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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  If it had been a terrible error two years earlier for the Plataeans to break sworn oaths and execute the Theban saboteurs, it was even more disastrous to place the city’s future under the protection of an ally on the wrong side of Mount Kithairon—one at war, beset by a terrible plague, and no more likely to defend a distant and tiny foreign community than it would protect its own farmers and farmland in front of its own walls. In short, the Plataeans on the ramparts seemed to be trapped inside their circuit by the Spartans, even as their families were residing as detainees among their “friends,” the Athenians.

  Misplaced Genius

  The second assault on Plataea that now followed proved to be the most remarkable example of the multifarious arts of Greek siegecraft during the entire Peloponnesian War. The ferocious attack and spirited defense warranted Thucydides’ full attention, in part because of its savagery and the ingenuity of the combatants. Within a day Archidamus had encircled the entire city with a makeshift wooden palisade, piled together from the limbs of fruit trees that his ravagers were only too happy to cut down. The circumference of Plataea’s walls was only fifteen hundred yards. The Peloponnesian army that arrived in Boeotia probably averaged somewhere around 30,000 combatants, in addition to various servants and auxiliaries. That meant that there were easily over 20 men responsible for each yard of circumvallation, explaining why they finished their first ad hoc blockading fence in about twenty-four hours. Clearly this was a far easier task than ravaging Attica. Unlike the later Athenians on Syracuse, the Spartans grasped that the key to any successful siege was to throw up some sort of makeshift wall immediately, so that from the outset food and water might be denied the enemy. That way they could start the countdown to starvation well before more elaborate and time-consuming permanent walls of encirclement could follow.

  Convinced that the garrison was trapped, an impatient Archidamus now turned to building an earthen ramp that might serve as a road right over the top of the battlement. The work on the sloped mound—so famous in the Old Testament sieges and later at the horrific Roman encirclement of Masada—may have been the only instance of such a technique in the entire Peloponnesian War. Yet the Greeks were not unused to this sort of earthen construction. For centuries they had rolled up the column drums and architraves of their archaic temples by fashioning temporary earthen inclines. But whether in peace or war, such construction remained a time-consuming task that took even Archidamus’ huge force some seventy days, or almost double the time he would usually have spent ravaging in Attica.

  Immediately the reaction and counterreaction of the combatants reached a fevered pitch, inasmuch as the Plataeans were fighting for their very existence, the Spartans against time itself. Much of King Archidamus’ army was made up of Peloponnesian yeomen who needed to get home and attend to their own summer harvests. Moreover, the besiegers would have quickly devoured most of their provisions and soon found the wheat fields of Plataea insufficient to feed such a horde—itself probably now larger than almost any city in Boeotia.

  As the ramp grew, the Spartans added reinforcing logs and stones to keep the earth compact and stable. In response, the Plataeans tried to increase the height of their own wall faster than the ramp could reach them, by adding additional courses of mud brick faced with timber. Just in case the more numerous enemy force might win the race for the top, the Plataeans also secretly bored holes through their own lower walls, right into the foundations of the ramp, and began stealthily removing earth—thus insidiously sinking the entire mound nearly as fast as it was rising! The Spartans countered by stopping up the breaches with makeshift clay-and-reed plugs. So it went, back and forth, on and on, as challenge met response, the Greeks from dozens of city-states now using the same energy and genius that had crafted magnificent temples and created classical literature to fight over the tiny wall of a tiny town.

  To cover their bets in case the Spartan mound still rose faster than it could be undermined or outwalled, the Plataeans also erected a new inner semicircular fortification not far to the rear of the old circuit. If the mound went over the original fortifications, the Spartans who stormed in now might be surprised by a completely new rampart, and thus would be forced to start the siege over again.

  But the Spartans were just as adaptable. For the first few weeks, at least, they had the advantages of steady supplies of food and provisions, and far more men working to break in than those laboring to keep them out. They now began bringing to bear several crudely constructed siege machines—large timber battering rams, most likely on wheels—and not only pushing one of them up the ramp but banging others against the less-well-defended portions of the fortifications.

  Not to be outdone, the desperate Plataeans—they had been engaged nonstop in tunneling, mining, and raising an entirely new wall—began to fashion even stranger counterweapons. Someone thought up the idea of a cranelike device of enormous rope nooses that could be lowered to catch the rams; so the besiegers’ machines were snagged, raised, and then dropped. In case the ram heads were not shattered from the concussion, the Plataeans also crafted twin poles to which heavy beams were chained. The contraption was then extended over the besiegers, carefully aimed, and the timber dropped down to snap the heads off the rams.

  Archidamus was utterly exasperated by such pesky ingenuity. Plataea’s skeleton garrison of 600–480 combatants and 120 women cooks—had held off his entire army for weeks. These stubborn defenders showed no signs of either starvation or civil dissension, the usual indications that capitulation was imminent. If ravaging had proved futile in either starving Athenians or prompting battle, siegecraft was proving even more maddening.

  He next turned to fire. His engineers sought to burn down the city they could not storm. Brush was dropped from the mound and piled in next to the wall. More was thrown over the ramparts. Pitch and sulfur were mixed, poured on the piles, and then lighted. If the fire did not weaken the mud bricks and their wooden supports, then perhaps the fumes would sicken the garrison. Thucydides believed that much of the city would have been engulfed had the winds been favorable and the weather stayed dry.

  Instead, the breezes remained calm and sudden rains came. The fires burned out without damaging the stone walls and their timber braces or the wooden supports of the houses inside. Nor did the smoke from such a sulfurous mixture incapacitate the defenders—if that was also an intent of the conflagration.

  With the failure of the fire attack, coupled with the discovery of the Plataeans’ new secondary wall, the Spartans felt stymied. It was now late September. They had been stuck at Plataea for over three months with nothing to show for their efforts in a backward hamlet. If anything, Archidamus was proving to neutral Greek city-states that the Spartan reputation for incompetence in taking fortified positions was largely justified—a disastrous development for a state that exercised sometimes tenuous authority over a number of fortified cities in the Peloponnese.

  Allied troops were restless. Archidamus finally realized this when he conceded that he could neither take nor afford to abandon the city. So he compromised somewhat, allowing most of his hoplites to trudge back home to the Peloponnese, as he marshaled some others to build a more permanent wall of circumvallation to augment the temporary one of local fruit trees. Now his men set to work digging trenches on both sides of a circuit of twin walls. That way they sought not only to extend the height of the ramparts and create protective moats but also to provide mud bricks for their construction.

  In fact, the Peloponnesians were building a curious circumvallation like nothing seen before in the history of Greek siegecraft—albeit on a smaller scale, perhaps as sophisticated as Julius Caesar’s twin palisades some four hundred years later at the siege of Gallic Alesia. Two parallel walls rose about sixteen feet apart, roofed in between, and outfitted not only with towers, battlements, and gates but also with interior quarters for the garrison. While the parapets must have been somewhat flimsy—some escaping Plataeans would later knock down a section as they
scaled the wall—the besiegers would still have good shelter for the winter, while remaining protected from sorties from both the city and the surrounding countryside.

  To take the city, in other words, Archidamus had essentially built an alternative city in the middle of nowhere. His fieldworks were double the circumference of Plataea’s own walls and nearly as elaborate. When he finished, he further divided his army and left behind a garrison, splitting the responsibility for the strangulation of Plataea between Peloponnesian forces and local Boeotians. To a neutral outsider, all this labor and capital expended on a mere hamlet was nonsense; but to the Peloponnesians and their Boeotian allies, Plataea had now become a symbol of both their intent and their ability to wage a murderous war against the Athenian empire.

  Respite

  The courage and genius of the Plataeans for a time won out. But they soon realized that with the erection of this curious barrier they could neither leave nor be rescued. Still, the stalemate now persisted for yet another year and a half after Archidamus departed—or about forty-five months since the initial night attack by the Thebans. In the meantime, Pericles had died; Attica had been ravaged twice; the plague had killed over one-quarter of the Athenian population—and 600 defenders of Plataea went about surviving in a ghost town on ever-dwindling stored provisions, long abandoned by most of its inhabitants and mostly forgotten by their beleaguered and disease-ridden Athenian would-be protectors across the mountain.

  In 429 the citizens of the northern state of Potidaea had finally given up their city to Athenian besiegers, an ongoing blockade that mirrored the contemporaneous siege far to the south at Plataea. The surviving Potidaeans were starved out, and allowed to leave with the clothes on their backs and a tiny amount of road money to see them on their exodus. At the time, the harsh treatment accorded the Potidaeans—captives after hoplite battle were usually exchanged or ransomed, and nearby civilians left alone—must have outraged the Greek world, the ripples of indignation lapping all the way to the ongoing assault at Plataea. If the fate of Potidaea steeled the Spartans to persevere against the Plataeans, they should have remembered that the Athenians had at least not executed those who surrendered. But in the future, with the fate of the soon-to-be murdered Plataeans also on their mind, the Athenians would rarely show any mercy at all.

  The last phase of Plataea’s long ordeal came to an end through slow starvation. But first, in December 428, almost four years after the Thebans had burst into the city, the beleaguered garrison voted for breakout. About 220 of the most audacious snuck out of the city—on a night as rainy and moonless as the initial Theban assault years earlier. The fugitives scaled the twin counterwalls with specially measured and constructed ladders, killed some of the occupying garrison, and escaped to Athens. The breakout was brilliantly planned, inasmuch as the ladders’ height had been specially calibrated to specification by counting the courses of bricks in the enemy counterfortifications. And the escapers had waited for a dark wintry night, even as the remaining garrison in Plataea provided diversions.

  Each man went out with one foot bare to ensure good stability in the mud. Only a single Plataean was captured and a few others turned back; in all 212 Plataean men, over a third of the skeleton garrison, escaped. While their departure meant less mouths for the city’s dwindling food supplies, it also left the desperate defenders with almost no ability to continue the watch on the ramparts, in theory a mere 267 men and women of dubious health to guard some fifteen hundred yards of parapet.

  Each defender would now be responsible for over five yards of the circuit walls. The Spartans could take the skeleton garrison almost anytime they wanted, although they were still wary about storming the ancestral home of such an honored people. Thus, rather than go over the walls, they felt it wiser that the few Plataeans left sue for peace and surrender, inasmuch as they could later claim in any peace negotiation that the city had not been stormed and needed to be given back, rather in the manner of a convert that had voluntarily joined the Spartans and their allies.

  At the very time the end was nearing for the trapped Plataeans, their Athenian benefactors a mere fifty miles away ignored the besieged and were instead concluding yet another successful assault of their own against the rebellious Mytileneans on Lesbos, across the Aegean. After the capitulation of the city, the Athenians executed over 1,000 of the ringleaders of the revolt and turned all their confiscated land over to Athenian settlers. Among the captives was a Spartan expeditionary officer, Salaethus, who asked to be spared on the condition that at the eleventh hour he could use his influence to call off his comrades’ siege at Plataea. But the obdurate Athenians were more interested in killing an elite Spartan than in saving a few Plataeans who had foolishly taken them at their word of protection some four years earlier, during a time of peace when Pericles was alive and the plague unknown.

  So Plataea fell shortly after the Athenians razed Mytilene, during the summer of 427, at the start of the fifth year of the war that had begun so much earlier with the Theban assault. The emaciated defenders left behind finally gave up, unable to meet one of the stronger Spartan probing attacks. Thucydides records the surrender negotiations, making special note of the poignant speech of the Plataean captives. They recited to the Spartans a litany of reasons why and how the entire calamity had begun years earlier when such a historically honorable people had been so unjustly attacked in a time of peace.

  The Wages of Resistance

  The furious Thebans demanded an opportunity to refute the captives as they insisted on collective death sentences. In the end the Spartans worried over the sheer embarrassment of it all, almost four years and thousands of man-hours wasted to capture a tiny garrison. Probably no more than a couple hundred men and women from the original defenders were still alive. Anger over their failure and the need to pacify the frustrated Thebans sealed the fate of the Plataeans.

  The captives were asked once more a single question: had they done anything to help the Spartans in the present war? It was a silly inquiry: what chance had the Plataeans had to help either friend or foe while they were trapped inside their city for four years? When they each replied no, the adult males were executed on the spot. The women and children were sold into slavery.

  Plataea itself, like Mytilene a few weeks earlier, was razed. The booty from its ruins was used to build a precinct to Hera, as if a symbolic act of piety could assuage the sins of invading a neutral city in a time of peace and executing the descendants of the heroes of the Persian Wars. The neighboring Boeotians, who had started it all by attacking sleeping civilians, rented out the surrounding farmland from the new Spartan owners, who desperately wanted some recompense for a costly fiasco that had gained them little strategic advantage. Thucydides ends the sad tale with the matter-of-fact statement “Such was the end of Plataea in the ninety-third year after she became an ally of Athens.”3

  The lengthy siege also fascinated the historian, who returned to the ongoing four-year saga of the garrison three times in his narrative. What can one learn from the poor Plataeans’ debacle about the status of Greek siegecraft? First, it proved almost impossible to storm a walled city without artillery, movable towers, light-armed skirmishers on scaling ladders, and plentiful archers and missile troops. For all the impromptu ingenuity of the attackers, the Peloponnesians were the wrong type of besiegers, the majority of them clumsy hoplites, and they employed only primitive battering rams and covered sheds. The Plataean escapees, when lightly armed and equipped with ladders, proved more adept in going over the Spartans’ elaborate double walls of circumvallation than the Spartans did in trying to break through the city’s ramparts. Plataea’s walls, like those of so many of the Greek city-states, seem to have been beefed up in the decades preceding the war on the assumption that the advantage in contemporary sieges was always with the defenders if they had strong stone ramparts.

  Second, taking a city really meant starving the people inside. The only sure way to reduce a Greek garrison was through
famine brought on by walling it off from both its own land and relief sorties from abroad. But a land power like the Peloponnesians was oddly ill-suited for such a task. Soldiers had their own harvest commitments back home. The moment an army arrived, the clock began ticking to determine whether the defenders or the attackers would first run out of food and water. The odds should have favored the besiegers. Yet their greater numbers, unfamiliarity with the local landscape, and worry about hostile relief forces could sometimes leave them as hungry, thirsty, and sick as those inside the city. In addition, in almost no case of any major siege, whether at Plataea, Mytilene, or Melos, did either Athens or Sparta commit sizable relief forces to save their respective beleaguered ideological allies. True, the Peloponnesians belatedly sent help to Syracuse, but only after a year of warring there, and more with the idea of hurting Athens than saving the Syracusans.

  Sieges were ostensibly between conventional adversaries within and outside the walls. In fact, they were often precipitated by, and sometimes resolved through, the intrigue and treachery of zealots and foreign agents. The exorbitant expenses incurred at Plataea—most of the rural plunder had been carted off by the Boeotians and the vast majority of citizens had long ago left the city with their valuables—also had a catastrophic effect on the Spartans’ willingness to engage further in such high-stakes intrigue. Plataea had cost much and, when taken, had given them back very little. Instead, as the war evolved sieges would increasingly become mostly a specialty of the Athenians, who were far better able to pay for them—and had far more subjects willing to revolt.

  The Politics of Siegecraft