At the very outset of the war Pericles, in advising his countrymen to retreat into their walls, had conceded that the Peloponnesians could defeat “all the Greeks put together in a single battle.” Unfortunately, he would be posthumously proved right, as Mantinea would now confirm the late Athenian leader’s worst fears about the prowess of Spartan hoplites. Unlike the Spartans’ arrival into Attica in 431, King Agis came to the flatlands of Mantinea with a much smaller force that convinced their adversaries to march out in hopes that a victory was possible after all. Yet so ready were the Argives and the Mantineans to induce battle that their brashness startled the late-arriving and methodical Spartans. Thucydides claimed that few could recall another occasion on which the Spartan army had been so dumbfounded.34
Both Delium and Mantinea were in a tactical sense near accidents. The respective armies did not know quite where their adversaries were camped, or even less their exact location seconds before they charged. Take away just two old men—Pagondas at Delium and an anonymous old Spartan hoplite who warned King Agis to back off his initial approach—and the two decisive hoplite engagements of the war either would not have taken place or at least would not have been fought where and when they were.
If one were to pick a place to fight a hoplite battle, Mantinea would be just about right. For killing people out in the open, generals need ample space, lots of food, clean water, level ground, easy accessibility, and nearby protection. Mantinea, unlike Delium, fits all such requisites. As the nearby modern freeway proves, it is on the strategic route between north and south. Mantinea is also a narrow plain where 20,000 warriors can still easily fit, as they did in August 418—and on several occasions afterward.
The killing fields are surrounded by mountains that provide both defense for the flanks of heavy infantrymen and a refuge after defeat. A few thousand brave men who can span such a narrowing plain can stop whole armies. Thus, Mantinea served as a choke point where the grand routes from southern Greece constrict to a mile or so—before opening up again to flatland and various roads that branch out northward to Argos, Corinth, and Athens. If Sparta had lost this battle, it would not only have gained an entire host of new enemies but found its main artery out of Laconia essentially blocked.
Mantinea is fertile. Then and now the black earth can grow wheat in abundance, and so it ensured food for thousands of men as they milled and jockeyed around for days, seeking preparatory advantage to kill one another. The plain suffers from too much rather than too little water. The runoff from the surrounding steep mountains explains the ubiquity of sinkholes and streams. Greek generals of the ages liked Mantinea. Numerous times in Hellenic history Spartan kings, the Thebans under the great liberator Epaminondas, and the national hero Philopoemen (253–182) all fought in battles here for causes and ideas that are now the stuff of classical scholars, but of little interest to anyone else.
Few tourists, then, visit Mantinea today. The new freeway interchange is about five miles distant; and the ugly modern cement city of Tripolis lies about ten miles away. There is nothing here at the battlefield but a few country homes, a bizarre church that a wild-eyed eccentric spent his life building by scrounging marble and bricks from the countryside, and the traces of a vast lost city that peeks out amid the weeds and wheat fields.
But walk carefully again through this plain. Scan the random blocks of the theater. Climb among the fallen bastions of the once great circuit wall, navigate through the precincts of the ancient sanctuaries of Herakles and Poseidon, and far from being empty, Mantinea is, in fact, full of ghosts. Thousands have died here over the centuries. The voices of Greece’s greatest statesmen, generals, and writers once echoed off these hills before they fell in the alluvial mud of the battlefield. Well off to the distance there is the small hillock of Skopê (“Lookout Hill”), where the greatest military man Greece produced, the liberator Epaminondas, died in 362—his retainers pulling out a spear from his guts as he gazed down at his retreating Theban army, which had broken on news that its beloved general had been carried off and was bleeding to death on the hill above them.
Somewhere beneath the present-day barbed-wire fences and cement irrigation ditches are the footprints of the rabble-rouser Alcibiades, who well before the battle traversed the landscape, trying to create an alliance of democratic states to encircle Sparta and crush oligarchy for good—only in typical fashion to miss out on the actual fighting in 418 altogether. His grand machinations to end the Peloponnesian War in an hour also ended in vain here on the battlefield of Mantinea.
Alcibiades was nowhere to be seen. After crafting the alliance, his candidacy for general was rejected, his homeland sending a scant 1,000 Athenian hoplites and 300 horsemen to fight in the climactic battle that it had engineered. Perhaps Athens was worried about inciting the Spartans by arriving en masse at a time of ostensible peace; if so, nothing in war is so dangerous as to be a little aggressive or somewhat provocative.
The Spartan army that lined up on the plain was emblematic of the demographic crisis that would eventually undo the entire military caste system of the state. In short, its hoplite military was no longer an army of elite Spartan Similars. The left of the line was manned by some 600 Sciritae, tough mountain people from the borderlands of Arcadia who enjoyed some limited privileges of Spartan citizenship—and as a token of appreciation usually found themselves in battle facing the enemy’s elite right. Next to them were several hundred freed helots. These were equally brave men, but without the training or the élan of the Spartiate class.
The core of the Spartan army manned the center, along with some Arcadian allies; the right was given to local Tegeans and another division of Spartiates. If one adds up the 12,000-some Peloponnesian hoplites, 5,000 light-armed troops, and 1,000 mounted Boeotians, King Agis had roughly 18,000 men with which to break up the Argive bid for a free Peloponnese.
The allied coalition opposite had somehow collected 11,000 to 12,000 hoplites, which was an approximate match of King Agis’s heavy forces. About 2,000 skilled Mantineans anchored the right, opposite the Sciritae. Along with 1,000 picked professionals from Argos and some Arcadians, they constituted about as good a force of hoplites as any in the Peloponnese and were determined to be free of the Spartan yoke.
The rest of the Argives, the Eleans, and militias from some smaller cities filled out the center and left of the battle line (about 7,000 men), along with a mere 1,000 Athenians on the extreme left wing. Unfortunately, the center and left stared across no-man’s-land at the cream of the Spartan army. Their only hope of salvation was to hang on long enough for the Mantineans and the Argive elite to finish off the Sciritae and immediately come to their aid. Beneath barren Mount Barberi, King Agis marched his Spartan killers right through the enemy left, his right and center wings immediately shattering the men of Argos, along with the trapped Athenians. His professional killers plowed on and lowered their spears, “walked slowly to the music of pipes,” and then impaled the few who fled too slowly.
Thucydides wrote that the hoplites of the terrified and collapsing allied phalanx “trampled each other” in their very eagerness to escape the dreaded red-cloaked spearmen. An entire corpus of passages in Greek literature reflects the ancient view that the Spartan army—its look, discipline, skill, organization, and method—terrified any Greek hoplites unfortunate enough to regard it across the battlefield as it slowly walked to the killing zone. Just as it was felt a terrible thing to go against the German army in the twentieth century’s two world wars, so too the Greek world recognized that it was deadly to square off against the Spartans.35
Like a methodical modern cyborg, the victorious Spartan center and right of the phalanx stopped, turned hard left, allowed most of the frightened and defeated Argive survivors to run away—after killing some 700 of them with their allies—and continued on laterally across the now broken battle line. All the tough talk about teaching the Spartans a lesson like Pylos had vanished in the reality of having to face such unrelenting killers
on their terms. Once more silently walking en masse, the Similars sought to rendezvous head-on with the enemy’s other wing of Mantineans and allies, over a half mile away.
For a brief moment these Argives and Mantineans were relaxed and ebullient that they had driven off the weaker Sciritae and freed helots before them. Fools! Their transitory sense of victory only further incited the approaching Spartans, who, as if stung by a bothersome pest, now unleashed their remaining fury on these men, planning to cut them apart without mercy. Little did the victorious Argives and Mantineans know that for a few minutes a few thousand men had almost had in their power the ability to reverse the entire course of the Peloponnesian War, a brief window of opportunity to accomplish what all the raiding, siegecraft, and trireme war of the last decade could not. That unforgiving moment was lost almost as quickly as it arose.
The only hitch in the final Spartan battle plan to finish off the coalition had occurred during the initial few minutes. The outmanned Sciritae on the left had been outflanked by the Argives and Mantineans. As Peloponnesian companies from the middle of the line drifted leftward to form a buttress against the surging enemy right, for a moment a dangerous gap opened in the Spartan lines. King Agis ordered two companies on the victorious right to disengage and head over to the hemorrhaging left. Both Spartan officers refused such an unparalleled order—and were later exiled on charges of insubordination arising from alleged cowardice—on the logic that the reckless enemy would not capitalize on their temporary victory and hit the Spartans on their vulnerable left sides, but rather first plunder and chase the defeated. Thus, soon enough the Argives and Mantineans would find themselves vulnerable and targeted by the elite Spartan right, once it polished off the enemy and turned to deal with these unsuspecting allies.
If hoplite battle was a story of each right wing winning as its left lost, then total victory was determined only by a second phase of the battle—by how quickly and effectively the triumphant right could make a hard left and hit its counterpart in the flank. Sometimes such a collision could lead to only more death and stalemate as the two best wings slammed head-on and found their adversaries a different sort of folk from the inferior troops whom they had each just routed. Unfortunately for the allies, that did not happen here, and the second Spartan collision proved almost as deadly for the coalition as the first. At Mantinea, Sparta won the second phase of the battle and with it obtained victory as it blasted apart the Argives and Mantineans before they knew what hit them. For professionals who so rarely had the opportunity to put their long training into practice, the Spartan hoplites at Mantinea killed as if it were second nature.
Most of the once victorious 200 Mantineans who were now caught and killed by the Spartans were buried in the soil where they had been born and had worked. For centuries they remained in obscurity, until a few decades ago American archaeologists found a stone inscription embedded in one of the surrounding abandoned houses. It may well record a partial casualty list of these Mantinean dead of some twenty-four hundred years past. Who were these hoplites with names like Eutelion and Epaines, and where on the battlefield did they die? Modern readers of epigraphy have no idea what Glausidas and Mnasias did in their last minutes. But they and dozens of others at least live on as names in stone because they died in glory rather than perished old and in obscurity—and so were commemorated on heroes’ lists that ended up over the ages as thresholds and windowsills for today’s similarly struggling farmers in the same plain of Mantinea.36
Thucydides himself probably sat in these hills and wrote what he saw, with a bird’s-eye view of the killing as it unfolded below. His eyewitness description of the great fight of 418 remains the ancient world’s most detailed and informative battle narrative, ending with his dry assessment that here transpired “the greatest battle that had occurred for a very long while among the Hellenes.” By “greatest” Thucydides apparently did not mean size. More soldiers were likely present seven years earlier at Delium. Thucydides instead implied that for once the outcome of a single battle might have determined an entire conflict, inasmuch as Sparta at last got her long-hoped-for hoplite clash against most of her enemies.37
Yet there is another Mantinea that transcends tactics, strategy, and politics, a story of accidents, brutality, and human fickleness. Alcibiades’ intrigue prompted the battle. But other Athenian generals, not he, fought and died here, among them Laches, the eponymous interlocutor of a Platonic dialogue, who was stabbed in the back as he ran away. Years earlier the same Laches had taken off from Delium; this time he was just as nervous but not so lucky. The Spartan king Agis, deemed incompetent or worse, had no belly to fight at Mantinea, and so twice backed his army out of the valley in the week before the battle. But fight he finally did and won the greatest single-day Spartan victory of the Peloponnesian War—ensuring that Sparta would at least not lose its struggle with Athens and that he would conduct a successful war against Athens in the decade to come.
The Anatomy of Battle
When the Spartans invaded the plain of Mantinea to break up the nascent democratic alliance of rebellious Peloponnesian states, they faced a coalition enemy army of radically variant composition. That group of 1,000 elite Argives, who trained at public expense and were mostly oligarchic, were ostensibly to serve as crack troops on the coalition’s right. They, along with the Mantineans, had initially broken through the weak Spartan left, where a gap had opened between it and the center. But then the allies had foolishly paused to plunder the baggage train and had not continued spearing the Spartan center from the rear. Had they pressed home their attacks against the backs of King Agis’ elite, the Spartans may well have lost the battle and the hundreds of Athenians and Argives would probably have been saved over on the left. Either the chance of plunder or the sheer fear of meeting Spartiates—even from the rear—explains their fatal hesitation. Clearly, allies on the same side of the battle line did not always work in concert.
Such leniency accorded a trapped adversary was soon reciprocated. The Spartans on the right and center blew apart the regular Argive army and slew hundreds. Then for some reason when they swung over and turned their attention to the victorious Mantineans, they left the retreating 1,000 Argive elite—the real spearhead of the enemy coalition—alone. The suspicion immediately arose that the Spartans were looking past the battle and plotting for a return of a docile oligarchic Argos. Such a reconstituted conservative ally later would need men like the 1,000 elite to keep democratic firebrands at bay. In contrast, the more hoplites killed from Mantinea the better, to teach them the wages of democratizing against fellow Peloponnesians.
What about those equally defeated Athenians on the allied left? The Spartans killed only 200 of them, allowing the other 800 to flee. After all, the two states were officially still at peace. So it made no sense to annihilate Athenians, especially when a moderate board of generals at Athens had already chosen not to send a full force to Mantinea, several thousand additional hoplites that might well have spelled defeat for the Spartans.38
In coalition warfare in which several allied city-states fought alongside one another, who and what determined which phalanx fought where, either on the esteemed right, where there was little danger, or the inglorious left, where peril was greatest? Usually the honored right slots were given either to the host poleis—the Tegeans and Mantineans, respectively, in 418—or to the strongest and most numerous force, usually Thebes, Athens, or Sparta. In response, allies usually resented the fact that they had followed the lead of such larger city-states only to end up fighting the strongest adversaries as their supposed betters over on the right wing faced the enemy’s weakest troops.
The later tactical breakthrough of the general Epaminondas at the battle of Leuctra in 371 was not merely that he put his best on the left to a depth of 50 shields to ensure a slugfest with the Spartan elite right, but that by doing so he ensured to his own allies—and Sparta’s confederates across the battlefield as well—that neither weaker side would have to
face their betters and play the roles of sacrificial lambs. The next winter Epaminondas invaded Laconia with a unified army and encountered Peloponnesian states that appreciated his past magnanimity and were now eager to join him. How odd that the basic idea that a leader should bear the greatest risk in battle by putting his men on the left of the phalanx waited until the twilight of the hoplite age.
Normally, however, because such alliances were often shifting and predicated on internal political upheavals—various factions installing democratic government one day, oligarchy the next—there was constant suspicion within a coalition army. Sometimes as much enmity arose along as across the battle line. At Delium, remember, the Boeotian confederation was racked by internal strife among its several member city-states. The Theban hegemons especially distrusted their neighbors the Thespians. It was probably out of enmity that Pagondas and his generals placed the suspect Thespians directly across from the Athenian right wing, perhaps in hopes that they would either fight well and hold off Hippocrates or be annihilated in the attempt.
As the battle unfolded, the Thebans got both their wishes. The Thespians were almost obliterated and yet kept back the Athenian elite until reserves could arrive to stabilize the wing even as Pagondas shattered the Athenian left. The result of such sacrifice was that there were at least 300 Thespians killed at Delium, perhaps out of an original contingent that numbered 600 to 700.
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 22
