Paralysis
At the very heart of the disaster was the flawed nature of the tripartite command. It was not just that battle responsibility was divided among three generals, rather than the more normal two. The suspicious Athenians, after all, were notorious for sometimes having too many squabbling commanders in the field at once. The problem was that the three were temperamentally so different, and in addition brought considerable political baggage along on the voyage. The senior officer in charge, the naturally cautious Nicias, was in poor health and had been against the expedition from the beginning. Thus for the next two years he fought only haphazardly and always in fear of being charged back home with dereliction. Such was the peculiar nature of Athenian command that sometimes generals who did not approve of expeditions were put in charge of them, on the dubious logic that they would provide a critical accountability both in the field and, later, at home.
Alcibiades was shortly recalled on allegations of sacrilege. On the eve of sailing, dozens of young right-wing firebrands, in a fit of drunkenness and politically inspired audacity, had been accused of public sacrilege that cast ill omens over the expedition’s impending departure. Perhaps their real intention was to spook the superstitious voting poor into rescinding the expedition altogether. Only that way might Athens ensure that an oligarchic Sparta remained neutral and its army thus kept away from the Attic heartland. While Alcibiades may have been involved with the pranks that profaned the secret fertility rites at Eleusis, he probably had nothing to do with the bolder escapade to mutilate the herms, stone totems sacred to Hermes that dotted the Attic landscape to ensure divine protection for travelers and private households. In any case, the fleet left under a cloud, but the irony remained that by charging Alcibiades in absentia with a capital crime and then seeking his recall from Sicily, the outraged Athenians perhaps played right into the hands of the conspirators: the man most responsible for leading the democracy on a vast imperial adventure would be sabotaged by his erstwhile supporters from carrying out their own radical ideas.
Shortly after arriving in Sicily, Alcibiades received the summons to return home. Grasping that extradition was the equivalent of a death sentence, he evaded his jailers and sailed instead to the Peloponnese. There he soon ended up at Sparta, urging it to renew the war both through aid to Sicily and the garrisoning of Attica. Meanwhile, back on Sicily, the no-nonsense Lamachus apparently lacked the political stature or wealth to convince the other two to enact his prescient plans for immediate attack on Syracuse. Within the year he was killed in battle while besieging the city. His impotence and later death were tragic, since under his leadership Athens not only might have shocked an ill-prepared Syracuse into surrender or panic but would have captured a great deal of plunder out in the countryside before it could have been evacuated.
The Athenians almost immediately ignored the cardinal rule of any great invasion: the need for direct action. Upon arrival in enemy territory there is only a finite time for victory, as stalemate weighs in favor of the defenders. Yet the Athenians did not, as Lamachus advised, head straight for Syracuse upon discovery that most of the Sicilians were not so eager to be liberated, that Athens’ few allied states were neither wealthy nor resolute, and that the Syracusans themselves were not shocked and awed as they began to see an impressive fleet more hesitant and dilatory than resolute and aggressive.
Nevertheless, the Athenians fought courageously for the next two years in almost every imaginable fashion, as befitting an ingenious democratic people. But never again after their arrival in late summer 415 would they regain what the American general George S. Patton once called the “unforgiving minute”—that brief window of opportunity when lightning action can stun the enemy, win an entire theater, and bring dramatic results without great carnage. The moment the surprised Syracusans discovered that they were not the immediate object of the Athenian armada, the emboldened citizenry recovered and demanded offensive operations against the Athenians.8
The Athenians did little upon arrival. Instead of attacking Syracuse, after heated debate they sailed to Rhegium. Once there, they got no help. Worse, they soon learned that their purportedly opulent Segestan allies were broke. With neither much allied money nor many troops forthcoming, they now headed for the town of Catana, some fifty miles to the north, to make a base for further operations against Syracuse.
Their first success after months of dawdling was the capture of the small community of Hyccara. After their experiences of nearly two decades of storming small cities from Potidaea to Melos, the Athenians had little trouble in taking the insignificant town. Under the new protocols of war, they sold every inhabitant into slavery. But by now it was nearly autumn and the first four months of the campaign had accomplished almost nothing: Alcibiades had been recalled, escaped, and was advising the enemies of Athens; the slothful Nicias was in virtual command; and the Athenians had yet to attack an ever more confident Syracuse.
The Struggle for Mounted Supremacy
Men who knew war well at Athens mostly misjudged the type of forces necessary for victory on Sicily, a distant island whose wide plains and greenery were more like the landscape of Thessaly than that of Attica or the Peloponnese. Intelligence about the nature of Sicilian warfare, the reliability of allies, and the resources of the enemies was either flawed or nonexistent. In perfunctory fashion Nicias had warned the Athenians that they would require mounted troops, but as a traditional soldier he predictably still gave far more attention to the need for hoplites. Even Alcibiades, the experienced cavalryman, had assured the Athenians that they could easily defeat Syracuse precisely because Sicilian states were notoriously weak in infantry! Yet almost immediately upon arrival, the Athenians discovered instead that their thousands of hoplites were mostly irrelevant for victory, and that they lacked the one resource—plentiful horsemen—that might have given them the protection needed for a successful siege. There was little excuse other than hoplite chauvinism to account for such strategic naïveté. After all, the Athenians already knew that more horsemen would have played a critical role at Spartolos (429), and through cavalry they had kept the Spartans under constant attack in Attica—operations that both Nicias and Alcibiades has been integrally involved with.9
Once ensconced at Catana, the Athenians grasped that Sicily was huge and required nearly constant communications with its network of cities. For an invader to have any chance of success against Syracuse, a city-state as large as Athens with hundreds of skilled horsemen, mounted supremacy was critical. Instead, Syracusans routinely rode up to the Athenian base at Catana and insulted the encamped Athenians, deliberately trying to provoke an invader who himself within a few weeks of arrival seemed more like the besieged than the real aggressors. To win this war, Athenian cavalrymen were needed in massive numbers to protect the stonemasons and skirmishers who alone could cut off Syracuse from its hinterlands by fortifications.
If the Syracusans were to emerge for a conventional hoplite battle, Athenian horsemen would be necessary to protect the flanks and conduct pursuit in the plains of Sicily. And when Athenians began to ravage the countryside and deny farmers access to their fields, cavalrymen were again essential. Lamachus, as an old veteran of fighting the Spartans in Attica who knew something about raiding and plundering, believed that upon arrival the Athenians should have immediately scoured the Syracusan countryside to find supplies from the unguarded farms and to shut off the city’s access to its vital hinterlands.
Something drastic had to be done to provide deterrence against what would prove the largest corps of enemy horsemen the Athenians had faced since the Persian invasions over a half century earlier. Yet cavalry was the one asset that the Athenians were woefully short of on Sicily. Either out of fear of the great seas between western Greece and southern Italy, or perhaps realizing the need to keep a cavalry patrol to guard the Attic countryside should the Spartans return in their absence, the Athenians had initially brought along only a single horse transport and 30 riders. Perhaps
that was understandable for anyone who has made the voyage from western Greece to Sicily in moderately heavy seas: imagine an armada of 10 or so horse transports—300 ponies on converted triremes with decks a mere few feet above the water—riding the waves that often sicken contemporary tourists on mammoth modern ships. Athens was not likely to risk its entire fleet of horse-transport ships and almost a third of its vital mounted defense force of Attica on the open seas.
After discovering from their base at Catana that their hoplites and skirmishers could not destroy Syracusan agriculture any better than the Spartans had ruined Attica, the Athenians sought to find some way of getting back down to Syracuse without being constantly attacked by horsemen. Finally, through false information they tricked the Syracusans into committing their land forces. Meanwhile, they stealthily sailed down the coast unopposed to Syracuse. There they disembarked in safety before the fooled cavalry could return. Although successful, this stratagem was ominous: a few hundred horsemen had kept tens of thousands of Athenian troops confined to their base. Only by deception could the Athenians even approach the very target of their entire expedition—and they had to sail, not march overland.
Even when the Athenian phalanx assembled in front of the surprised city, it was careful to deploy only on terrain where “the Syracusan cavalry could least of all harm them both in the actual battle and before.” One ancient source believed that the desperate Athenians actually set spiked horse traps on the sides of the army to keep back the dreaded mounted enemy—a humiliating admission that heavy infantrymen no longer fought on the “best and most level ground.” And why not, when the furious deceived Syracusans would ride back in full force, some 1,200 horsemen eager to pick off anyone out of formation? Although in the ensuing actual battle Athens’ hoplites broke the more inexperienced Syracusan infantrymen—who were apparently terrified by the sound of thunder and unused to war on foot—they could not destroy them, given the cover once more of this enormous mob of horsemen. At no time in the Peloponnesian War had the Athenians ever fielded a force of more than 600 cavalry at once. The very idea that 1,200 enemy horsemen would roam the Greek battlefield at will was something beyond their comprehension.
Even this tiny hoplite battle was predicated on the idea that only a trick could allow the Athenians to muster in peace, that only wise use of geography could protect them in battle, and that victory could never be fully exploited as long as a mounted enemy ranged the battlefield. Overnight on Sicily, Hellenic war as the Greeks knew it had changed. The presence of 1,200 Syracusan horsemen salvaged a standoff from an utter rout. Overwhelming numbers of horsemen turned the rearguard action into a victory when the Athenians sailed back to Catana and gave up operations for the winter. Once back at their base, the stunned Athenians made preparations to find as many cavalrymen as quickly as they could.10
The Athenians’ only hope under these surreal conditions of Sicilian warfare was to cobble together an adequate mounted counterforce of their own from their allies or somehow find reinforcements from home. Once the Athenians obtained mounted superiority, they could move, forage, and fortify at will; but should they fail, the besiegers might well be confined to camp and thus become besieged.11
Despite living in makeshift quarters, thousands of Athenians now had to prepare to spend the winter outside Catana, while Nicias made ad hoc arrangements to acquire horses as quickly as possible, and to send out embassies to potential allies. He naively expected that both Sicilians and Carthaginians might aid an invader who had won only a small hoplite battle. In contrast, the Syracusans were hardly depressed by a minor setback, but rather buoyed by the near mastery of the countryside provided by an ever more haughty cavalry. While the Athenians dallied, the Syracusans revamped their command and set to work to reinforce the city’s fortifications for the inevitable siege to come. They sent encouraging news to the distant Spartans, soon to fall under the spell of their newfound advocate Alcibiades, that it was time to restart the war and finish off a now hemorrhaging Athens.
After escaping Athenian custody, Alcibiades had immediately reinvented himself in the Peloponnese into a doughty Laconian and spun fantastic tales that the Athenians had all along sought to renew the war and obtain hegemony over the entire Mediterranean: Sicily first, then Italy, followed by Carthage itself. From Alcibiades’ mind poured out even more yarns: such conquests would win new allies from Iberia, triremes built from the forests of Italy, and money from conquered peoples. Did a Carthaginian expedition exist only in his mind, or was it the logical successor to a Sicilian victory? Answers vary, but surely such visions of Athenian imperial democratic aggrandizement could rile paranoid Spartans to renew the war—and for the moment that was in the exiled Alcibiades’ own interest.
With the zeal of the convert, eager to pay back his countrymen, to save his own skin, and to ingratiate himself with his new hosts, Alcibiades further terrified his stunned Spartan audience with tales of fantastic Athenian plots to surround the Peloponnese by land and sea. He finished his treachery by outlining the only way to destroy his native city, in a manner as sober and judicious as his stories of Athenian imperial aims were probably wild: the Peloponnesians should promptly invade Attica and fortify a base at Decelea, send help to Sicily, and foment insurrection in the Aegean.12
Back in Sicily, when spring arrived the Athenians attempted a few raids. But mostly they were waiting for the requested horsemen from Athens. Eight months at Catana were essentially lost. From Athens at last came 250 experienced riders, 30 mounted archers, and 300 talents to purchase horses from Segesta and Catana. The fact remained that the Athenians had essentially accomplished nothing since the prior summer. Through inaction they had emboldened the Syracusans and very soon also their old Peloponnesian enemies on the Greek mainland. Nevertheless, with the arrival of a few Sicilian horsemen, Nicias had cobbled together a makeshift force of 650 cavalrymen, enough cover to allow his siege engineers to start the assault on Syracuse itself.13
Despite the near-fatal laxity on the part of Nicias, the Athenians still possessed a number of advantages that might well have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. With the departure and treachery of Alcibiades, Lamachus, the always reliable third general, slowly came into his own and was able to galvanize the Athenians to sail back to Syracuse and at last begin the real war that should have been started on the first day of arrival.
There they could use their newfound cavalry to protect besiegers while they started the campaign of building fortifications in earnest to hem in the city. After the Syracusans refused another pro forma offer to meet in hoplite battle, the Athenians suddenly showed signs of their old skills, which had reduced a score of cities from Potidaea to Melos. They almost immediately seized much of the heights of Epipolae, the upper portions of the citadel, and began a sophisticated plan to wall off from above the entire city from its hinterlands. To this end, they quickly built a round fort (“the Circle”), and began to use this nexus as a base from which to send out walls of circumvallation both to the sea at Trogilus and also southward to the Great Harbor of Syracuse, and thus partition off the city proper from infantry or naval reinforcement.
After successfully dealing with five invasions of their own territory, and storming Potidaea, Mytilene, Scione, and Melos, the Athenians had gained a great deal of both offensive and defensive experience in combined land and sea operations. Unlike the city of Athens, Syracuse had neither a well-fortified harbor like the Piraeus, a superior fleet, or anything like the Long Walls. Should the Athenians finish their ramparts around the upper city, patrol the southern walls to the sea, keep their newfound cavalry and hoplites busy in the countryside, and guard the exits from the Great Harbor, Syracuse really could be cut off from both home-grown and imported supplies, and thus the war won.
With at least an adequate supply of horses, the tide of battle slowly began to turn the Athenians’ way as they began freely to roam around the targeted city. Perhaps hunger and plague would soon follow, given that Syracuse would
be more easily cut off than was Athens of 430, which had descended into epidemic and chaos. Rumor had it that as the wall inched toward the city, the Syracusans were on the verge of capitulation, ready to concede that the belated Athenian attempt to cut them off from their hinterlands spelled doom for the city.14
Growing Despair
What was tragic about the next year of failed Athenian operations was not the combination of stupid mistakes and lost opportunities but, rather, how often Athenian courage and audacity almost nullified the blunders of command and nearly won the day. Nicias had made no effort to stop the Syracusan counterfortifications during the winter of relative inaction. He had allowed the newly arrived Spartan general Gylippus to bring an allied army of relief overland into the city. The Athenians let a Corinthian naval squadron under the Corinthian admiral Gongylus sail into the harbor at Syracuse. They failed to assault the enemy counterwall in its first phases of construction, and then labored on a meticulous double wall of circumvallation rather than immediately cutting off the city first with an ad hoc single fortification. Yet despite all that, the Athenians almost took Syracuse a few weeks after they began serious investment, in spring 414.
Because of some attacks on the Peloponnesian coast, Sparta now had the pretext that the Peace of Nicias was broken. It began freely to organize a steady stream of reinforcements to Sicily as it also prepared to invade Attica for the first time in over a decade. Sparta had agreed to the peace in winter 421 as a demoralized state, full of gloom over Pylos and failures in Attica and the northwest. But after the victory at Mantinea and the growing enemy quagmire in Sicily, it now saw no reason to wait to finish Athens off, especially when a major Athenian defeat might convince Persia to subsidize a Spartan fleet in earnest.15
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 29
