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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Again, how many died in these ghastly sieges of the Peloponnesian War? There are no precise numbers, but it is likely that tens of thousands perished. The few figures that survive add up quickly: 1,050 Athenians lost taking Potidaea, with no exact figures of how many Potidaeans perished inside the walls; over 1,000 executed at Mytilene; about 45,000 Athenians and allies who did not return from the siege at Syracuse, along with an untold number of Sicilians, who were to be besieged not much later by the Carthaginians. Sources most often tally the Athenian losses but forget, perhaps, that as many Sicilians perished as well. Thousands more on both sides perished at Torone, Scione, Melos, and Mycalessus.

  If one includes the execution of prisoners taken from captured ships, there were over twenty occasions in the Peloponnesian War when captured seamen or townspeople were summarily executed en masse. A recitation of such barbarity is salutary, if only to remind us just how frequent the killing became. Note especially the single year 427, when civilians were being simultaneously executed far to the west on Corcyra, on the mainland at Plataea, in the Aegean at Mytilene, and in Asia Minor by the Spartan admiral Alcidas.

  Plataeans killed all Theban hostages (431). Peloponnesians did away with all Athenians found in ships off the Peloponnese (430). Alcidas slaughtered captured Athenians (427). Plataeans and Athenians were eliminated upon surrender of Plataea (427). The Athenians executed 1,000 Mytileneans (427). Corcyraean oligarchs were executed (427). Two thousand helots were rounded up and killed (424). Aeginetans were captured at Thyrea (424). Megarian oligarchs executed democrats (424). Brasidas butchered all who could not escape at Lecythus (424). Spartans killed citizens of Hysiae. Mende was sacked (423) and Melos destroyed (416). Messanians were killed by pro-Athenian insurrectionists on Sicily (415). Even schoolboys were massacred at Mycalessus (413). The Athenians were surrounded and butchered at the Assinarus River and the survivors left to die in the quarries of Syracuse (413). Samian democrats murdered oligarchs (412); in turn, Chian oligarchs slaughtered democratic Chians (412). Lysander executed Athenians after Aegospotami (404). In addition, there were another 20,000 Greek soldiers who are recorded in our sources as taken prisoner and sold into slavery. Given these atrocities and the toll of the plague, in the sense of who died and how, the term “Peloponnesian War” appears a misnomer. A far better name might be “The Thirty Years Slaughter.”19

  How to Take a Polis

  In an obscure fourth-century military treatise about protecting poleis from besieging armies and intriguers within the walls, a shadowy Greek author, Aeneas Tacticus, who may have been a contemporary Arcadian general, reviewed the intrinsic drama of the siege. Aeneas points out that should the besieged citizenry survive, they thereby send a powerful message to the enemies not to try such a foolish attack in the future. On the other hand, should a city fall, it presaged a fate far beyond that of a defeated army alone: “But if the defenders fail in their efforts to meet the danger, then there is not one hope of safety left.”20

  The word for siege or siegecraft in Greek was poliorkia (hence the term “poliorcetics,” or “fencing in the polis”). Although there was an advanced science of taking cities by 431 involving rams, mounds, and fire weapons, walls themselves remained mostly unassailable, as they grew taller and thicker well beyond the old dimensions of ten to twelve feet in height and three to six feet wide, common before the mid-fifth century. The spread of ashlar blocks and regular courses of limestone, replacing mud bricks, rubble, and irregularly shaped stones, throughout the war widened the advantages of defense over offense even further. So there is yet another paradox about the besieging of cities in the Peloponnesian War, one that tells us a great deal about the overall nature of Greek society and culture: almost every assaulted city-state eventually capitulated, and yet almost none of them fell through storming the walls.

  Instead, in a world where the art of defensive fortifications had far outstripped the science of offensive siegecraft, city-states like Plataea, Potidaea, Mytilene, Scione, and Melos were starved out only after months, or even years, of systematic circumvallation. The sieges were sometimes accelerated through treachery, mostly in the form of partisans opening the gates at night. Even the supposed experts, the Athenians, did not know all that much about attacking walls and towers directly, smashing through stone foundations, or battering down wooden gates.

  Scaling a wall was not as simple as it sounds. Many city ramparts were twenty to thirty feet high. Ladders by necessity were tall, their height calibrated by counting the wall’s stone or brick courses, and thus flimsy. All were easy for defenders to toss back, especially if assault troops were heavy hoplites perched on rungs in the air with sixty to seventy pounds of equipment. No army on either side yet knew how to craft wheeled siege towers with artillery and hinged boarding ramps that might provide a bridge over the fortifications—engines that would become ubiquitous only a century later, during the siege craze among the successors of Alexander the Great. The Athenians’ clumsy attempts to build a primitive tower at Lecythus ended with its collapse.21

  The last chance to breach the walls was to follow a beaten army inside the walls before the gates could be shut. Even battering rams—the Athenians purportedly first fashioned them, along with protective sheds, or “tortoises,” at the prewar siege of rebellious Samos in 440—could not smash through reinforced wooden gates, at least not quickly enough to save the crews handling the ram from being picked off by stone- and missile-throwing defenders atop the walls. Primitive siege engines (mêchanai) were used not only by the Spartans at Plataea but also by the Athenians at Potidaea (“every kind of engine used in sieges”), and later in small skirmishes at Eresus and on Sicily. In all cases, such machines, probably no more than timber tipped with bronze on wheels, proved a failure, the crews sometimes wearing themselves out in vain efforts to batter down the fortifications. On other occasions they were vulnerable to capture or torching by counterassaults.22

  Why was this so? Rarely were the approaches to ancient cities on flat ground. Instead, most often the targeted gates were on inclines. It was nearly impossible for crews to push ponderous rams over uphill rocky ground while under assault from the walls. A better solution was to knock the parapets down. But catapults and other sorts of artillery were not invented until after the Peloponnesian War.

  There was no general in the fifth century comparable to the infamous Demetrius Poliorketes, nicknamed “the Besieger,” who in his failed siege of Rhodes (304) employed catapults, moles, miners, and siege towers (including the 130-foot iron-plated helepolis, or “city taker”). True, in three instances relatively early in the war troops employed fire—at Plataea, Delium, and Lecythus. But only at Delium did a strange hollowed-out beam, packed with incendiary pitch and its flame blown out by bellows, seem to work. That rare success was probably only because the target was a makeshift wooden rampart, not permanent walls of stone.

  Mining was no doubt undertaken in most sieges of the war. Yet the dirty business seems to have been a tactic much feared—Aeneas Tacticus later gives us plentiful advice on how to stop it—but rarely successful. In theory, tunnels could provide secret access for besiegers under the walls. Barring that, wooden reinforcing braces could be burnt at preset times, forcing the subsequently unsupported subterranean passageway to collapse, and with it the foundation of the fortifications themselves above. On occasion, even bees and wasps were let loose into enemy shafts to sting and annoy diggers.

  So tunneling was a tricky business. Greece is a rocky place where digging is rough under almost any circumstances. Sometimes cities had built substantial stone subterranean foundations that blocked underground entrance, or secondary interior moats to ensure that any diggers who got through emerged into trenches in full view of armed and waiting defenders. Nor was it easy to dig unnoticed from the walls. Tunnelers were forced to begin from great distances or to camouflage their excavations by building shelters over their initial holes.

  In response, defenders could usually hear diggers. O
ften defenders placed inverted shields over the ground to intensify the sounds of pickwork; the besieged could then block off the tunnels, countertunnel to collapse them, fill them with smoke, or pour in dirt as fast as it was removed. Again, there was not a single instance in the Peloponnesian War where mining alone caused the fall of a fortified city.

  Most cities, especially if they had provisions and strong fortifications, refused terms before the siege began. But if an army timed its arrival precisely during the grain harvest or grape vintage, depriving the defenders of their annual food supply or potential export income, then sometimes a few communities gave in at the very outset. Acanthus, for example, a wine-exporting community in northern Greece, in 424 surrendered at the outset to Brasidas rather than lose its precious grape crop.23

  Betrayal

  A popular tactic was treachery, the reliance on agents inside the walls to open the city during a dark or rainy night and thus save the lives and property of the besieged. The Theban attackers who started the Peloponnesian War by their assault of Plataea entered the city only because sympathetic oligarchs inside unbolted the gates to their foreign co-conspirators. The fault lines between squabbling oligarchic factions, democrats versus oligarchs, Thebes against Athens, mistrust between friendly Athens and Plataea, and general hostility between Sparta and Athens all coalesced in this little town. These multifaceted rivalries and tensions account for why the community was assaulted at night, prisoners murdered, oaths broken, and promised assistance not forthcoming.

  Why did perfidy play such a prominent role in siegecraft? The explanation is both a general one and yet seems specific to the peculiar nature of the Greek city-state and the era of the Peloponnesian War. It was hard to maintain political harmony among a cooped-up population of several hundreds or even thousands during a siege. Suspicion mounted that private deals might result in lenient consideration for opportunistic traitors after the city was taken. Conservative farmers often trudged in from their fields and disliked their urban counterparts. The latter dominated the city and were more willing to sacrifice the fields of the wealthier than risk their own lives in providing defense outside the fortifications. In such cases, for men of property “patriotism” entailed the sacrifice of one’s farm, while “treachery” reflected a desire to return to the countryside.

  The fractious nature of Greek politics, especially by the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, also ensured plenty of partisans on both sides in every city. Athens fought Sparta not merely as an Ionic culture pitted against the Doric people, or even a northern maritime state threatened by a southern infantry power. Rather, the divide was more sharply defined still by political fault lines, Athenian-style democracy against Spartan oligarchy.

  Because democracy was the more revolutionary of the two creeds, and the Athenians more frequently the besieging party, it turned out that there were always either would-be democrats or Athenian agents ready to open the gates or, in contrast, a few oligarchic exiles who desperately wanted to find some way to restore their city to the men of property. Yet as ancient observers from Thucydides to Aeneas point out, ideological professions were often high-sounding cover for personal agendas—private feuds, concern over debts, petty envies and jealousies—that ignited whenever the social fabric was torn through sieges, which worked like plagues and revolution to strip away the patina of civilization.

  Athens and Sparta were often hesitant to intervene, given the costs to the besiegers. At Potidaea, for example, a quarter of the attacking Athenians, 1,050 hoplites, perished from the plague alone. At Plataea, after four years of intermittent warfare and the eventual garrisoning of thousands of Peloponnesian and Boeotian troops, only 225 Plataeans and Athenians inside were officially reported as killed, less than the 300 Theban attackers who fell on the very first night of the assault in March 431! There are no figures of the additional hundreds of Spartans and Thebans who were injured or killed outside the walls in their nearly four-year effort to take the city.

  Throughout history the attackers often paid the higher price. During the savage though unsuccessful siege of Malta in 1565, over 30,000 Ottomans perished, while killing only 7,000 of the defenders. At Vienna in 1683, the besieging Turks withdrew after suffering over 60,000 losses, twelve times the 5,000 deaths of the defending allied Christians. The Japanese took Port Arthur (1904–05) after a five-month siege, but only after suffering 90,000 dead and disabled from hunger, disease, and Russian fire—three times the casualties of the defeated Russian garrison. For all the misery of being inside a trapped city, it was sometimes worse to be exposed outside without permanent shelter, secure walls, and stockpiled food.

  Statistical study of some sixty-nine recorded Greek sieges in the entire fifth century reveals that only sixteen citadels were taken through a forced blockade, while eleven involved some treachery inside the walls. But before one deprecates the art of siegecraft, in the other forty-two cases the city and its attackers came to some agreement that entailed a capitulation with terms, usually involving the besieged agreeing to hand over indemnities or give up on condition of guarantees for lives and property. So arose this paradox that exemplified the entire experience of attacking cities during the Peloponnesian War: few were successfully stormed, yet most came to some agreement to capitulate under threat of force and the specter of starvation.24

  Postheroic Walls

  Why did a people like the Greeks, steeped in the scientific method and adept at building majestic temples to precise designs, as late as the Peloponnesian War know so little about storming the impressive walls they so routinely built? From what little is known of the early history of the city-state from the eighth to fifth centuries, disputes were often settled by rural militias of heavily armed infantry who met each other in pitched battles. Under these rules of war, one side often threatened to ravage the cropland of the other to precipitate battle. Whereas early city-states may have had rudimentary walls of mud brick around their small citadels, most communities until the fifth century could not afford to encompass their entire living areas with stout stone fortifications. Why should agrarians spend labor and capital to extend the city’s ramparts beyond its acropolis, especially to protect the poorer, who owned no land and lived in town? But after the trauma of the Persian invasion of 480, the subsequent cold war between Athens and Sparta for most of the mid-fifth century, and the spectacular construction of the Athenian Long Walls, an increasing number of Greek states slowly began to invest in fortifications, to protect against both a sudden march of Spartan hoplites and the unexpected arrival of the Athenian fleet.

  Even today one of the most incomprehensible things about the antiquities of Greece are the plentiful remains of towers, walls, and temples in relatively flat terrain miles from quarries—proof, as it were, that the fragmented and warring classical Greeks lacked the unifying concept of nationhood (or even a word comparable to the Latin natio). Moreover, how the ancients cut stones with flimsy hand-held saws, then used teams to transport stones from quarries miles away seems miraculous, especially when it is kept in mind that even small stones not more than two feet in diameter might weigh nearly a ton.

  Compared to the economy of hoplite battle, walls and the effort to capture them were an expensive investment. Thus, after the Persian Wars, futile calls went out to Greek states not to rebuild their circuits, or to tear down those walls that had survived. The Spartans claimed that they did not wish the Persians to have national redoubts should they return. In fact, they were more afraid that the Athenians might use fortifications to spread a creed of war without hoplite battle. Or was it that all sides conceded that the Greeks as a whole could better invest millions of man-hours in something more productive than cutting and carrying tens of thousands of stones to wall themselves off from one another?

  For decades before the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks had sought to avoid something like what would transpire at the nightmarish siege of Potidaea, a two-year ordeal that cost the Athenians over 2,000 talents and over a quarter of the
ir original besieging force, enough investment to have built two entire Parthenons, to have plated with gold Pheidias’ monumental statue of Athena fifty times over, or to have staged all the plays that were presented in Athens during the fifth century. In that sense, much of the early cultural achievement of the Greek world was explicable in the relative economy of hoplite warfare, which required no investment in ships, dockyards, or walls, and limited fighting to a few grim hours.

  Often the victors tried to reclaim some of the costs of a siege by expropriating the farmland and property of the vanquished, both before and after capitulation. For example, the Spartans claimed possession of Plataea and rented its land out to neighboring Boeotians. They probably ransacked houses, stampeded livestock, and made off with crops once the citizens had either fled inside the walls or to Athens. The Athenians gave captured Melos over to 500 of its own colonists. After the infamously expensive Potidaean blockade and the ongoing siege of Mytilene, the money-strapped Athenians not only gave the town and its environs to their own settlers but immediately sent out ships to collect much-needed revenue from their subjects as well as voting to tax themselves further.25

  Booty sellers quickly descended on captured cities to market the spoils. Each woman and child, even when sold off en masse at depressed prices, might go for 100 drachmas, or about three months’ salary for a besieger. For a state to pay for a year’s siege, then, it would need to acquire about three or four healthy captives per each of its attackers—not counting the personal fortunes of the prisoners, which were often considerable. When the Athenian general Demosthenes surrendered his contingent to the Syracusan pursuers, the victors filled four inverted shields with coins, a sum estimated by present-day scholars to be about 55 talents, or the modern equivalent of about $27.5 million. If roughly 6,000 Athenians surrendered, then each man was carrying about two months of salary. So the capitulation of larger cities in some cases might mean an eventual profit for even the most costly of sieges. The trick was the initial outlay, or the confidence that a state had enough reserves to pay its besieging force on promises that the captured city would yield a profit to both the soldiers and the state.