in the hundreds, if not thousands. One of the reasons for the rapid deterioration of the fleet and army on Sicily during the last wretched months was the flight of slaves, who were critical for carrying the arms and baggage of the infantry and sailors.36

  Pylos was a metaphor of just how radically the war had evolved since the Spartans had crossed into Attica six years earlier. The entire infantry campaign involved only 420 Spartan and 800 Athenian hoplites. In contrast, some 8,000 rowers, 800 archers, and 2,000 light-armed Athenian troops had overwhelmed the Spartan elite on Sphacteria—the triumph of soldiers from the lower classes without body armor who were not supposed to beat hoplites, much less Spartan hoplites, even at numerical advantages of 20 to 1. Thucydides remarked that their agility and ability to bombard the clumsy hoplite with missiles made them “most difficult to fight.”

  Athenian generalship was equally unconventional. Cleon was a radical demagogue, hated by Thucydides (who may well have been exiled through Cleon’s machinations) and slurred by Aristophanes as a rabble-rousing tanner. Yet he had accomplished what neither the majestic Pericles nor the aristocratic Nicias could even have envisioned. Everything about the successful campaign was untraditional. Many of Demosthenes’ troops were Messenian exiles, that is, former helots who had fled their Spartan overlords. Moreover, the strategy had nothing to do with forcing the Spartan fleet to meet the more formidable Athenian armada (though they did and lost), much less with staging a pitched battle against Spartan infantry.