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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Historians could argue over whether the rush for both urban and rural fortification in the postwar period was an unwise diversion of Greece’s finite resources, or itself spurred on economic activity while providing needed defense. But the archaic dream that Greece should remain unwalled was dead except at Sparta. Citizens, not just soldiers, began to plan for their collective defense in wars that were as likely to break out at their doorsteps as in distant fields.24

  THE NEW COMMAND

  Before the Peloponnesian War it was rare for Greeks to entrust too much power to the hands of any one commander. It was neither a Spartan nor an Athenian trait but a Panhellenic custom that most generals led the army or fleet from the first rank and so frequently died in battle, a fact that precluded both long military careers and evolving tactical innovation. The old ideal was perhaps best reflected in the seventh-century poet Archilochus’ encomium to the hoplite brawling leader: “short and bandy-legged, firmly set on his feet, full of heart and courage.”25

  But throughout the three-decades-long war, commanders discovered that a general could do more to kill large numbers of their enemies than by merely wielding a spear on the right wing of the phalanx, displaying the cardinal virtues of sobriety and self-control (sophrosynê). Armies were no longer the glue that held together the consensual government of the old polis but became simply military assets that carried no particular civic or political weight. Personalities such as Alcibiades, Cleon, Demosthenes, Thrasybulus, Brasidas, Lysander, and Gylippus were not anonymous warriors but leaders who were expected to exercise intellectual options that might achieve victory by superior logistics, tactics, finance, or public relations. A man like Brasidas or Lysander (the latter of questionable background) was seen as a valuable asset in his own right, whose worth was almost impossible to calculate but now appreciated as never before.26

  Pagondas, for example, was more responsible for the victory at Delium than was the strength of his Theban agrarian infantry, in the same manner that Sphacteria and Pylos were Athenian victories due largely to the vision of Cleon and Demosthenes. Without Alcibiades and Lysander, Sparta would never have successfully built a large fleet. Only Gylippus’ arrival at Syracuse saved Sicily. To marshal the new diverse forces of mercenaries, slaves, and combined arms, thinkers, not just warriors, were needed.

  A veritable revolution in the idea of generalship unfolded in the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath, especially in the hysterical reactions to it, as philosophers and rhetoricians debated the proper credentials for military leadership.27 Before the war generals were considered regular folk; afterward they often appeared publicly as mounted horsemen and were feared and worshipped. The careers of Epaminondas and Alexander the Great are testimony to the idea that single men could galvanize an entire state—democratic or otherwise—and through sheer brilliance and audacity raise sophisticated armies of invasion.

  Whatever the controversy, immediately following the defeat of Athens there appeared an entire genre of military literature for the specialist. Some itinerant sophists, like the Dionysodoros of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, promised that they could teach one “how to be a general.” In the war’s aftermath, veterans often enlisted as mercenary commanders—men, for example, like Phalinos of Boeotia, who claimed that he was an “expert on tactics and arms-drill.” Fourth-century utopian literature stressed the new need for professionalization, specialization, and careful training.28

  At Athens an entire array of mercenary captains, such as Iphicrates, Timotheos, Chabrias, and Chares, took over the military in a way undreamed of in the prior fifth century, when Nicias and Alcibiades had debated as politicians first and generals second. One of the great mysteries of the Peloponnesian War is why inward and blinkered states like Sparta and Thebes produced brilliant strategists and tacticians like Brasidas, Gylippus, Lysander, and Pagondas, while liberal, freethinking Athens entrusted so many of its critical commands to timid dullards like Nicias; inspired but often reckless entrepreneurs such as Alcibiades, Cleon, and Demosthenes; or anonymous functionaries whose names are known mostly by reason of their death in defeat, such as the otherwise obscure Hippocrates or Laches. Perhaps it was the intrusion of the assembly into military decision making, a factor inherent in the radical democracy at Athens, or a naval tradition that great commanders of the past—like Themistocles, Pericles, and Phormio—were admirals, not infantry generals. In any case, the Peloponnesians, not Athens, produced the better military minds. At key junctures—Sicily and Aegospotami stand out—the outcome of the war itself hinged on just such superior leadership.29

  WAR AS EVIL

  Not all the legacies of the Peloponnesian War were material, social, or political. There was ideological and philosophical fallout as well. Much of Greek literature both before and after the Peloponnesian War, whether the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus’ dictum that “War is the father of us all” or Plato’s postbellum appraisal in his Laws that war is a more natural phenomenon than peace, envisioned war as tragedy, but not therein necessarily evil. Rather, the moral landscape of the times—who fought whom, why, how, and with what result?—determined the ethical appraisal of wars that had been mostly short and economical.

  Again, the growth of such a Greek tragic acceptance of war, so common from Homer to Sophocles, was also predicated on two more practical realities. Most wars of the eighth to fifth centuries between Greeks had probably been both short and seasonal. The rare cosmic struggles for national survival, such as the Persian conflicts between 490 and 479, were conducted exclusively against foreigners and still ended with a single climactic pitched battle.

  The Peloponnesian War was different. When the Greek world tore itself apart in national suicide for almost three decades, some Greek thinkers—in the manner of the postwar 1920s generation, who recoiled at the trenches of World War I—began to associate their own dissatisfaction over the conduct of this particular war with the nature of war itself. Thus, wartime plays such as Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Peace, and Lysistrata, as well as Euripides’ Andromache, Helen, Hecuba, and Trojan Women, while they betray no love for the Spartans, seem to offer a new wrinkle in Greek attitudes toward war: such conflicts themselves are awful human experiences that transcend the reasons for hostilities. The farmers and women of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Peace, and Lysistrata, like the captured and suffering civilians of Euripides’ Hecuba, Trojan Women, and Andromache, reveal that everyday Greeks found shared experiences across the battle line. Thus the playwrights offer the idea that there is something wrong with war per se—not just with the Spartans.

  While the totality of postbellum thought never became therapeutic, much less pacifist or utopian, the Peloponnesian War at least introduced into Western philosophy the comprehensive idea that war was not always noble or patriotic but often nonsensical, suicidal, and perhaps intrinsically wrong, especially when it lasted twenty-seven years, not a few hours on a summer day. Homer, of course, had questioned the morality and logic of motives and sacrifices of unthinking warriors in the Iliad, but Achilles did not doubt the nobility and heroism inherent in armed conflict.

  Fourth-century Greeks, however, realized that the Peloponnesian War had been something uniquely awful in the Hellenic experience. It destroyed the idealism and spirit of Panhellenic unity that was so critical in the defense of Greece against the Persian invader. The war left in its wake the more self-interested idea that Greeks, if they were going to kill so savagely, should at least kill Persians, the mantra that Philip and Alexander would soon so brilliantly manipulate. In any case, to win the war the Spartans had used Persia to destroy Athens—a strategy brilliant in the short term but calamitous in the conflict’s aftermath, when Spartan hoplites were stationed in Asia Minor to check the Persian resurgence in Ionia that they had ensured by earlier bringing the satraps into the war effort.

  Why Did Athens Lose?

  Given the absence of resolute action or inspired Spartan leadership in the twenty years before the Ionian War, one asks that questio
n rather than “How did Sparta pull it off?” Thucydides himself emphasizes how rare capable men like Brasidas, Gylippus, and Lysander were at Sparta, and how Athens, despite the advantages that democratic government brings to war, made mistake after mistake.

  In his narrative there emerge four reasons why Sparta triumphed; none of them can be attributable to the oligarchy’s strategic insight or imaginative tactics. The plague was nature’s bane. Sicily was Athens’ own strategic mistake and was compounded by tactical blunders. The creation of a fort at Decelea and the use of Persian capital to build a fleet are attributed by Thucydides and Xenophon to the advice and machinations of Alcibiades, an Athenian. So naturally observers look to what Athens did wrong rather than to what Sparta did right to explain how such a dynamic imperial city was not merely beaten but nearly ruined.30

  Yet Athens no more lost its war with Sparta than Nazi Germany did its offensive wars with France or Poland. By 425, in the seventh year of the conflict, almost all of Athens’ limited objectives had been achieved in line with Pericles’ original goal of a temporary stalemate—or perhaps more charitably seen as not losing in a war of exhaustion. Athens’ empire was still intact. It exercised continual naval supremacy over all potential enemies and, indeed, would finish the first decade of the war with its fleet still at its prewar level of 300 ships. True, the problems with Sparta were not solved, only postponed; but the city at least had shown that its own destruction might be beyond the capabilities of Sparta’s original alliance.

  Athens, after all, had proved to Sparta that hoplite invasions of Attica, despite the horrific plague, would not bring the city to its knees. With the capture and detainment of the Spartiate prisoners from Sphacteria, who were to be executed the moment a Peloponnesian army again crossed the borders of Attica, the general outline of the Peace of Nicias, which would transpire four years later, was already established. Pericles’ vision, though tattered and torn, seemed fulfilled. Contemporaries in 421 thought Sparta was checked and demoralized after Pylos and the failure to make headway in Attica. Whether a shaky peace and a return to the status before the war were worth the cost of a decade of fighting and the plague is another matter altogether.

  In contrast, the reasons for Athens’ later and utter defeat after the failed peace were probably twofold. First, even before the Sicilian expedition Athens had not simply fought Sparta but for a decade of the Archidamian War was holding off Sparta, its entire Peloponnesian alliance, and Corinth and Thebes. These two latter states proved their vehemence by not even becoming signatories of the shaky peace achieved in 421. In the trireme fighting in the Corinthian Gulf, at Solygia, and at Delium both allies had frequently fought Athens mostly on their own, without help from Sparta.

  The powers formally allied with Sparta for most of the conflict were not weak. Peloponnesian states like Elis, Tegea, and at times even a reconstituted Mantinea and Argos provided hoplites for a Spartan-led enterprise or later occupation at Decelea. The Boeotian army was as formidable as the Spartan. Its bitter hostility ensured a two-front war, a permanent condition after the failed Athenian effort at Delium. Corinth controlled much of the lateral sea traffic in and out of the Gulf, and all routes to and from the Peloponnese by land. The continual Athenian failure to take over the Megarid only ensured the Peloponnesians perpetual access to Attica anytime they thought they could devise some better strategy than the earlier failed annual invasions, such as the final occupation of Decelea.

  In the first few years of the war Athens conducted massive operations abroad, but quickly learned that the permanent deployment of some 100 to 200 ships was exhausting its treasury without bringing decisive results. But with the capture of Pylos and Sphacteria in 425 it achieved a stunning psychological victory, made all the more so once the Spartans were shamed by the surrender of their crack hoplites and were willing to withdraw from Attica for good.

  Once more, by 421 the Athenians had not won; but they had proved that even after suffering horrendous losses to the plague they could find innovative new methods of not losing the war. Yet the city-state’s most creative thinkers, from Alcibiades to Demosthenes, gauged stalemate a disappointment rather than a windfall. Thus they began to devise further probing operations in the Peloponnese that might weaken Sparta without taking on her formidable hoplites. The result was a doubly disastrous policy, a renewed war with the Peloponnesians and misplaced faith in expanding the theater of conflict in lieu of confronting and defeating the Spartan army outright as a way of freeing the helots and dismantling Spartan apartheid.

  Second, despite taking on all at once the three largest of the city-states, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes; losing well over a quarter of its population to the plague; and not destroying the hoplite or naval resources of any of its three adversaries, in 415 Athens invaded Syracuse. Immediately it found itself at war with a larger city than its own and almost as democratic. Not only had Athens diverted its precious resources to a far distant campaign at a time when Spartans were soon to be thirteen miles from its walls, but in attacking democratic Syracuse it also weakened its propaganda that its war was in large part ideological, taken up on behalf of democratic peoples and their resistance to foreign-imposed oligarchies.

  Sicily drew blood, and the hemorrhaging attracted a whole host of new enemies. Perhaps worst of all, after Sicily Athens was in a war against itself, as the revolution of 411 and the ultimately failed oligarchic putsch proved. By 412 Persia was soon to be a de facto belligerent. Without Persia’s vast capital for crews and triremes, Sparta could never have prosecuted the Ionian War, which eventually forced Athens to capitulate. In that narrow strategic regard, Athens really was like the Germany of World War II, which fought the old European allies of France and England, took on the vast industrial might of the United States, and tried to invade Soviet Russia. Hitler might have defeated or obtained a draw with any of the three powers individually or in succession, but never two, much less three, in combination.

  It was the belief of Thucydides that if democracies brought multifaceted advantages to war, their raucous assemblies, constant second-guessing, grandstanding, and hypercriticism severely hampered military operations. Only a towering figure such as Pericles could rein in the raw emotions unleashed in open forums and, as first citizen, by sheer power of his moral authority run the country by near fiat and still take full advantage of democratic dynamism. Whether that pessimism of the historian was warranted or fair to democracy, it was certainly clear that Sparta had more patience with an occasionally lax Brasidas, Agis, or Lysander than Athens ever did with its own generals.

  True, Sparta could execute generals like Thorax and shun the returning prisoners from Pylos, but in comparison to Athens it gave latitude to commanders in a way unknown at Athens. If Thucydides was exiled for failing to save Amphipolis from Brasidas, later in the same theater Brasidas most surely was not recalled to Sparta after failing to reach Torone in time and thus losing the entire city to Cleon. That the Athenian assembly exiled, executed, or fined almost every notable general it ordered on campaign did not make commanders more accountable as much as timid and prone to second-guessing. Thus, after any setback, whether in the Delium campaign or at Arginusae, they would most likely not come back to Athens, in fear of a trial. So the city did not often learn from its mistakes but almost always scared generals into being too cautious or reckless, their decisions based on anticipating what the voters back home might approve on any particular day.

  A Possession for All Time?

  Whether Thucydides entertained preexisting views about the nature of war and sought to use the events of the Peloponnesian War to confirm his pessimism, whether his philosophy emerged inductively from the mayhem that he witnessed over three decades, or both is not really known. But his history is more than a narrative of now obscure battles and massacres. Instead, as he predicted, it serves as a timeless guide to the tragic nature of war itself, inasmuch as human character is unchanging and thus its conduct in calamitous times is always predictabl
e.

  If the Peloponnesian War still teaches us something about men at war, it is the lesson that interim armistices may quiet down the fighting but cannot with any degree of consistency end the conflict unless they address why one party chose to go to war in the first place. More often resolute action, for good or evil, can bring lasting peace, usually when one side accepts defeat and ceases its grievances through a change of heart or government—in either freedom or tyranny. In that sense of how to make a war end for good, the no-nonsense Lysander understood the nature of this awful conflict far better than the stately Pericles or naive Nicias.

  Both states initially went to war unsure of how to defeat the other. Yet after nearly twenty years of futile killing, the war was resolved in about seven years when Sparta realized how Athens could be vanquished (keep its people inside the walls, its tribute and food outside, and sink its fleet). The disturbing message here is that discussions follow the sway of the battlefield, and diplomatic solutions work best when they accurately reflect military weakness or strength.

  It is common to label this appreciation for power and its role in state affairs “realism” or “neorealism.” But Thucydides—and this is why he is truly a great historian—is too discerning a critic to reduce strife down simply to perceptions about power and its manifestations. War itself is not a mere science but a more fickle sort of thing, often subject to fate or chance, being an entirely human enterprise. The Peloponnesian War, then, is not a mere primer for international relations studies, and the historian does not believe that “might makes right.” Tragedy, not melodrama, is his message.