A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War
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After finishing their circular fort, Athenian horse and infantry immediately beat off a Syracusan counterassault. With superior infantry discipline and the newfound support of horsemen, the Athenians systematically attacked the Syracusans on the heights of their upper city known as Epipolae, in a tragicomic war of rival fortifications: one side sought desperately to finish its walls over the rocky terrain to the sea, while its enemies threw up perpendicular lines of obstruction. In this odd mix of simultaneous attempts at construction and destruction, Lamachus was killed in a brief skirmish, robbing the Athenians of their sole gifted general.
Worse still, Nicias dawdled at the most critical moments and seemed to underestimate the psychological significance of the arrival of the Peloponnesians. He had no appreciation of the critically brief window of opportunity he had to finish the walls before the despairing Syracusans rallied at the sight of fresh Peloponnesian hoplites and ships. Given that Nicias had perhaps 10,000 laborers available for the task and about five miles of fortification to build on either side of the circular fort, there was no reason why a determined general could not have finished the project before reinforcements from the Peloponnese eroded both his psychological and numerical advantages.
Earlier in the war, the Athenians had built walls far more rapidly at Nisaea, Delium, and Pylos. Even the supposedly slow Spartans had surrounded Plataea with a double wall in less than three months. Almost five centuries later Titus walled off Jerusalem with a fortification of about the same length as the Athenians’ on Epipolae, using not many more men and in just three days. So despite the rough terrain and stubborn resistance, the Athenian line failed to reach the sea mostly because of lackluster leadership.
Nicias continued to dally. The two sides fought over ramparts on the heights. And almost imperceptibly an often idle Athenian navy, the only means of getting back home safely, deteriorated: its waterlogged ships and deserting allied and servile crews meant that the Athenians were no longer capable of either an ironclad blockade or an automatic victory in the Great Harbor should the Syracusans’ fleet and their newfound Corinthian allies finally come out to fight.
The appearance of the Corinthian fleet followed Gylippus’ overland relief march. This sudden arrival of Peloponnese manpower and leadership not only added military resources to the Syracusan cause but also began to win over neutral Sicilian cities. In a matter of days, Syracuse was thus saved from sure defeat. In response, Nicias, ailing from some sort of kidney disease, compounded his already long train of errors at summer’s end by sending home a request to be relieved. Facing the possible choice of dying on Sicily or being executed at home when he returned from a military catastrophe, Nicias sought to shift the responsibility for the campaign’s fate once more back to the Athenian assembly. Thus he advised the Athenians either to recall the entire expedition or to send him massive reinforcements.
In one of the most memorable scenes in his history, Thucydides begins his famous seventh book with the appearance of Peloponnesian succor at the eleventh hour of the siege, just as the Syracusans were on the verge of surrender:
Gylippus happened to have come at the critical moment when the double wall of seven or eight stades [almost a mile] had already been completed by the Athenians down to the Great Harbor—except for a short distance near the sea where they were still building. In regard to the remainder of the encircling wall, for most of the course that ran to Trogilus and the outer sea, stones had already been deposited and some parts were half completed while others were already finished. Thus, so near had the Syracusans come to catastrophe.16
The interruption of the critical final Athenian fortification above Syracuse by the Peloponnesians proved the most important moment of the entire conflict. Both sides now sought to pour additional forces into the confused and often nonstop battle on the heights above the city: the Athenians desperate to finish their double wall to the harbor and their longer rampart on Epipolae, the now energized Syracusans equally anxious to block their progress while they simultaneously harassed the enemy construction crews.
Despite occasional tactical victories, the war of the walls was a struggle that Nicias ultimately lost as Gylippus adroitly barred his path with a series of forts and counterwalls. The Syracusan cavalry on one occasion was instrumental in routing the Athenians. They charged hoplites on rough ground, sending the entire army back behind their unfinished fortifications. Such interruptions essentially ended any chance that the Athenians could ever break through the counterwall and extend the key final segments of their own circuit to the sea on either side.
Nicias alleged a number of reasons for the army’s failure in his interim written account to the Athenian assembly back home, from the lack of sufficient cavalry to the constant wear and tear on ships and crews. But ultimately the problem lay with the thin margin of error allowed by a total force of only 45,000 in both the first and second armadas. The expedition had really always been a great gamble that an Athenian fleet of little more than 200 ships could take out one of the largest cities in the Greek-speaking world some eight hundred miles distant across the seas—one always predicated on audacious and resolute leadership.
True, the careers of both Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar proved that forces of fewer than 50,000 could conquer and occupy successfully huge tracts of enemy land, but such a bold military calculus demanded even bolder commanders who grasped that morale, will, and an offensive spirit alone could nullify an enemy’s numerical superiority. In that regard, Nicias—old, sick, by nature timid, and on record against the entire invasion—was sorely wanting and thus naturally sought ever greater resources to supply an edge that his own leadership could not. Poor generalship is often synonymous with frequent requests for more troops.
The Horns of a Dilemma
Worse folly ensued. The uncharacteristically dense Athenians back home once more misconstrued their general’s cautionary assessment as sober advice about obtaining victory rather than a thinly veiled cry for retreat. They readied a second armada to arrive sometime the next spring. To be fair, the Athenians were on the horns of a dilemma: pulling out would only embolden their enemies, while sending more reinforcements raised the specter of turning a manageable tactical defeat into a military catastrophe.
By early 414 most of the Greek world was slowly learning of the growing quagmire in Sicily and preparing to get in on the kill in a variety of ways. States as diverse as Corinth, Sicyon, and Boeotia were adding their own hoplite contingents to another Spartan expeditionary force slated to sail to Syracuse. A growing Peloponnesian fleet dispatched more ships to Syracuse. Gylippus now found additional surrounding Sicilian states as eager to help Syracuse as they had once been interested in joining the Athenians when the city was on the verge of capitulation. While the Greek world rallied to defeat the Athenian expeditionary fleet, the Peloponnesians prepared to invade Attica and fortify Decelea.17
Athens never flinched. In majestic defiance or folly the Athenian assembly sent Demosthenes—the hero of Pylos, the scapegoat of the Delium campaign, and more or less unheard from for over a decade—with an auxiliary imperial fleet of yet another 65 triremes and 1,200 hoplites, supported by additional allied contingents. And by the time Demosthenes arrived in Sicily, in ostentatious fashion as pipers and coxswains blared out his arrival, his combined forces had grown by over 70 fresh triremes and another 5,000 hoplites, augmented by more light-armed auxiliaries.
Once again the Athenians could hardly afford to bring either horsemen or mounts to replace the exhausted Athenian cavalry, which was increasingly unable to ward off its superior Syracusan counterparts. Altogether, in less than two years Athens had thrown into the fray almost 45,000 men and 216 ships, well over half of all the available military assets of the empire. This madness was at a time when Spartans were camped thirteen miles from the walls of Athens, thousands of slaves were deserting from Attica, and tribute-paying allies from the Hellespont to the southern Aegean were on the verge of revolt.
It wa
s precisely this resiliency that so amazed Thucydides. He repeatedly emphasized the incredible resources of Athens and its ability to carry on the fight despite overwhelming losses and a growing list of adversaries. Moreover, at the very time thousands were besieging Syracuse, Persian satraps were also plotting to finance a new Peloponnesian fleet to tear apart the maritime empire. Thucydides might have been appalled at the foolish logic behind such a grand mistake, but he was also in awe of the democratic spirit that nevertheless went ahead with the gamble, and amazed that Athens could have pulled it all off.18
Demosthenes was as audacious as Nicias was timid. But once the Athenians had mobilized a second relief force and made their way to Sicily, they discovered that things on the island had become even worse than when Nicias had sent the bleak letter home the prior autumn. Frustrated up on Epipolae and unable to break through the counterwalls of the enemy, Nicias had abruptly turned his attention to the sea and plotted a new strategy: the navy would now take the offensive in the Great Harbor of Syracuse while ground troops were stalemated on the heights.
Yet in a series of brutal sea battles in and around the Great Harbor, the Athenian triremes were manhandled by the less skillful Corinthian and Syracusan fleets. The enemy—learning from the battle of Sybota (432), where the Corinthians had found success against the more expert Corcyraeans by turning a fight at sea into a land battle of boarding and head-on attacks—had reinforced their rams and found the confined conditions inside the harbor to their advantage.
Even worse, Nicias had lost a key fort at Labdalum, up on the northern crest of Epipolae, that was critical to supplying forces to protect the ongoing construction of the wall. In response, he had moved his base of operations to Plemmyrium, on the south entrance to the harbor—a nearly indefensible spot that had little water and less fuel. But then Nicias had already given up on sealing off the city. He was more worried about securing a base in which to outfit his triremes for a quick departure home should things get any worse. That poorly selected fort was quickly lost as well, along with most of the rigging and supplies for the fleet.
The Athenians’ earlier efforts to use battering rams to knock down the Syracusan counterwall failed. It was this increasingly bleak scenario that the newcomer Demosthenes immediately surveyed, and it influenced him to make that drastic decision to attack the Syracusan counterfortifications by night. Only for a moment, Demosthenes reasoned, had Athens regained the momentum and perhaps local superiority in manpower, and they could ill afford to throw away this second but fleeting chance at victory.
The attack was a disaster, as one might expect of thousands of heavily armed soldiers marching up unfamiliar rocky heights to fight an unknown enemy in the middle of the night. Demosthenes’ fresh reinforcements soon found themselves in full retreat down the slopes, lost in the darkness, often falling and fighting one another, and eventually butchered by the ever vigilant Syracusan cavalry. Two thousand men may have been killed in just a few hours, nasty deaths for Athenians who a few weeks earlier were strolling in their agora at a time of relative peace.
In one of the most famous pronouncements about the confusing nature of Greek infantry battle, Thucydides concluded of the nocturnal Athenian calamity on Epipolae that “it was not easy to ascertain from either side what precisely had transpired; of course, things are clearer in the daytime, but even then those who are present hardly know everything that goes on—except what each person senses with difficulty in his own vicinity.” Utterly demoralized, Demosthenes now pondered a variety of options before concluding that it was probably wisest to gather both forces up and sail home. The Athenians, he figured, still had ships and a tenuous naval superiority. And the Spartans gathering in Attica, not democratic Syracuse some eight hundred miles distant, posed the greater danger to Athens. The new dilemma was not one of winning or losing but, rather, a choice between defeat and ruin.19
Utter Destruction
After lengthy debate and needless delay, both sides made ready for a final grand sea battle in the Great Harbor, one even greater than the initial fights a few weeks earlier, which had on occasion involved some 160 ships. The Athenians put to sea everything they had left, some 110 triremes. Thucydides implied that it was the most crowded and desperate battle in the history of Greek naval warfare. He may have been right, since there were well over 20,000 Athenian and imperial sailors on the water, along with missile troops and marines on the decks. Perhaps as many infantrymen and slaves were watching from the shore. But the invaders were already a beaten force well before the battle even started, inasmuch as most enterprises that they had begun on Sicily—the effort to rally the island’s neutral states, the attempt to wall off Syracuse, the sea battles with the enemy fleet, and the political intriguing to win Syracuse by treachery—had already failed. Even occasional victories, whether besieging minor cities or beating Syracusan hoplites in the field, had not led to strategic success.
By day’s end, the Athenians were thoroughly defeated. The last battle in the harbor of Syracuse was an authentic Greek tragedy as the assembled Athenian soldiers watched the two enormous fleets go at it—now swaying and screaming from shore, “We are winning”; now in dejection shouting, “We are losing.” At last, realizing that their own superior seamen could take full advantage neither of their numbers nor of their skills in such confined waters of the harbor, sailors and hoplites alike grasped that their fleet’s defeat was not a setback but a death sentence. Those triremes, after all, were the only way to get back home.20
Nicias and Demosthenes then chose to march their still enormous combined army of 40,000 survivors on a meandering course west and then south across the island in hopes of finding refuge among friendly allies. For all the calamity, Demosthenes and Nicias still commanded more troops than the Peloponnesians and Sicilians combined. True, in two years of attrition, the Athenians had lost many in battle and to disease. Yet the startling fact remained that perhaps four out of five combatants who had arrived at Sicily were still alive and determined to find sanctuary somewhere on Sicily. It was no idle hope: a little over a decade later a far smaller force of 10,000 Greek mercenary hoplites fought their way to safety, against far greater odds, from the middle of Mesopotamia to the Black Sea, despite being outnumbered and constantly attacked by an array of Asiatic horsemen and tribal peoples.
This was still the largest army that Athens had fielded in the entire war. Indeed, it was perhaps the greatest Greek force that had been marched en masse since Archidamus had invaded Attica, almost twenty years earlier. But if alive and mostly well, most soldiers were nevertheless defeated men, demoralized that their once magnificent fleet was gone and, with it, the only way home. The Athenians were in hostile, unfamiliar territory, constantly pursued, and forced to march without easy access to water under the late August sun.
The Syracusan horse rode them down mercilessly. Infantry and light-armed troops harried them without end. The retreat soon became a rout and then a slaughter. Some eight days of marching and twenty-some miles later, they ended up in the riverbed muck of the Assinarus River, thirsty, demoralized, and incapable of going on. How many imperial troops ultimately returned home is unknown. The captured allies and slaves were sold off, while 7,000 Athenians were taken alive and interred in the quarries of Syracuse. Diodorus believed that 18,000 men were killed in just a few hours, a horrific figure that, if true, would represent the greatest single-day fatality rate in the history of classical Greek warfare and, indeed, rank with the Roman nightmares like Trasimene, Cannae, and Carrhae, or even modern bloodbaths like the first days of Antie-tam or the Somme. Both Demosthenes and Nicias surrendered and were executed, and their once grand expeditionary force quite literally ceased to exist, meeting not so much defeat as annihilation. Syracusan demagogues argued that after the Athenian barbarism at Scione and Melos, the captives deserved no clemency for trying to repeat their savagery on Sicily.
An entire mythology at Athens arose in later years surrounding this lost generation. Only a few n
otices of the dead emerge from extant Athenian casualty lists on stone—less than 200 of the tens of thousands who perished, with names like Nicon, Euages, Blepyrus, or Athemion. One can read of a Phrynus killed and a Carpides dead, but will never know how or where they died.
Yet some diehards purportedly fought on as guerrillas avenging their comrades’ deaths. Others ransomed themselves by reciting verses from Euripides, who was much in vogue among the Syracusans, perhaps because he was seen as an antiwar voice who aroused sympathy for the victims of Athenian aggression. In the most gripping passage in his entire history Thucydides records the last moments of the desperate Athenians struggling to stay alive in the muddy waters of the Assinarus River, as they were picked off by their enemies from the banks above. The force that had left in such celebration at Athens and arrived in equal pomp at Syracuse now met its destruction from drowning, enemy missiles, and one another:
Inasmuch as they were forced to move in a dense mass, they fell on and trampled one another. Some of them immediately were killed by being run through by their own spears and becoming bogged down amid their equipment. Others were swept away by the current. The Syracusans were standing on the opposite steep bank, and hit the Athenians from above with missiles. But they were busy drinking greedily and tangled up in the hollow bed of the river in great confusion. Then the Peloponnesians descended to the water and cut them down, especially those in the river itself. And the water immediately became fouled, but nonetheless was drunk—mixed as it was with mud and dyed red with blood. Indeed, it was fought over by most of them.