Instead, the vision of Demosthenes was predicated on the idea of rebellious serfs: how best to encourage helot desertion and thereby rob the Spartan state of its critical field hands. True, the idea that all 250,000 helots might flee to such a small sanctuary such as Pylos or the Malea peninsula was a fantasy; but Demosthenes apparently thought the mere chance of insurrection would be enough to prompt some wild Spartan response. Pylos helped to expose the absurdity of the Spartan state: it was paranoid about the loss of any of its scarce Spartiates and yet accepted that these very same troops were of little value in keeping sailors, light-armed troops, archers, and helots from doing what they wished in their own backyard.
Right after Pylos and Sphacteria, the Athenians occupied Methana, on the coast of the Argolid, hoping that such a fortified base in the Peloponnese would help raise additional insurrection among allies throughout the Argive peninsula. The next season, Athenian maritime troops grabbed Cythera, in the sea off Laconia. This was a key base for merchant ships heading to northern Africa, and an ideal fort from which to mount continual seaborne raids on the southern Peloponnese. With Athenians ensconced in the Peloponnese by land at Pylos and at sea on Cythera, Thucydides concluded that a stunning change suddenly came over the Spartans, one achieved at very little cost in lives to the Athenians. They had more or less ignored the thousands of crack hoplites stationed at Sparta and instead sought to tear the very political and economic fabric of the Spartan state:
At the same time the reversals of fortune that had come in such number and in such a short time caused an enormous shock, and the Spartans became afraid lest once more another setback befall them of the type that had transpired on the island. Thus, for this reason they were far less confident in battle, and figured that whatever move they would make would end in failure, inasmuch as they lost all their confidence after having no experience in the past with real adversity.37
The Athenians had not beaten Sparta—to do that would require an invasion of the Laconian heartland—but they seemed to have achieved the stalemate that Pericles once envisioned. The Pylos syndrome proved contagious. Within months of its success the tactic of forward basing was breaking out almost everywhere. By 424 almost the entire Peloponnese seemed to be ringed by permanent Athenian forts—at Aegina, Cephallenia, Cythera, Methana, Nisaea, Naupaktos, Pylos, and Zakynthos—designed to cut off trade to Sparta from Sicily, Italy, Egypt, and Libya, to encourage helot rebellion, and to provoke dissension among the Peloponnesian alliance.
Still, the problem in this conceptually brilliant plan of encirclement that arose after Pylos was threefold. The maintenance of these bases with enough permanent troops to cause harm to the economy of the Spartan state was beyond the resources of Athens. The strategy presumed that the Spartans themselves would not copycat such success and send long-range patrols deep into Athenian territory. And there was still no plan to deal with the 10,000 Spartan hoplites who, in theory, could march anywhere they pleased to put down rebellious states.
After Pylos
If Cleon and Demosthenes had turned out to be not quite the regular sort of Athenian generals, then neither was Brasidas. He had started out as a traditional Spartan ephor, or government overseer, and ended up as something altogether different. But even in the first few years of the war Brasidas had proved no mere functionary. In 430, for example, he had rushed to save the Messenian town of Methone from Athenian seaborne raiders. For much of the early 420s he patrolled the Corinthian Gulf and tried to intervene on behalf of the oligarchs in the bloody killing on Corcyra. Brasidas led a spirited attack against the Athenian fort at Pylos in 425, and was almost killed for his efforts. The next year this Spartan fireman rushed to Megara to head off a democratic revolution.
Pylos obviously made a terrible impression on him. Consequently, in the year after the capture of the Spartans at Sphacteria, Brasidas sought to turn the tables on the Athenians, striking deep at their rear, both to disrupt their commercial trade in the Thraceward region of northern Greece and to put such fear in the heart of the Athenian empire that it would think twice about persisting in attacks deep into the Peloponnese. As Thucydides drily put it, “The Lacedaemonians thought that the best way to hurt the Athenians in return would be to send out an army against their allies.”38
Unlike traditional Spartan generals, Brasidas enrolled a new army of Peloponnesian allies, mercenary soldiers, and, most interestingly, 700 helots—the “Brasideans,” a force not unlike many of the enslaved peoples of the Third Reich, who on occasion were conscripted into the Wehrmacht as if it were the better of two bad alternatives. Spartan officials were only too glad to see potentially rebellious helots (and perhaps Brasidas too) sent far from their homes as Spartan shock troops. And thus Brasidas headed hundreds of miles northward to free some of the most important states of the Athenian empire.
Once there, in less than two years he “liberated” the key Athenian subject city of Amphipolis—Thucydides himself was exiled by a furious assembly at home for his failure to keep Brasidas from the town—and began raising general insurrection in neighboring communities. These were no marginal cities. Instead, Brasidas’ targets were renowned for their rich farmlands, supplies of timber critical for Athenian naval construction, and numerous gold and silver mines—an area where the aristocratic Thucydides had substantial holdings and in vain, with an Athenian fleet, was trying to thwart the Spartan intrusion.
The largest city, Amphipolis, situated on the Strymon River, might offer a good base to raid routes to the Hellespont by land and sea. With a quasi-private army, Brasidas more or less ignored the brief armistice of 423 and kept at his grand plan of raising havoc throughout the entire northern theater of the Athenian empire, before dying—along with his Athenian adversary Cleon—in a desperate clash during the defense of Amphipolis. At the battle some 600 Athenians perished to the Spartans’ 7 fatalities; but the death of Brasidas meant that Sparta lost its only gifted leader of the Archidamian War and thus the confidence to continue the conflict.
Brasidas’ battles were like none Spartans had ever waged—offering the carrot of autonomy and liberation to key subject cities of the Athenian empire along with the stick of brilliantly unconventional war that ignored the old Hellenic distinction between civilian and combatant. At the grape-growing port city of Acanthus he threatened to destroy the town’s vintage, ripe for harvest outside the walls—the sole cash crop of the entire coastal community. Next he set up camp outside nearby Amphipolis and began to plunder the rich farms of the surrounding countryside, while his agents inside the city laid the groundwork for the citizenry to go over to the Spartan cause. Arriving at Torone, he sent assassins into the city by night to open the gates and allow his own light troops to storm the city. After taking Scione, he refused to give it up, even though the newly concluded armistice agreement of 423 had made it clear that the city was to be returned to the Athenians.39
When Brasidas was finally killed in the defense of Amphipolis, the locals gave him a hero’s funeral, erected a monument to him as the “liberator of Hellas,” and instituted yearly games and sacrifices in his honor. Brasidas’ preference for irregulars and soldiers of questionable background, coupled with his romantic lectures about the need for freedom from Athenian imperialism, made him a near saint among Third World Greeks—a most un-Spartan Spartan.
Indeed, his dash and magnetism must have been formidable if he could make thousands forget that he was an agent for the most repressive state in the Greek world, which had itself enslaved 250,000 Messenians. In that eerie sense, the 700 Brasideans did more harm to the cause of promoting helot unrest than all the good done by the liberators at Pylos. What is striking about the near-simultaneous careers of Demosthenes and Brasidas is that while the Athenians in the south tried to promote instability by offering freedom to Sparta’s underclass, in the north the Spartan used such serfs to advance liberty and autonomy among the subject states of Athens—suggesting that realpolitik rather than consistent idealism was the engine t
hat drove both men and the policies they advanced.
Of all the characters in Thucydides’ history Brasidas is the most intriguing, an ancient romantic version of Fidel Castro or Che Guevara who combined ostensible idealism and brutal guerrilla warfare in such a dazzling fashion that most formerly enslaved soldiers forgot the nature of the harsh master they worked for. In the last analysis, Brasidas’ efforts counterbalanced Pylos and achieved a rough stalemate, as he proved that the Athenians had just as much to lose to their own rear as did the Spartans. His ragtag mercenaries and few hundred freed helots did more damage to Athens than had King Archidamus’ enormous grand army of 60,000, which eight years earlier had trudged into Attica, convinced by its sheer size that it might bring the empire to its knees.
In peace treaties that followed throughout the war, the terms sometimes reflected the new realities. No longer was an armistice a matter of seamen and hoplites ceasing hostilities. There was rarely a call to forgo sieges or a delineation of territory to be returned and alliances to be established. Rather, all sorts of codicils called for specific conduct regarding plagues, slave revolts, hostage taking, plundering, and forward field fortifications, as both sides took formal account of the new, multifaceted warfare.40
Where was Alcibiades amid the raiding and terror of the Peloponnesian War? In fact, no mode of war better fit his skills as both an intriguer and a practitioner of diplomatic subversion. Wherever the arts of betrayal, plotting, and execution were needed, Alcibiades could be found. Apart from his presence at the major hoplite battles, naval engagements, and sieges of the war, a simple recitation of his career following the agricultural conflict in Attica and the plague at Athens reveals that throughout his late twenties and early thirties Alcibiades was knee-deep in the new terror. Indeed, he was now in his proper element.
Aside from the fact that he intrigued to establish democratic governments at Argos and Patras, bolted from Sicily, persuaded the Spartans to attack his kinsmen in both Sicily and Attica, triangulated with the Persians, and then rejoined the Athenians after toying with revolutionaries at Samos, Alcibiades was more directly involved with a number of paramilitary operations. He may well have been one of the architects of sending the Athenian fleet to besiege Melos, and then a strong advocate in the assembly of the subsequent execution and enslavement of all the island’s inhabitants.
In the same year, 416, Alcibiades arrived at Argos and kidnapped 300 rightists as insurance against an oligarchic coup that might bring in the Spartans. They were all later brought to Athens and executed. He was also probably involved in the assassination of the popular Athenian leader Androcles and some other radical democrats, an act instrumental in facilitating his own return to the Athenian side in 411. A little later Alcibiades was equally responsible for the murder of the rightist Phrynichus. Again, the employment of terror, rather than any sign of ideological consistency, was his trademark.
After his second exile from Athens, at the end of the war he used his skills gained from raiding the coast of Asia Minor to craft a life as a privateer in Thrace with his own hired army. Alcibiades, like few others in the Peloponnesian War, grasped that the conflict was no conventional fight but, rather, a new sort of civil war in which there was no divide between war and politics, external policy and internal intrigue, killing on the battlefield and murder off it.41
It is hard to calibrate exactly what effect the unconventional fighting had on the ultimate outcome of the war. Certainly the Pylos campaign and the subsequent Spartan operations in Amphipolis resulted in the eventual temporary peace of 421, in a manner none of the traditional fighting at sea or on land had accomplished for either side. The fort at Decelea irrevocably harmed Athens. The city itself soon suffered irreparable psychological damage as well from a rightist revolution in 411. At the end of the war the city was taken over by oligarchs who concluded the peace with Lysander. Ultimately, however, terror, revolution, and murder were no substitute for the climactic battles of thousands that were to decide entire theaters. Had the Spartans lost the battle of Mantinea, had the Thebans been defeated at Delium, or had the Athenians won Aegospotami—a mere three critical days among some twenty-seven years of conflict—the outcome of the war would have been forever changed, in ways impossible to envision being accomplished by all the daring and machinations of a Brasidas, Demosthenes, Cleon, or Alcibiades. Thus, Athens, of all city-states, finally resolved to organize allied armies to end its wars with Boeotia and Sparta through single days of battle—efforts that were as heroic as they were doomed.
* “Hoplite battle” is meant to denote heavily armed spearmen fighting in the close-ordered formation of the phalanx against a similar formation, most often at daytime and by some sort of arrangement.
CHAPTER 5
ARMOR
HOPLITE PITCHED BATTLES (424–418)
Why No Battle?
After seven years of war, there was still a virtual stalemate in the fighting. Even by 425 no Spartan fleet had emerged to challenge Athenian naval supremacy. The Corinthians had left the seas except for the nearby Gulf. Spartan ships, such as Alcidas’ armada, which had headed for Lesbos in 427, were capable only of short voyages akin to the German battleship Bismarck’s brief breakouts into the North Atlantic during 1941. These short-lived Peloponnesian raids were intended to harass merchants and tributary subjects before Athenian superior triremes could find and hunt them down. In turn, Athens had no desire or ability to force a showdown with the Spartan phalanx. Invasions of the Athenian homeland had ceased in 425, after Spartan prisoners had been captured at Pylos and brought back to Athens with the announcement that they would be killed the moment another Peloponnesian army entered Attica.
Widespread helot revolt had not followed the Athenians’ establishment of a series of bases in and around the Peloponnese. Seaborne raids of the Peloponnese had bothered the Spartans but had caused neither massive defection from its alliance nor famine or panic. Perhaps a quarter to a third of the Athenian population alive at the start of the war was dead seven years later, but mostly because of the ravages of the plague rather than Spartan spears. While small bands of killers and innovative commanders murdered and plundered, so far the Athenian empire remained intact. Mytilene was subdued. Corcyra did not become an oligarchic ally of Sparta. Persia was still hesitant to begin subsidizing the construction of a Spartan fleet that might wrest away the eastern Aegean.
A few old-style generals on each side began to see that major changes in the strategic calculus of the war might still come about only through some large-scale, dramatic victory. In Athenian eyes, that meant either knocking Boeotia out of the war or marching into the Peloponnese and crafting a hoplite alliance to defeat Sparta once and for all, on its home turf. If only Athens and Sparta had agreed to face-off in full armor on a summer afternoon—what Herodotus once labeled “a silly and most absurd” way of fighting “on the best and most level ground”—then at least Sparta could have won the war in a few minutes and saved Greece twenty-seven years of misery. Yet for that very reason Pericles in 431 had thought it “a terrible thing” for Athenians all by themselves to join battle with 60,000 Peloponnesian and Boeotian hoplites, to gamble the survival of the city itself on “a pitched battle.”1
In both 410 and 406, it looked for a moment as though a much smaller Spartan contingent of occupation in Attica might precipitate an old-style battle by marching out from its fortress nearby at Decelea to the very walls of Athens. Yet in the first instance, the Spartan king Agis’ smaller force backed away at the last minute. On the second occasion, in 406, his more formidable army of 14,000 hoplites, as many light-armed troops, and 1,200 horsemen moved on the city again. But his nearly 30,000-man force was not willing to meet the Athenian phalanx until the latter ventured beyond the protection of the archers, slingers, and javelin throwers on the walls of Athens. Instead, a three-decade-long war raged between Athens and Sparta in which the chief Hellenic method of resolving conflict—hoplite pitched battles—occurred rarely between th
e two chief belligerents! Still, there were too many hoplites in too many places elsewhere in the Greek world for some old-style confrontation now and then not to transpire in the span of so many years. Thus, near the small seaside sanctuary of Delium, on the border between Athens and Boeotia, one of the traditional battles at last broke out seven years into the war in November 424.2
It is hard to walk freely now over the seaside hills overlooking the modern resort town of Dilesi. Vacation homes, wire fences, and access roads are springing up on what just thirty years ago were mostly open grain fields and range-land. Few of the contemporary upscale Athenians who spend their weekends here realize that thousands once battled near their backyards. This was a fight that saw middle-aged Socrates in defeat grimly fighting off pursuers, the corpse of Pericles’ nephew moldering in the dirt for over two weeks, brave Alcibiades winning the award for valor as he galloped through these gentle rises, and Plato’s cowardly father-in-law running for his life. Delium was but a two-day hike from the Athenian Acropolis.
The Hope of Delium
Why did Athens, which purportedly knew it was not wise to fight in such pitched battles with better hoplites, risk a campaign that might involve facing the Boeotians? Again, it was the age-old desire to be free of a two-front war, the specter that later haunted Rome when it faced the Carthaginians and Philip V of Macedon, the traditional German dilemma of being wedged between Russia and France, and the predicament America found itself in during World War II, with both Pacific and European theaters. In his hasty final few words, the surprised Athenian general Hippocrates had stirred his men with the promise that a victory would mean the Spartans could no longer cross Attica at will into the sanctuary of Boeotia, as the northern front would be forever closed. In contrast, he assumed that a defeat would doom Athens to a perpetual two-front war of attrition that it could not win.
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 17
