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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The sordid finale to the battle was at last over. Again, there is no exact knowledge of how many corpses were finally given back to the Athenians to be burned, the bones collected and buried. The total may well have been over 2,000 if both hoplites and the irregulars are included. The Athenian losses at Delium constituted only a fraction of the fatalities that would follow nine years later, during the debacle on Sicily, and were probably no more than had been lost in any two-week period of the great plague. Yet the strategic consequences were just as calamitous: Boeotia, on the northern border of Attica, would remain an oligarchic and especially powerful ally of Sparta. Its continued hostility meant that Athens would be stuck with a two-front war for the duration of the conflict. Rumors of the entire debacle—unlike the news from Sicily, which took several days to arrive at the Piraeus—spread through the Athenian agora within a few hours, reminding the citizenry that a victorious enemy was a few hours’ march away.

  Dreadnoughts of the Battlefield

  Certain types of fighting are more memorable than others. The world of the samurai, the chivalry of the ponderous medieval knight, and the colors and pageantry of Napoleonic columns have captured popular imagination in a manner not explicable just by the record of battle or the degree of lethality of the warriors. Hoplite collisions were equally unforgettable. Maybe it was the frightening look of the shiny bronze armor or the formality and grandness of the massed columns. Certainly the shock and sounds of the colliding armies made a lasting impression. Surely such a formulaic way of fighting allowed thousands of combatants to assemble in a relatively small space—in a way impossible during raiding, ravaging, or amphibious assaults. Various phrases in the Greek language—“battles in the plain,” “battles by agreement,” “just and open battles,” and “drawn up”—were used to evoke the formality and morality of traditional hoplite forces squaring off.

  From the anachronistic fighting of even the single collision at Delium comes a glimpse into the very cultural foundations of the Greek city-state—the protocols of an earlier age, in which small rural settlements agreed to solve their differences over contested border ground through formal pitched battles of armored militiamen. Although very little of the military history of the poleis before classical times is recorded, the Greeks at least preserved a tradition that hoplite warfare between 700 and 500 had been the most common and preferred way of fighting. War had once been heroic, local, and waged over disputed boundaries by like agrarian communities. In Plato’s Republic, his ideal states would naturally squabble over borderlands, assuming that proud and overbearing people would always covet (“give themselves over to the endless acquisition of material things”) the resources of another nearby.9

  In the later romantic legends of hoplite supremacy, early wars supposedly had been decided honestly by picked contingents who fought at prearranged times and places to avoid larger bloodshed. Formal rules often outlawed the use of missile weapons. In the popular myth, armies were to seek out prearranged flat plains, where each side in similar heavy armor could more easily charge into the other. Battle then was not merely utilitarian but also moral: it was not just against whom or why one fought that mattered, but apparently how as well.

  For centuries after the Peloponnesian War, later Greeks looked back nostalgically at just those lost hoplite moments, even if in reality they had been rather rare. Reactionaries lamented that militaries of the later fifth through third centuries had no longer sought to “crush the spirit” of an enemy by “fighting in open battle”—and that this avoidance of simple collisions resulted in disasters like the twenty-seven-year war of Sparta against Athens (431–404), the later Theban-Spartan near-constant fighting (378–362), and the rise of Philip of Macedon (358–338).10

  Thucydides himself, anywhere in his history that he records the death of hoplite soldiers caused by light-armed troops, guerrillas, or archers, makes it a point to lament the loss in poignant terms. Yet this mythical hold of the hoplite on the popular Greek imagination seems to have made no rational sense. For example, throughout the Peloponnesian War, when there were very few occasions at all for phalanx battle, authors continued to talk of war only in terms of heavily armed soldiers. Thus the pacifist characters in Aristophanes’ comedies refer to getting rid of breastplates and spears, even as the tragedians describe battle courage as the domain of the hoplite, the favorite martial figure as well of contemporary vase painters and pedimental sculpture on temples. Yet rarely after the classical age would civic governments embrace war as defined largely by heavy infantry, in a manner so ill-suited to the rough terrain, Mediterranean summers, and narrow passes of the southern Balkans.11

  Archidamus and his Spartans, in their original hope for a hoplite showdown in May 431, did not envision the annihilation of the Athenian people or their property through plague and fire. Instead, by fighting without many tactics and in the open, Spartan reactionaries felt that there would remain no real excuse other than courage and strength for victory or defeat—no reason, then, to repeat the battle again and again until the manhood of one side was wiped out or, worse still, to transfer the conflict to messy third theaters that were as indecisive as they were deadly to good hoplite infantrymen.

  Even by the beginning of the Peloponnesian War there was a brutal logic to such simplistic Spartan thinking. After the Athenians experienced defeat at Delium, they never again tried to invade Boeotia in force, despite later having available far more troops than those on hand in 424. Similarly, after the Spartan alliance won at the great hoplite battle of Mantinea in 418 (to be discussed at length in this chapter), there was never again talk of a grand democratic alliance to overthrow its Peloponnesian hegemony until the invasion of Epaminondas a half century later. There still remained some mystique to the hoplite code in the late-fifth-century mind from the earlier aura of great battles, making them pivotal in ways that cannot be explained entirely in terms of casualties, tactics, or strategy. After all, for the purposes of killing, hoplite warfare made little sense: fewer than 40 percent of the combatants of the phalanx could even reach the enemy with their spears at any given time, quarter-inch armor kept most thrusts from hitting flesh, and the spear itself was not an especially lethal weapon.

  Nevertheless, it was not just that Athens had lost 1,000 of 7,000 hoplites at Delium, a surprising 14 percent fatality rate unmatched in classical phalanx battles, in which 10 percent was more the average. Rather, the real significance was that they had been beaten so badly in an apparently fair fight. The clash and the subsequent mad Athenian flight appeared to offer a clear referendum on the respective courage and skill of both sides. After the dramatic victory at Mantinea six years later, Thucydides relates that the Spartans “had wiped away through this one occasion” all the recent calumnies that arose from their supposed cowardice on Sphacteria.12

  Alcibiades could later brag that earlier, in 418, he had forced the issue so that “the Spartans had staked their all on one day at Mantinea.” Although the defeat had in effect set back terribly the cause of Athens and her allies, Alcibiades claimed the battle as a work of his own genius that at least was able to bring both sides to the battlefield. There his allied coalition, in theory, had a 50 percent chance of winning the war outright. When, after all, were such good odds possible in the Peloponnesian War? “One occasion” and “one day” were used only in association with pitched battles, in a way impossible to use to characterize the Attic devastations, the cycle of revolutions at Corcyra, or the operations at Pylos or Amphipolis.

  If there were only two major hoplite battles of the Peloponnesian War, the ubiquitous Alcibiades was involved in some ways with both of them. The fame he had won saving his kindred during the traumatic retreat at Delium, coupled with a succession of deaths of prominent Athenians—Pericles, Hippocrates, and Cleon—and the shame of others like Cleonymus and Laches, meant a meteoric rise in the career of the twenty-six-year-old hero.

  Later he engineered the entire Argive-Athenian resistance at the battle of Mantinea
, despite the fact that the Athenians had only committed a small number of combatants, and had sacrificed only 200 hoplites for the cause at the battle. Yet Alcibiades himself was not officially an elected general at the time, his oratory far more influential than his actual political clout to match fighting words with actual soldiers. In fact, unlike his ubiquity at Delium, he was nowhere to be seen on the day of the battle of Mantinea.

  Churchill recalled of the battle of Jutland in World War I that the commander of the British fleet, Admiral Jellicoe, was the only man who through his failure might have lost England the war in a single day: battleships, like hoplites, were assets rarely used, but their destruction nevertheless left the enemy a deadly freedom of action. Athens may have had fortifications that stopped Spartans from reaching the Acropolis, but the very fact that its army could not prevent enemy hoplites from marching up to the walls took a psychological toll on the great city’s reputation.

  A Thing of Fear

  That is precisely what the Boeotian poet Pindar said of Greek warfare prior to the early fifth century, when hoplite battle was a common way of solving disputes. What was the carnage like for these men of the old phalanx in battles like Delium? Pretty awful by modern sensibilities. Enemy or ally, Pagondas’ Boeotians or Hippocrates’ Athenian hoplites, all alike donned helmets, breastplates, and greaves that were hammered out of bronze. About a quarter to a half inch thick, this armor provided substantial protection from the blows of most swords, missiles, and spears, but at a terrible cost in weight, discomfort, and heat. That thousands on both sides of the battle line, often from disparate city-states, owned almost identical armor implies an implicit shared understanding of such fighting in the life of the Greek city-states.

  The entire ensemble might cost a citizen-soldier well over 100 drachmas. That was the equivalent of about three months’ wages. Later in the war, small factories—like the orator Lysias’ family shieldworks in Athens—could turn out the standard wooden elements of the panoply en masse. As the war became more desperate, in its second and third decades, the old idea of hanging inherited ancestral arms over the hearth was becoming passé, since the state armed thousands of the poorer regardless of their particular census status. Most fighters now used the panoplies to fight as skirmishers or marines rather than traditional hoplites arrayed in the formal ranks of the phalanx. Sometimes hoplites ditched the breastplate and Corinthian helmet altogether. Instead, many wore conical caps (piloi) and leather jerkins for combat that was increasingly often against light-armed troops rather than other hoplites in pitched battle.

  Surviving examples of wooden shield cores and the thin bronze veneers that went over the wood—at the Vatican museum, the Athenian agora, and the sanctuary at Olympia—reveal real craftsmanship, reflecting pride in private ownership, as well as the small size and stature of the wearers. Until the Peloponnesian War, most armor was donned by its owners only in times of national muster. The panoply’s weight and design made it almost useless for hunting or skir-mishing—in fact, for much of anything other than pitched battle. But like modern tanks, which are sometimes caught singly outside an armored division, an individual soldier who put on all the cumbersome hoplite armor and carried a heavy shield was often easily surrounded and ambushed by the quicker and lighter-clad, who in the bargain gained the psychological satisfaction of killing their hoplite betters. Some of the most notable of Athenians—for example, the generals Cleon, Laches, and Lamachus—were killed in heavy armor when fighting in fluid formation or in retreat, most probably by skirmishers or peltasts.

  Since the advent of gunpowder, moderns have tended to deprecate the idea of body armor. The fiery offensive arts have for some six centuries overshadowed the much older sway of personal defense, so much so that surviving panoplies in modern museums seem ridiculous to the modern eye. Nevertheless, the age-old tension between attack and defense is not static. Only recently an emphasis on body armor has returned as scientists have at last discovered combinations of synthetic fibers, plastics, ceramics, and metals that can withstand even the onslaught of high-velocity, metal-alloy bullets and shrapnel fragments, which can strike the body instantaneously with incredible force and numbers. Ironically, the catalysts for Kevlar helmets, bulletproof vests, and assorted insertable ceramic plates are somewhat similar to those that led to heavily armored hoplites: first, such protection can save lives; second, the value of each combatant is now prized in a way not true of previous wars of the twentieth century.

  The grotesque shield insignias, the incised artwork on the bronze breastplates and greaves, and the masklike appearance of the helmets crested with horsehair all indicate that elements in the drama of hoplite battle were almost eerily ostentatious. Certainly the equipment only heightened the psychological terror of the formal meeting of two phalanxes. Recall that both like-armed armies formed up in similar columns, stared at each other across the battlefield, and lowered spears on command. Pan (whose name led to our word “panic”) was considered a fickle deity who could appear on the battlefield to scatter columns before battle even began.

  For that very reason, the Spartans polished their bronze shield veneers to a high shine, wore long scarlet cloaks, draped their oiled and braided hair over their shoulders, and painted bright lambdas (for “Lacedaemon”) on their shields—to stunning visual effect, if one can believe ancient accounts that enemies sometimes turned tail and ran rather than endure the Spartans’ slow measured march to the killing zone, accompanied by the music of pipes. At Mantinea, despite being surprised and confused by the sudden appearance of a large enemy coalition force, the Spartans never lost their nerve. Instead, they quietly walked right into the enemy wall of spears, quite in contrast to the noisy “sound and fury” of their adversaries.13

  In the actual fighting, the hoplite depended on the man next to him to shield his own unprotected right side and to maintain the cohesion of the entire phalanx, military service now solidifying the valued egalitarianism of the property-owning citizenry. Thucydides makes that point about mutual protection offered by close-ordered ranks throughout his history—implying that rote technique was critical, since men were not freelancing as individual warriors but cognizant that their own spearing must always be done in concert. Later writers stressed the importance of agility that might be formally inculcated by mastering set moves and war dances, but we are still not sure whether such individual skills were advocated for the pursuit or retreat, or simply to help hoplites attack within the confines of ranks and files.

  Indeed, it is hard to think of any other form of fighting in which so much rested on the support of the men in the ranks. When the Spartan general Brasidas invaded Illyria in 423, he reminded his hoplites that their discipline and interdependence made them far more formidable warriors than the loud-shouting barbarian rabble they faced. In the eyes of Thucydides’ Brasidas, the Greeks differed from the barbarians precisely in the manner in which they preferred to fight, as if their singular group discipline on the battlefield was the dividend of Hellenic civilization itself. The Illyrians, Brasidas scoffed to his men, “are not what they seem” since they “have no regular order” and are no different from “mobs.”14

  Of these supposedly preeminent Greeks, the Spartans themselves were far the best. Their domination was not necessarily due to their bodily strength (here the agrarian Thebans were far more formidable), numbers (Athens could field more hoplites than the aggregate number of Spartiates), or equipment (shields and body armor were almost uniform in size, shape, and construction the Greek world over). Instead, the Spartan mystique was a product of singular discipline and organization, and the ability to stay in rank. And why wouldn’t order be a premium when the typical hoplite of the phalanx was subject to tremendous pressures in every direction: men pushing at his back, comrades in line crowding him to the right, rows in front presenting an impenetrable obstacle? As he was buffeted by the force of armored bodies, the hoplite also dodged incoming enemy iron, the sharp bronze spear butts of his friends in fr
ont bobbing in his face, and the razor-sharp spear points of the ranks to the rear darting over his neck and shoulders. All the while he trudged over the detritus of fallen wounded and dead hoplites, friend and foe, often both sons and fathers.

  Hoplite Logic

  In this regard of close-order fighting, our present-day notion of Western discipline—marching in time, advancing and retreating on command, preservation of formation, and mutual protection within files and ranks—started with the Greek phalanx, was passed on through the Roman legions, and survived in medieval Swiss, Spanish, and Italian columns and tercios of pikemen to find its way into the gunpowder age with European mastery of drill and volley fire. If that seems a chronological stretch, remember that with the onset of firearms, the Europeans best seemed to have the prerequisite traditions to use guns most effectively in cohesion and mass, with ample attention paid to firing in unison and in accordance with group protocols. That legacy of the Greeks defining courage as staying in rank rather than counting individual kills seems as important for the survival of the Western tradition as the much more heralded ideas of democracy and rationalism, though a heritage for the most part underappreciated today.

  Hoplite technology was craftsmanship at its highest. The three-foot in diameter shield, sometimes known as either the aspis or hoplon, covered half the body. A unique combined arm- and handgrip allowed its oppressive weight to be held by the left arm alone. Draw straps along the inside of the shield’s perimeter meant that it could be retained even should the hand be knocked from the primary grip, a common mishap given the shield weight and the constant blows of massed combat. The shield’s strange concave shape permitted the rear ranks to rest it on their shoulders. Anyone who has tried to hold up fifteen to twenty pounds with a single arm, even without the weight of other armor amid the rigor of battle, can attest to the exhaustion that sets in after only twenty minutes. Yet the hoplite shield was an engineering marvel: the round shape allowed it to be rotated in almost any direction even as the sloped surface provided more wood protection from the angled trajectory of incoming spear points.