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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Posthoplite Warfare

  Two new factors in the fifth century had changed three centuries of past hoplite practice. First, the Persian Wars, particularly the invasion of Xerxes in 480, had shown that even a successful battle like Marathon or Plataea could not guarantee total victory against an enemy that did not share ideas about the primacy of agrarian warfare but sought annihilation of its enemy by land and sea through any means available. In response, that war was won in a large part through the destruction of the Persian fleet at the sea battles of Artemisium and Salamis, but only after Athens, along with most of northern Greece, had been burned and occupied. Had the Athenian defenders depended solely on their hoplites, the Persian Wars would have been lost. Ten thousand Athenians, even if they were the brave veterans of Marathon who a decade earlier had defeated 30,000 of Darius’ invaders, could hardly have withstood 100,000 Persians in a pitched battle in the Athenian plain.

  Classical hoplites and later phalangites might defeat Persian infantry—as the Hellenic infantry victories from Marathon and Plataea to Issus and Gaugamela attest—even at a 5 to 3 numerical disadvantage, but not at 10 to 1. At the battle of Cunaxa (401) the Greek Ten Thousand routed their Persian adversaries. But after the death of their patron Cyrus the Younger, the vastly outnumbered mercenary force found itself on the Euphrates facing tens of thousands of enemies in what is now southern Iraq, and conducted a fighting retreat rather than invite a pitched battle.

  By the time of the Peloponnesian War hoplites enjoyed a role similar to that of the majestic dreadnoughts of the First World War, formidable capital assets that likewise “feared nothing.” Highly prized and much touted even in their anachronism, such imposing ships could blast apart in minutes an entire fleet and thus change a war—and yet rarely got the chance to fight one. So it was too with a classical hoplite phalanx. On the eve of the expedition to Syracuse, Alcibiades deprecated the supposed hoplite strength of Sicily by scoffing that throughout the Peloponnesian War states usually bragged of hoplites whom they did not have, even though such highly prestigious forces rarely any longer won wars outright.23

  Alcibiades seemed to wish to reassure the Athenians that they might win, given the paucity of Syracusan heavy infantry—and then brought far too few cavalry along, only to discover that it was Sicilian horsemen, not hoplites, that most harmed the Athenian army. Such hoplite chauvinism lingered even after the Peloponnesian War. In the fourth century, Plato’s Socrates makes the almost treasonous claim that the great naval victory at Salamis was an unhappy occasion because it empowered the landless naval crowd at the expense of proud landowning hoplites. Again, it was how you fought, not whether you won or lost, that mattered. War had as many internal ramifications as it did external consequences. The great catastrophe to the founder of Western philosophy was not that the democracy at Athens had lost, but that it had inaugurated a type of fighting in the Peloponnesian War that divorced virtue from military efficacy.

  During the discussion about the Peace of Nicias (421), the Argives suggested to the Spartans that they both resolve their disputes “just as once before” by selecting champions to meet at a prearranged time and place. Even the conservative Spartans at first scoffed at such reactionary thinking. “A moronic [môria] thing” was their initial reaction to the strange proposal of deciding an entire war by allowing a few hoplites to crash together in phalanxes. After a decade of frustration in Attica and having been stymied by light-armed troops on Sphacteria, the Spartans were no longer under the illusion that ceremonial battles could settle any dispute.24

  Triremes, along with the poor men who rowed on them, the marines who sailed along as skirmishers, and the public taxes that built them, proved far more critical to the war effort than agrarian militias. Yet at the outbreak of the war Thucydides takes care to note that Athens had at least 13,000 front-rank hoplites and another 16,000 reserve garrison infantrymen made up of old and young citizens and augmented by resident aliens with heavy armor. In other words, the Athenians had enough men to have manned an additional 150 ships. The purpose of these nearly 30,000 Athenian deployable hoplites under a policy that sought to avoid their use in pitched battle is not altogether clear, other than for marching out to Megara to intimidate the smaller city and provide cover while light-armed troops ravaged its agriculture.

  By the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War both Athens and Sparta, far more so than other city-states, found themselves immune from the old restrictions on hoplite warfare. Neither needed to be home at harvesttime—triremes or helots, respectively, could supply enough food to exempt thousands from farm chores. Thus, neither learned to predicate short wars on the prestige of winning rather insignificant borderlands. Throughout the Archidamian War (431–421) it was the Peloponnesian agrarian allies, not the Spartans per se, who were reluctant to march northward to Attica. Why? Unlike Sparta, they worked their own fields, and, as Pericles had foreseen at the outbreak of war, such men had no capital to endure a long war.25

  Athens, through its overseas empire of tribute and imported food that supplied at least two-thirds of the population, had similarly transcended seasonal hoplite warfare. With the port at the Piraeus, a navy of some 300 ships, a large populace of voters who did not farm, and annual commercial income, it too did not confine itself to a few weeks of spring campaigning in hopes of deciding conflict by glorious battle. Moreover, since the Greek victory at Plataea over the Persians, the Spartan phalanx had established a reputation of invincibility that was to last well into the fourth century, the disaster at Sphacteria (425) being considered an aberration and quickly redeemed by the dramatic hoplite victory at Mantinea.

  Quasi Hoplites

  Thus, all during the Peloponnesian War the Athenians felt that meeting such hoplites on a flat plain was tantamount to suicide, like sending out cruisers to face battleships when there were carriers available.26 The victors of Delium and Mantinea—the Boeotians and Spartans—came away from the conflict convinced that their own hoplites were unbeatable, thus explaining why both confident armies were willing to meet each other in the numerous battles to come at Haliartus, Nemea, Coronea, Tegyra, Leuctra, and second Mantinea, which followed the Peloponnesian War. Despite only two major old-style battles, fighting throughout the twenty-seven-year war was nearly constant and took place everywhere—on rough terrain, in mountain passes, and through amphibious operations. Indeed, there are some eighty-three instances in the text of Thucydides of what might legitimately be called a land “engagement” of some sort, illustrating that most soldiers were killed far apart from a typical phalanx battle.

  On long marches, cavalry, light-armed troops, and archers were needed to provide reconnaissance, cover, and pursuit against like kind. Light troops, mostly highly mobile javelin throwers unencumbered by body armor, were especially prized once battle moved away from the plains and onto difficult ground. Clumsy hoplites away from the phalanx were often ambushed, their breastplates of quarter-inch bronze not always a sure defense against a storm of arrows and missiles from skirmishers who could target arms, legs, and the neck. Horsemen were no longer mere ancillaries at the peripheries of hoplite battle but were often critical to military success against a mélange of enemies in a variety of locales. Poor men, rich grandees, slaves, foreigners, aliens, even women and children during times of siege—they all got into the fighting, once more disdaining the old idea that rural communities would let farmers adjudicate border disputes by brief collisions.27

  As the fighting wore on, the nostalgic Thucydides could find ever more poignancy in the destruction of the old hoplite infantry of both sides of the Peloponnesian War, especially when they died outside of pitched battle or at the hands of their social inferiors. He listed the losses of the Athenians to the plague first in terms of dead hoplites. A Spartan who surrendered at Sphacteria after seeing his hoplite comrades suffering from a barrage of arrows was made to sigh, “An arrow would be worth a great deal if it could pick out noble and good men from the rest.” When the Athenians lost
120 hoplites in the wilds of Aetolia to hill men, he remarked of the dead that they “were truly the best men whom the city of Athens lost in this war.”

  Recalling an earlier incident before the war when Corinthian hoplites had been ambushed and slaughtered, he pronounced it a great “tragedy.” He also concluded that the dead Thespian hoplites at Delium had been the “flower” of their city-state.28 In Thucydides’ view, hoplites should have fought in pitched battle—not fallen less gloriously to disease, ambush, or missiles. The Greeks themselves were conscious of the military revolution in their midst. In the fourth year of the Peace of Nicias (418), Thucydides grieves that the two sides went after each other through ambushes and raids, precisely because neither side would march out to fight a battle “with formal preparation.” Aristophanes ridiculed the youth of his day. They could not even hold their shield chest high—as if that skill would ever be needed in a war without hoplite battles. Both during and after the Peloponnesian War, Greeks agreed that something had gotten out of control and led to slaughters never before anticipated, not unlike the modern repulsion at World War I, which soon proved to be quite unlike the expected short and decisive campaigning a half century earlier during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.29

  Besides Delium and Mantinea, there were only a few other occasions when two phalanxes collided. These engagements were usually small affairs and thus decided little. In summer 425, for example, the year before Delium, the Athenians had embarked a small army of some 2,000 hoplites near Corinth, just the sort of nontraditional mixed use of hoplites that Plato would later condemn as impure. At the small village of Solygia, seaborne Athenian hoplites were met by Corinthian heavy infantrymen. The two sides fought a tough, though atypical, hoplite battle in difficult terrain. Thucydides points out that the battle was “entirely hand-to-hand,” and apparently brutal. Reserves, a retreat behind fortifications, and the prominent role of the cavalry—as well as confusion, panic, dust clouds, pushing, and the death of the defeated general—proved more pivotal to the Athenian victory than hoplite courage.

  The Athenians claimed Solygia as a tactical victory, by virtue of driving the Corinthians off the field, losing little more than 50 dead to the Corinthians’ 212, along with their general Lycophron. Still, they were unable to establish a secure base, and so suffered a strategic setback in that they returned to their ships and sailed away. Then the general and old conservative hoplite Nicias belatedly discovered that two Athenian corpses had been left behind, requiring an embarrassing return to ask the defeated for the bodies, thus in formal terms nullifying the psychological dividends of the limited victory.30

  About a year and a half later, in winter 423, the Mantineans fought the neighboring Tegeans, in a precursor to the great battle of Mantinea that would follow in that same valley five years later and at last involve the great powers of the Peloponnesian War. Of this earlier and similarly minor affair Thucydides notes only that the engagement was hard-fought and mentions some characteristic elements of phalanx battle: each side claimed victory on its right wing and broke off hostilities at darkness. Such backwater and mostly unrecorded fights between hoplites must have been ubiquitous as smaller states over the three decades of the war went on with the normal business of settling border disputes—even as Sparta and Athens simultaneously tried to transport their own larger hoplite armies into peripheral theaters to obtain local advantages against numerically inferior and poorly armed and led militias.31

  Thus, such “hoplite” battles were not exactly purely hoplite affairs. In most of them there were ambushes, seaborne attacks, and hoplites employed more on garrison duty than in rank. Perhaps the most famous was the engagement at Amphipolis (422), where 600 Athenian hoplites were killed at a cost of a mere 7 on the Spartan side. Both opposing generals, who had agitated for continuation of the decadelong war, the Athenian demagogue Cleon and the maverick Brasidas of Sparta, were killed in action. With their joint demise, peace factions arose to allow the Peace of Nicias the next year, suggesting that most of the war’s key figures died with their armor on, and that hoplite battle in a day still had a tendency to alter the course of the war. Of course, Thucydides makes it a point to note that Amphipolis was not quite a “regular battle” (what he calls a parataxis) but, rather, a more confused effort by Cleon to approach the Spartan garrison at Amphipolis—only to be surprised by joint sallies of Spartans from the city walls who surrounded the Athenians and quickly routed them.32

  What did the term “hoplite” then come to mean? Not much more than a heavy infantryman with some sort of bronze armor. He was no longer per se of a particular class. Nor did he necessarily fight in the phalanx—or even observe the age-old protocols about notification and cessation of pitched battle.

  The Last Hurrah at Mantinea

  After the Spartan failure of annual ravaging (431–425), after the Athenian toll from the plague (430–426), after the Spartans had lost at Sphacteria (425), and some of their best warriors—among them high-ranking officers—had shamefully surrendered and been taken hostage (425–421), after the Spartans became terrified that their helots might revolt en masse, after the defeat of the Athenians in Boeotia (424), and after Cleon and Brasidas both perished at Amphipolis (422), both sides acknowledged that the war had degenerated into a messy calamity that neither could win outright.

  A breather was welcomed. After some failed brief truces, the conservative Athenian statesman Nicias negotiated with the Spartans the peace that bears his name and would prove to last about six years (421–415). If Athens was exhausted from the plague and the dislocations of evacuating the Attic countryside, Sparta had been so shattered by the rather light losses at Sphacteria and the Athenian garrisoning of Pylos and Cythera that its citizens “thought they would fail in whatever risk they undertook, because of the loss of self-confidence arising out of not before experiencing such calamity.”33

  So eager were the Spartans to get back their prisoners taken at Sphacteria some four years earlier that they signed on to the agreement over the objections of their allies Thebes, Megara, and Elis, which, in fact, remained nominally at war with Athens. However, rarely do peace agreements last when the original conditions for hostilities have not ended. Both Sparta’s purported fear of the power and growth of the Athenian empire and Athens’ unwillingness to make painful concessions to assuage Peloponnesian anxieties were not altered. Despite a decade of carnage, by 421 neither side believed it had really been beaten.

  Thus, the “cold war” lasted only a few years before it began to heat up again in the Peloponnese, near the small town of Mantinea in 418, as the old Spartan alliance threatened to unravel. Alcibiades and the war party at Athens were the surrogate players. Their grand strategy—once more like the ambitious schemes that had come to naught at Delium in 424—was bold, hinging on creating a democratic revolutionary movement that might turn once-hostile Peloponnesians into friends and thus in one big battle shut down an entire theater of the war in the south.

  Under the leadership of Alcibiades, the Athenians intrigued with Argos to fashion an ad hoc coalition of newly democratic Peloponnesian states—Argos, Elis, and Mantinea—that might surround Sparta and dissolve her alliances, especially with Thebes and Corinth still nursing resentments on the sidelines over the recent peace with Athens. The Peloponnesian League itself was rife with tension. Argos had fought Sparta repeatedly in the early fifth century, both in pitched battles and border skirmishes, and always represented a potential nexus of rebellion. Elis was a wealthy unified city-state, home of the Olympic games, site of the magnificent temple to Olympian Zeus (larger than the Parthenon), and itself quasi-democratic as early as 460.

  During the peace, the Athenians were at last starting to fathom the rough outlines of a winning approach of fomenting helot rebellion in Messenia—all the while in hopes of liberating the major Peloponnesian allies in the Argolid, Arcadia, and Elis. The occupation and fortification of Pylos, along with the defeat and taking of the Spartan hostages on the island of
Sphacteria, were now to be complemented by surrounding Sparta with hostile democratic states. At the hub of this grand plan of anti-Spartanism in the Peloponnese, both figuratively and geographically, was Argos. Its leadership sensed that the Spartan surrender at Sphacteria, coupled with the failure of devastation in Attica, had improved Argos’ chances to serve as a democratic and autonomous Peloponnesian rallying point. The post-Pylos leadership in Sparta had done nothing between 420 and 418 to stifle this growing alliance other than to marshal a few troops on the border and then disband them because of “bad omens.”

  Athens, however, failed to grasp this golden opportunity to undo the Peloponnesian empire. Alcibiades had led the groundwork for this anti-Spartan alliance, but in a foolhardy move the Athenians had rejected his candidacy for general in 418, preferring instead the lethargic Nicias and his associates. This ensured that they would only haphazardly support the resistance when it finally came to real fighting in the Peloponnese.

  Alert to the danger in early summer 418, the Spartans under King Agis arrived in the Mantinean plain to put an end to such nonsense and protect Tegea, their first outpost ally that was targeted in the new coalition’s grand ambitions. This insurrection proved to be like none other in Sparta’s recent history. The recalcitrant states were the most powerful in the Peloponnese. And they could field good infantrymen. Had they won then, the Peloponnesian War would have been, for all practical purposes, over in an afternoon—as the Spartans could never have marched northward into Attica again, Corinth and Thebes would not have returned to the Spartan coalition, and the state itself would probably have been immediately plagued by massive helot revolts at home.

  King Agis brought some 12,000 hoplites into Arcadia to force battle and restore the old reputation that it was not a wise thing to face the Spartans in battle. Thucydides thought his force “was the finest Greek army brought together up to that time”—apparently a suggestion that these elite hoplites were intent not on ravaging the Attic countryside but on killing Argives in pitched battle. After a few false starts, each army—the allies had roughly equivalent forces—maneuvered for position in the plain of Mantinea before squaring off and colliding. The final onslaught probably took place sometime around August 1, 418—the hottest time of the year in one of the hottest and most humid plains in mainland Greece.