In the gore were thousands of men from the far reaches of the Athenian empire and friendly states—Chalcidians, Euboeans, Argives, Aegean Islanders, mercenaries from Crete, Arcadia, and Italy—all of whom, a few months earlier, had had no idea what fate would meet them in far-off Sicily against an enemy they knew very little about. The final destruction of the Greek forces was an eerie spectacle that affected Thucydides as no other battle disaster did. Reading it today reminds us of Plutarch’s gruesome account of the Roman triumvir Crassus’ end at Carrhae in 53 B.C., when nearly the same number of legionaries were surrounded and slaughtered by mounted Parthian archers. History is unfortunately replete with these awful scenarios of veteran infantrymen far from home who are destroyed by mounted enemies whom they cannot draw into pitched battle—a thirsty Crusader army cut apart by Saladin’s 12,000 horsemen at Hattin in July 1187 or Napoleon’s retreat before Russian Cossacks. The Athenians had arrived on the island in late summer 415 only to discover that they needed cavalry, and they had perished in August two years later, still regretting that they lacked enough good horsemen to make good their retreat. The incongruity that so many thousands were reduced to a mob by enemies whom they could not engage not only appalled but saddened Thucydides:
This was the most remarkable occurrence of all those that transpired during the war—indeed as it seems to me of all the Greek events that we know of— one most illustrious for the conquerors and for the defeated most ruinous. As for those defeated utterly and in every respect and meeting with no small setback in any manner—but rather as it is said with an utter destruction—their land forces, fleet, and everything else perished, and few from many came back home. Such were the events that happened in Sicily.21
Pony Battle
What did horsemen of the Peloponnesian War look like, these deadly riders who killed hundreds of Athenians and ruined their imperial hopes in Sicily? The typical knight of the later fifth century was hardly a medieval conquistador in full mail or even a raider of the steppes with a string of mounts. Instead, imagine a young aristocrat, with a breastplate, helmet, and high leather boots—young, proud, and privileged, like the stone horsemen captured for eternity on the frieze course of Pericles’ Parthenon. Few carried shields in battle. Such protection might mean an additional weight of fifteen to twenty pounds and could thus unbalance the rider and interfere with the reins.
Riders were not much over five and a half feet tall, 120 pounds. They were perched on ponies about four and a half feet above the ground (13½ hands at the withers). These tiny mounts, mostly stallions, were only partially protected with light cloth padding over the face, thighs, and chest, and harder to ride than geldings. Without the aid of stirrups, riders required strenuous training in how to grip the sides of the animal with their thighs. Most riders carried a short thrusting spear and either one or two auxiliary javelins. For close-order fighting, a small saber proved effective for downward strokes to the heads, necks, and backs of foot soldiers. Mounted bowmen were prized but rare, inasmuch as they drew on the combined skills of both horsemanship and archery.
On vase paintings, horsemen seem to be riding down infantrymen as often as bombarding them from afar with missiles. The disastrous loss of Lamachus on Epipolae reflects what could happen to fleeing or pursuing veteran hoplites should they find themselves out of formation and confronted with even a single horseman. If death by trampling seems unlikely given the small weight and height of the ponies, it is important to remember that infantrymen themselves were about the same size as modern twelve-year-olds rather than contemporary adults, and fought as clumsy hoplites without javelins or bows.22
While in theory cavalry of most Greek city-states were loosely organized into large regiments of 500 or so—and later in Hellenistic times would mass in tactical rhomboid formations of 120 to break light infantry—for most of the Peloponnesian War, smaller subgroups rode out in bands of 30 to 50, often in loose rectangles. True, they were probably deployed in dense formations in pitched battles at Solygia, Delium, and Mantinea; but just as often classical horsemen scattered to attack small pockets of ravagers or skirmishers. Heavy cavalry and lancers charging in concert with infantry were the later achievements of Philip and Alexander, almost a century after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War.
Despite the superior speed of cavalrymen and the ability of mounted armies to travel hundreds of miles at sustained daily clips of over thirty miles, for a variety of reasons prior to the Peloponnesian War horses had, strangely, not mattered much to Greek militaries. Of course, they were always valuable for surveillance and reconnaissance. As ancillaries in hoplite battle, a few horsemen could also protect the unshielded wings and could stab at the backs of fleeing infantrymen during pursuit—places and times when cavalrymen were not confronted with serried ranks of spears. But there was a variety of reasons why the Greek city-state never put much emphasis on mounted forces in the eastern Mediterranean, where wars had traditionally been decided by great chariot collisions in the Middle East or the dreaded charges of Persian horsemen on the vast plains of Asia.23
On the Greek mainland, it made little sense to raise horses in small valleys. Pasturage was rare and rocky hills common. Eating horseflesh was considered wrong, reflected by the general deference for the horse in Greek religion and mythology. Oddly, the auxiliary and subordinate role of horses in Greek society cast an aura of reverential exceptionalism upon them, making their position there different from that on the steppes, where they were seen in more pragmatic and utilitarian ways. Moreover, in an age before sophisticated harnesses, oxen under yokes proved the more reliable and economical draft animals, whether pulling wagons or plows. An acre devoted to wheat, barley, vines, or olives would support a family much better than turning the land over to pasturage for sheep, goats, or cows—much less horses.24
Cavalry Calculus
Cost is always mentioned in any discussion of horse rearing, a profession confined to the rich, who, in turn, publicly complained about its ruinous expense. By the end of the war, even an average pony might cost the equivalent of almost a year and a half’s salary for the average unskilled worker. The price of a typical horse might instead support a family of six for almost two years. A mount was clearly a luxury that only a small fraction of the population could afford. The average Athenian who walked into town or plowed with an ox saw a horse not as a critical asset but as a luxury, one that in a radically democratic society perhaps gobbled communal Athenian resources away from the more needy. The simple truth was that there were not thousands of acres of communal grazing land around most city-states on which herds of horses could graze cheaply.
The acquisition cost for some of the better mounts might exceed 1,000 drachmas, illustrating another dilemma for democratic Athens: as the war wore on and horses were proving more critical for collective survival, only the very rich could afford to patrol the homeland. And if the additional costs of feeding the horse are added in—and often a groom, who accompanied the cavalryman on a cheaper mount to carry supplies and equipment—a knight might need almost a drachma a day to buy barley rations. True, the state often provided partial subsidies for horse acquisition and upkeep, but as imperial revenues declined, Athens found itself broke and ever more dependent on private largess to ensure that cavalrymen continued to scour the countryside.
In theory, only a wealthy state like Thessaly or Syracuse, with a surrounding lush countryside, could afford to put into the field a gigantic force of 1,200 horsemen, which represented an initial investment of at least 100 talents, in addition to over 5 talents a month in collective upkeep. For that kind of money, a state might instead field a hoplite army of 20,000 infantrymen for a month, or even outfit a fleet of 100 triremes.25 Cavalry was thus a luxury most states—other than Syracuse, Boeotia, and Thessaly, which all enjoyed wide expanses of pastureland—could not afford. Most generals would reckon that a trireme or 60 suits of heavy bronze armor were far wiser outlays than the equivalent investment in a mere 12 horses.26
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Yet what is nearly inexplicable is that under the practices of the typical polis before the Peloponnesian War, hoplite and agrarian snobbery extended to the very wealthy as well, the elite who owned farms of perhaps 100 acres or more and so could manage to own a horse or two. There are few, if any, other ancient societies in which a wealthy citizen could brag to the assembly that he dismounted and chose instead to serve the state as a soldier in the ranks, despite the valuable and privileged role horsemen played in the defense of infantry. At the outbreak of the war Greeks thought that cavalry service was easy and riders were less than resolute compared to hoplites. At Sparta there was essentially no formal cavalry force until the seventh year of the Peloponnesian War. And at Athens, even by the outbreak of fighting in 431, there had only recently been raised about 1,200 horsemen, drawn from less than 3 percent of the voting citizen population.27
For one of the rare moments in history, landholding for the period of the polis was comparably egalitarian. Thus the very wealthy did not enjoy automatic prestige, and certainly were not accorded deference in political and military matters. Their land might have been ten, but surely not one hundred, times the size of the average farm owner’s. This relatively equitable landscape was a vast difference in land tenure from that of the horse lords of Thessaly or the Macedonian princes who raised entire herds on vast estates.
In contrast with the north, even at oligarchic Sparta the state was run by an elite number of Similars. These infantrymen owned often equal shares of land and took up identical slots in the phalanx, the real basis of their prestige. At Athens the landless thetes gradually assumed the predominant role in the politics of the city, a fact that explains everything from Pericles’ massive building program to state subsidies for government service to an enormous fleet and the primacy of the Long Walls. At agrarian Thebes, despite the flat plains and a rich heritage of hippotrophia (horse raising), the real power likewise resided with hoplite farmers, who by the fourth century would become fully democratic and the most dreaded military in Greece.
The two oligarchic revolutions that overthrew Athenian democracy, those of 411 and 404, occurred during and at the close of the war, following the military catastrophes at Sicily and Aegospotami, which were blamed on the radical democrats. In contrast, the so-called knights were the privileged horsemen who had taken on an increasingly vital role in, and paid a high price for, the city’s defense during the struggle, cleaning up, as it were, the mess created by their inferiors. Indeed, in almost every land engagement that Athens fought—Spartolos (429), Solygia (425), Delium (424), Amphipolis (422), Mantinea (418), Syracuse (415–13), Ephesus (409), Abydos (409), and Kerata (409)—the Athenian cavalry had had a critical role and had won a strange sort of admiration from the usually hostile majority of poorer citizens. During most expeditions a tenth of the Athenian aggregate force was made up of cavalrymen.
Besides such political and economic considerations peculiar to Greece, there were other more pragmatic and general military explanations for the inferior role of cavalry. Ubiquitous rocky terrain meant that unshod horses often went lame or were restricted to bottomland. Because Greek horses stood less than five feet off the ground, in an age without saddles, stirrups, or horseshoes, they were not equipped to carry even a small mailed knight at a gallop into shock battle. Whether one turns to jokes in ancient comedy or warnings in equestrian literature, there are frequent references to the dangers of falling off horses, even without the worry of attacking and defending during battle.
Bareback riders can be lethal warriors (witness the Native Americans). But it is still a difficult skill to ride and stab or shoot without a modern saddle and the expertise acquired by years of training of the sort Xenophon outlined in plentiful detail in his treatise on ancient horsemanship. The city-state, unlike a nineteenth-century nation, could not put thousands of raw recruits on ponies and, with standard-issue saddles, stirrups, or horseshoes, then expect them to become serious lancers that could break apart the ranks of hoplite spearmen. Instead, more often the wealthy few alone grew up on horses and learned to throw the javelin, shoot the bow, or stab with a short spear while mounted on a simple blanket—but not, in the later manner of Alexander the Great, to coordinate attacks with fellow infantrymen.28
The New Horsemen
The Peloponnesian War changed most of this existing equestrian protocol, as military efficacy, not social stereotypes, economic rationalism, or political considerations, determined how men now fought. Horses did not suddenly grow larger. Stirrups were not magically invented, and aristocrats did not gain control of the reins of government. As the war progressed, and traditional strategies from agricultural devastation to hoplite battle were proved wanting, city-states began to learn that horsemen were vital to all sorts of operations that would play major roles in determining the outcome of the war, from riding down fleeing hoplites and light-armed troops to patrolling the countryside and keeping the enemy away from camps, fortifications, and farmland.
Unlike most of the battle experience of the previous decades—the Greeks had won at Salamis and Plataea with ships and hoplites, and fought one another for the next fifty years in classic pitched battles at Sepea, Tanagra, Oinophyta, and Coronea—horsemen appeared everywhere in the Peloponnesian War and killed far more thousands of Greeks than did those in the hoplite phalanx. Typically, cavalry would gallop upon small groups of infantrymen, who were either marching loosely or scattered in twos and threes. They rode up, often at short bursts of speeds of thirty miles per hour, cast a javelin or shot an arrow, and then easily outran pursuit, hoping to tire any infantryman foolish enough to offer chase.
Because the rider was throwing with his arm alone and thus could hardly approximate the two- to three-hundred-foot range of a skilled javelin thrower on foot, he might at most have cast his weapon thirty to forty feet, and then found safety only in retreat given his mobility and speed. When horsemen outnumbered infantry groups—on Sicily this was not uncommon, given the enormous size of the Syracusan mounted contingents—they could ride in formation and spear their inferiors from the back or sides, not unlike German fighter pilots of World War II, who swarmed American B-17s that fell out of protective formation.
Athenian cavalrymen attacked Spartan ravagers in Attica on five separate occasions in the Archidamian War (431–421). They accompanied every Athenian army during the annual invasion of the Megarid, participated in many of the seaborne raids of the Peloponnesian coast, wore out their mounts harassing the Spartan permanent garrison at Decelea, and were active in the last decade of the war in Ionia. During the Megara campaign of 424, 600 horsemen protected thousands of infantry, providing the sort of cover that they would desperately need in Sicily a decade later. In the Megarid they held off the more feared Boeotian cavalry, which likewise appeared 600 strong, as over a thousand mounted troops on both sides battled it out to a draw.29
Thucydides, at least, believed that in a number of instances the presence of Athenian horsemen ensured victory, such as at Solygia in the Corinthian plain during the battle there of 425.30 At Cleon’s final battle at Amphipolis, where both he and Brasidas perished in the summer of 422, at least 300 cavalrymen were present. The value of horsemen in the first decade and a half of the war suggests that the Athenians grasped that they would be critical on Sicily. Still, for some reason, they miscalculated the ease of securing mounts from their allies, and had no real idea of the effectiveness or size of the Syracusan cavalry.
The outcome of entire theaters occasionally hinged on horsemen. For example, at the battle of Delium, Thucydides makes the Athenian general Hippocrates claim that a defeat of the Boeotians would put an end altogether to the Spartan invasion of Attica, inasmuch as the Boeotian cavalry would never again venture into Attica to protect Spartan ravagers. In the battle itself, horsemen were largely responsible for the Boeotian victory. As reserves they surprised the victorious Athenian right wing and collapsed the morale of the entire army. Only the presence of a few hundred Athenian c
avalry kept the Athenian flight from becoming a complete disaster as they desperately tried to shield fleeing hoplites from being speared from the rear by mounted pursuers. In the only other major hoplite encounter of the war, that of Mantinea in 418, Thucydides observed that had the Athenian cavalry not been present, the Athenians might have lost more than their 200 dead and 2 generals.31
The enormous force of Sitalces’ that invaded Macedonia with 150,000 troops comprised 50,000 horsemen. In response, the Macedonians fought back with heavy cavalrymen, men with breastplates equipped with stabbing spears and riding horses with body protection. Sitalces’ invasion must have been the greatest cavalry fight of the ancient world in the era before Alexander the Great.
Postmortem
The Athenians had set sail for Sicily in spring 415. Then they were still at peace with Sparta and in the midst of an ongoing recovery from the ravages of the plague and war, as well as buoyed by the recent conquest of tiny Melos. Two years later, between 40,000 and 50,000 Athenians, allies, and slaves were dead, missing, or captured. Some 216 imperial triremes were lost. The Athenian treasury was broke. For the first time in the war, Athens could no longer afford to patrol the coast of the Peloponnese. Its old strategy of proactively hitting the enemy to the rear was now over with. Allies and tributary subjects were talking of revolt at precisely the time Athens needed their money, materials, and imperial crewmen to build an entirely new fleet. After expending well over 3,000 talents in a failed enterprise, Athens earned only a renewed war with an evergrowing Peloponnesian alliance. There was to be a permanent Spartan fort in sight of the walls of Athens, a newly envisioned alliance of Persia, Sparta, and Syracuse, and the specter of a Peloponnesian fleet far larger than its own now augmented with a few Syracusan triremes.
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 31
