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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  What were the ramifications of the fatalities at Delium: cui bono? Almost 50 percent of the Thespians present at the battle were killed in an hour or so. Such catastrophic losses meant that a third of all the small farmers at Thespiae were now dead. Of the roughly 7,000 Boeotian hoplites present at the battle, perhaps 60 percent of the dead came from those that made up 10 percent of the army.

  There were immediate consequences to such one-sided sacrifices. Thucydides reports that a few months after Delium, in summer 423, “The Thebans destroyed the walls of the Thespians, on the allegation of pro-Athenian sympathies. They had always wished to do this, but now they found an easy opportunity since the flower of the Thespians had been annihilated in the battle against the Athenians.” Thespiae, it should be noted, had suffered the same fate when its hoplite army had been wiped out at Thermopylae a half century earlier, and would again lose nearly its entire small army at Nemea (394), thirty years after Delium.39

  Hoplite Fumes

  After the battle of Mantinea, the allies of Athens never again fought the Spartans in pitched battle. In a mere hour or so, the Spartans and their allies had killed at least 1,100 of the democratic coalition at a cost of only 300 Peloponnesians. Like the battle of Delium, a supposedly anachronistic way of fighting had settled an entire theater of war for the duration of the conflict. For the final fourteen years of fighting, there was only one more traditional hoplite battle—a small skirmish between the Athenians and Syracusans in Sicily. By 413 Sparta began to develop a serious fleet and to build permanent fortifications in Attica, giving up the old pipe dream that any army would meet its own in battle.

  The hoplite battle outside the walls of Syracuse (415) did not involve all the combatants of the Sicilian campaign, and the Athenians’ victory did nothing to prevent their eventual defeat. The Athenians formed in almost the same way they had three years earlier at Mantinea: Argives and crack Mantineans on the right, Athenians in the center with assorted allies on the left. But this time the Athenians and their allies grew confident because they were facing amateurish Syracusans, not deadly Spartans.

  The fight once more revealed the usual chain of events. Confusion was evident at the very beginning. The Syracusans, like the Athenians at Delium, were surprised at the sudden attack. Thunder and rain panicked the less experienced Sicilian defenders. After a fierce struggle, the battle was, as was customary, won on the right, where the Argives and Mantineans scattered the enemy. Cavalry no longer protected just the flanks, but played an integral role both in the pursuit and defense of the defeated.

  The small battle was similar to the earlier engagement at Solygia, even down to the number of dead: 260 Sicilians, a little more than 50 Athenian and allied fatalities. But just as earlier the seaborne Athenian hoplites, with 300 horsemen, had won a tactical victory over the Corinthians but been unable to translate such battle success to strategic advantage, so too in 415 the Athenians won a small battle but could not press their advantage. In short, hoplite fighting in such small numbers had little effect on the strategic goal of their campaign: the capitulation of Syracuse.40

  If during the Peloponnesian War cities were increasingly often protected behind strong stone walls, and if they weighed carefully the wisdom of committing their entire armies to old-style collisions against either numerically superior or more experienced phalanxes, then naturally fighting would be redirected against the entire urban community itself. Moreover, since the two most-feared armies of the age—those of Sparta and Thebes—were allied, what army would be so foolish to fight either and thereby guarantee its own destruction?

  Yet if there was a dearth of hoplite battle in the Peloponnesian War, there were instead attacks on cities in a manner unprecedented in earlier Greek history. Each side soon ignored the old idea that courage should determine victory, but instead looked to innovation, capital, and sheer manpower to storm the strongholds of their adversaries. Few, if any, Greeks were executed or enslaved in the aftermath of the hoplite battles at Mantinea or Delium. Tens of thousands most surely would be when war turned to the cities.

  * “Boeotians” is used to denote the residents of Boeotia, the large region to the north of Attica, which was united under an oligarchic federation led by its largest city, Thebes. Both in ancient and modern usage, “Boeotians” is sometimes used interchangeably with “Thebans,” although, strictly speaking, not all Boeotians were citizens of Thebes.

  CHAPTER 6

  WALLS

  SIEGES (431–415)

  Plataean Nightmare

  Sometimes the sieges of small towns and cities that have little strategic significance—a Guernica or Sarajevo—become emblematic of both the senselessness and the barbarity of war by the fact of their deliberate destruction and the inability or unwillingness of others to save them. So it was with the hamlet of Plataea, which slowly perished in a series of death throes.

  Plataea’s eventual capture made very little difference in the larger calculus of the conflict, even though it ostensibly guarded a key pass over the mountains to Attica, and might be an obstacle to any Boeotian army that thought about invading Attica in force from the northwest. As the town died, Athenians fifty miles away and mostly oblivious to its plight died in droves from a mysterious disease, while Spartans sought to cut down olive trees and burn houses in Attica. Yet throughout its four-year ordeal, the on-again, off-again siege to take this small Boeotian hamlet illustrated the multifaceted ways that the classical Greeks assaulted and defended fortified cities. In that sense, the death of Plataea won the attention of Thucydides, who was fascinated by the misplaced scientific genius of both the attackers and the attacked, and saw the strategically unimportant city’s fate as emblematic of the savagery of the war at large.

  Today the site is little more than a few stone foundations, coupled with the traces of the circuit walls and towers—most likely the remains of the rebuilt fourth-century town that grew up on the ruins of its fifth-century predecessor. A new paved road, in fact, goes right through what remains of ancient Plataea, almost exactly where twenty-five hundred years ago the Thebans and Spartans so desperately tried to break in. The modern visitor to Plataea rarely sees a single tourist. This solitude is true of most of the killing grounds that dot the Boeotian countryside and were once so famous in Greek literature: nearby Delium (vacation homes now encroach on the landscape where Socrates backpedaled out of battle), Leuctra (a quiet grain field and irrigation ditch mark the spot where Epaminondas crushed the Spartan army), and Chaeronea (now a nondescript orchard where Philip and his teenaged son destroyed Greek liberty).

  The fortified city’s end began in peacetime on a late March night in 431, seven months after the Spartans had officially declared the peace with Athens broken, and yet seventy days before they and their allies crossed the Athenian border. The Peloponnesian War ostensibly pitted Athens against Sparta, but its precursors were Corinthian and Theban attacks against the Corcyraean and Plataean allies of Athens.1

  About 300 prominent Thebans had secretly made their way to Plataea along the gently rising eight-mile road from Thebes during a rainy cold night. Their oligarchic ringleaders had counted on kindred reactionaries inside the border city to open the gates, since it would have been impossible to storm the walled community by day. Buoyed by the surprise arrival of a foreign force inside the walls, the Plataean zealots could then round up their sleeping democratic opponents, kill their ringleaders, and hand the city over to Thebes. Or so the right-wing conspiracists thought.

  Nothing is worse than for a state to have nearby enemies and distant friends—as the lonely experience of Armenia, Cuba, Taiwan, and Tibet attests. Adversaries loom daily on the horizon; far-off allies often pledge support that they cannot really provide, thereby ensuring that their friendship is as costly as it is undependable. The city of Plataea—like poor Poland squeezed between Germany and Russia—had the misfortune of resting on the border of powerful and hostile Thebes while miles away from stronger and friendly Athens.

&n
bsp; In fact, for much of the latter fifth century the Plataeans owed their independence from Thebes’ Boeotian Confederacy not to tangible Athenian military assistance or its strategic location on the main road into Attica. Instead, the backward state of Greek siegecraft meant that the city’s impressive stone walls could still guarantee it autonomy from the entire Boeotian Confederacy—despite the latter’s aggregate population of at least 100,000 people and nearly one thousand square miles of territory.

  The advantages in the age-old battle between offense and defense lay with the masons and stonecutters, whose stout ashlar courses, towers, and crenellations, and reinforced wooden gates could withstand the ram and the hand-propelled missile. In this age before the torsion catapult and movable artillery—which in the postwar era to come could hurl stones over 150 pounds up to three hundred yards distant—patience, treachery, hunger, and disease were the better assets of the besiegers. The exceptions during the Peloponnesian War when walls were breached are instructive: Torone, Lecythus, and Mycalessus were all stormed precisely because their walls were said to be in a state of disrepair.

  Athens was an old enemy of Plataea’s immediate neighbors, the Boeotians. It was no accident, for example, that much of the incest, patricide, and civil strife of the classical Athenian stage—involving Oedipus, Antigone, Creon, Teiresias, Pentheus, and the Bacchae—was situated in or near Thebes, Plataea’s contemporary adversary and the chief city of Boeotia. Nearly thirty years before Plataea’s destruction, Athens had once subdued Boeotia, and for over a decade had reestablished it as a friendly and democratic client state. But when the Athenians in turn were defeated in 447 at the battle of Coronea, and then mostly kept to their own side of Mount Kithairon, Plataea was once more left alone as an isolated vestige of hated Athenian imperialism. Consequently, the Boeotians, during the increasing tensions of 431, preempted the Spartans and sought to win over or finish off Plataea in a cheap victory before the Athenians realized that they were even at war.

  Once the Theban advance party got inside and made its way to the public square, everything suddenly went wrong. Their rightist Plataean co-conspirators wanted to kill all the democrats immediately. The more sober Theban invaders instead preferred to awaken the city. By virtue of their unexpected presence they would shock the people into accepting a forceful and peaceful inclusion into the Boeotian Confederacy. Yet it was not a wise thing for right-wing insurrectionists to call for conciliation in the midst of their own nighttime raid on a much larger democratic citizenry—especially when there were no more than 300 of them to bully the opposition.

  At first, the “shock and awe” tactics of the small party of invaders seemed to work. The stunned Plataeans were ostensibly pondering the terms. Yet in their ad hoc negotiations the sleepy democrats very quickly awoke to two surprising facts: there were not many Thebans, and there were even fewer of their own traitors who had invited in the foreigners. Within a few minutes they quietly retreated to their homes and plotted a counterassault. Soon dozens began burrowing through the common walls of their dwellings—Greek houses were made of mud brick without reinforcing studs and often had common partitions. Unseen, the resourceful democrats assembled to devise as best they could a sudden counterresponse. In no time they were barricading the streets and charging out en masse to confront the shocked and vastly outnumbered Thebans.

  The attackers became the attacked. Everything now turned against this tiny band of Theban interlopers, who, after all, were soaked, tired, and hungry. It was a black night, stormy, without much of a moon: good for sneaking in—terrible for finding a way out. The rain and mud increased the newcomers’ sense of disorientation, but then none of the foreigners knew their way back out of the winding streets anyway.

  In a frenzied retreat the Thebans got lost searching for the main gate, through which they had originally entered; it was now mysteriously jammed closed. The 300 Thebans immediately broke into scattered parties. Some tried to climb over the walls—and then mostly perished or were disabled in the subsequent fall of some twenty to thirty feet onto the rocky ground. Others got trapped in dead-end streets and were butchered by their pursuers. Still more were captured hiding in buildings. In a war to decide the future of the Greek world, this preemptive strike was a particularly inglorious beginning.

  Shared Barbarism

  The giddy Plataeans quickly sent out heralds to abort another and far larger supporting enemy force that was now arriving as planned in front of the city. After battling the rain and a swollen river, the Theban relief columns were shocked to find the city barred. Worse still, a Plataean envoy appeared from the darkness warning them to retreat without molesting any people and property outside the walls; otherwise the summary execution of all their kindred attackers now captured inside the walls would follow. On the first night of the fighting, the Plataeans—not known as a particularly savage bunch—would threaten, and soon carry out, the execution of captives. When the Plataeans got word to Athens of their plight, the first thing the Athenians did was to round up Boeotians residing in or visiting Attica, purportedly to use them as bargaining chips in the war that would inevitably follow from the night attack on Plataea.

  Such immediate resort to hostage taking—six years later the Athenians would threaten a similar immediate execution of 120 elite Spartiates should the Peloponnesian army again invade Attica—suggests that the Peloponnesian War was a scab that was torn off, revealing preexisting and deep festering wounds of a half century prior. Scholars who have catalogued all the major massacres documented in our literary sources during the fifth century note the depressing trend: seven massacres in the long history of fighting before the outbreak of the war and some twenty-four near the beginning and throughout the three-decade-long conflict.2

  After rounding up Boeotians, the Athenians responded by marching in and leaving a few garrison troops, aiding in the provisioning of the city, and arranging the evacuation of most of the Plataean women, children, and disabled to Attica. Having recovered from their recent nightmarish experience with treachery, murder, and broken oaths, some 480 Plataeans and a few Athenians in the city braced for the inevitable counterassault.

  They had a long wait. A surprised Sparta had prior concerns, and instead would soon find itself busy for two seasons of campaigning in Attica before the outbreak of the plague. It is unclear what went on inside Plataea for the next twenty-four months, other than the fact that Thebes apparently could or would not begin a full-fledged siege. Apparently the city was more a ghost town of adult males than a real community, as the tiny skeleton garrison kept watch for an assault that mysteriously did not come. A few rural Plataeans may have drifted back to their farms, making private alliances with the Boeotians who now surrounded the countryside and patrolled the fields. Plataea, in fact, was becoming a matter of prestige for both sides: the Spartans could not afford to allow their Theban allies to fail to polish off a small renegade city, while Athens for the security of its own empire belatedly realized that it was critical to prove that it would pay any price to help save its most proximate loyal ally. That being said, both sides had their hands full a few months later when the real war broke out.

  It was not until the beginning of the third year of the war—May 429—that at last the Peloponnesians went into Boeotia to help their Theban allies deal with the festering Plataean sore. Yet even when Archidamus led his massive force up to the walls, he offered two startling last-minute proposals: those Plataeans still holed up in the half-deserted city could either immediately announce their neutrality, let in his garrison, and thereby stay put—and alive. Or, if still distrustful of their Theban neighbors, they might leave the city in safety on the guarantee that their property and land would be looked after under Spartan auspices—with full rent, no less, for a decade or until the war ended.

  The Spartans, with a poor reputation for siegecraft, were not exactly eager for a protracted siege, one that even if successful would be costly and beneficial mostly to their mercurial Theban allies, w
ho had acted unilaterally and without prior consultation. Archidamus also remembered the symbolic stakes involved, namely the once gallant role of the Plataeans in the prior Persian Wars (490, 480–479). He was right then encamped near the hallowed battlefield where the Persian army a half century earlier had been crushed by the grandfathers of those now both inside and outside the walls.

  The pious Spartan king also had a problem of sorts with ancestral oaths, well known to all the Greeks, that had been pledged to protect the autonomy of Plataea, now by general consent the shared memorial of the Hellenes. The rolling plains around Plataea had, over some fifty years, become enshrined as the Omaha Beach of the Greek world, a hallowed battleground and Panhellenic graveyard where squabbling allies in better times had once fought, died, and been buried together to push back autocracy. It was one of the crimes of the Peloponnesian War that many of the consecrated places of the Persian Wars where Greeks had earlier united to preserve their freedom were slowly to be desecrated by internecine bloodshed: first the battlefield of Plataea; then another evacuation of Attica, but from a Greek rather than a Persian invader; and soon Spartan raiding in the seas off holy Salamis.

  The Plataeans asked for, and got from Archidamus, more time, and then immediately once more sent emissaries to Athens to explain their new dilemma. Themselves surrounded by Spartans, the Plataeans also had worries over many of their dependents who for over two years had been residing inside Athens, some as guests, perhaps most like quasi hostages in the plague-infested city. When they received word that real Athenian help was at last on the way to face the latest threat, the Plataeans felt emboldened enough to reject Archidamus’ final offer. They may have recalled that the Spartans enjoyed a poor reputation for storming cities and had failed two years earlier to capture even the small Attic garrison at Oenoë. The Plataeans now braced for the siege.