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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  46. 1.69.1; cf. 1.90–93. Athenian conservatives had always opposed the Long Walls and had hoped that the Spartans would intervene to stop their construction; cf. 1.107.4.

  47. For Athenian finances, see 2.13.3–5. It is a testament to the costly nature of the new war—mostly sieges and wages for rowers—that by the fifth or sixth year of the war, Athens was essentially out of money and was seeking new sources of income (as well as reduced expenditures) to avoid capitulation.

  48. 1.19.1. For the size of the empire, see Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 24.3, and Cawkwell, Thucydides, 101–02. We can only speculate on the future of Athens had it avoided war in 431 but instead continued to augment its reserves and ensure its tribute—what-ifs similarly entertained by a few British Tories who felt that their empire was lost by a needless internecine struggle with Germany between 1914 and 1918. Alcibiades in extremis outlines all sorts of imperial conspiracies to the Spartans, suggesting a soon-to-be-greater Athenian empire that would shortly absorb Sicily, Italy, and Carthage (e.g., 6.90.2–3)—even after tens of thousands had been lost to the plague and fifteen years of prior war.

  49. [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 1.10–12. For Athenian population growth, see Sallares, Ecology, 95–99.

  50. 1.81.2; cf. 2.13.6, and [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 2.1–3. Rather than destroy the subject states of the empire, the Spartans eventually realized that ruining Athenian assets might give psychological impetus to local oligarchs, who, in fact, throughout the war caused the Athenians enormous grief at Samos, Lesbos, and Chios. The exact number of Athenian subject states is under dispute, but contemporary Athenians considered the empire huge—so the comic poet Aristophanes (Wasps, 707) offers up the impossible number of one thousand tribute-paying states.

  51. Thucydides thought Athenian latitude for unilateralism was a real advantage in the war (e.g., 1.141.6); but it cut both ways. A single setback like the plague or Sicily could induce immediate revolt, inasmuch as subjects felt that they had little responsibility for such poor planning and much to gain by distancing themselves from an apparent loser. On the shortcomings of Athenian strategy, see Henderson, Great War, 47–68.

  52. To survive (periesesthai): 1.144.1 and 2.65.7; cf. Lazenby, Peloponnesian War, 32–33. For the Spartan pipe dream at the war’s beginning of creating a huge navy and the allied contributions, see 2.7.2; cf. 1.121 and I.27.2. The thought apparently did not much scare the Athenians (e.g., 1.142.6).

  53. The role of the Athenian empire and its popularity as a protector of local democrats against oligarchic exploitation were the focus of the life’s work of the great, though eccentric historian G.E.M. de Ste. Croix. See especially his brilliant, often hyperbolic arguments in Origins, 34–49. For Sparta’s efforts at imposing oligarchy, see 5.81.2. Athens likewise sought to spread democracy by force: 5.82.I—4.

  54. See budget figures in Kagan, Peloponnesian War, 62–63; these suggest Athens could not sustain full deployment of its fleet for more than four years.

  55. See 5.26.2–5 for Thucydides’ famous defense of the idea that the twenty-seven years were to be seen as a cohesive period of war rather than a series of theater conflicts. The “Ten Years War” was often later known as the Archidamian War (431–421). The Pachean War (431–425), the Peace of Nicias (421–415), and the similarly distinct Mantinean War (419–418) followed that first decade. The intervening Sicilian War (415–413) led to a third phase of the conflict, often in two simultaneous theaters known on land as the Decelean War (413–404) and at sea as the Ionian War (411–404).

  Chapter 2

  1. 3.26.3; cf. Xenophon, Hellenica, 4.5.10 and 5.3.3; Polybius 18.6.4. “Suckering” is an annual job of any tree or vine farmer, who must send crews into the orchards or vineyards each spring to cut off unwanted shoots that spring from the trunk.

  2. [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 2.14. Thucydides could have added that the poor also looked to profit in war from state pay for service and opportunistic plunder, perhaps on the expectation that the city itself could survive despite annual attacks on its landowning classes’ exposed cropland.

  3. For examples of landlocked states that faced real problems after having their harvests ravaged, see Xenophon, Hellenica, 5.4.50 and 7.2.10. Both sides in the present-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict seem to embrace the importance of olive trees as symbolic capital that has value far beyond producing olives. Throughout the years 2000–2002 the Palestinians cited the Israelis as bulldozing some fifteen thousand of their olive trees—about one hundred acres at normal planting densities—to clear paths along strategic areas to prevent sniper attacks. Yet the Christian Science Monitor (December 8, 2000) reported that both the destroyers and the owners, as traditional Mediterranean peoples, were depressed by the tactic: “We were educated not to uproot a sapling, and for us as Israelis, this has left a bad taste,” remarked Yoni Figel, an Israeli government official. In turn, the Palestinian mayor of Hares lamented, “Olives are like water to us. You cannot imagine a home without olive oil. The olive tree is a symbol of our people, surviving for centuries on these hillsides” (Daily Telegraph, London, November 3, 2000).

  4. See, in general, Aristophanes, Peace, 511–80. The hero of both his Acharnians and Peace is the archetypal “little guy” farmer, whose good sense, practicality, and salt-of-the-earth morality are at odds with a new commercial and radically democratic culture.

  5. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 6.9–10. In another paradox of the highest order, for the romantic Xenophon the paragons of Hellenic virtue were the Spartans, who themselves did no farmwork at all, while his archenemies were the Thebans, the agrarians par excellence of the Greek world.

  6. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 694 ff.; Euripides, Medea, 824. The sense of the sanctity of Attica’s soil was reflected in art as well. On the west pediment of the Parthenon, Poseidon vies with Athena for dominion over Attica, while a sacred olive tree is prominent nearby on the Acropolis.

  7. Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum 21 (1966): 644.12–13; Xenophon, Memorabilia, 2.1.13; Plato, Republic, 470A—471B; cf. 5.23.1–2 and 5.47.3–4; Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2.21.8, 3.11.6; Isocrates 14.31. For these and other passages, see discussion of these citations in Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 9–13.

  8. 1.121.2–3. The Corinthians apparently had some affinity with Athenian innovation by reason of their own long walls, sizable fleet, and maritime economy. Yet, despite all their natural endowments and prized location, oligarchic government lacked the dynamism of radical democracy, and thus by the fifth century Corinth itself was abjectly weak compared to the Athenian empire. For democracies and oligarchies in war, cf. 1.118.2, 2.39, 4.55.3–4, 6.18.6–7, 6.93.I, 7.55.2, 8.I.4, 8.89.3, and 8.96.5; cf. Herodotus 5.78. On the advantages of ancient democracies in wartime, see the review of ancient citations in Hanson, “Democratic Warfare,” especially 17–24.

  9. Short war: 5.14.3 and 7.28.2. It is not clear whether these initial wildly optimistic estimates were based on anticipated starvation accruing from devastation, the exhaustion of Athenian financial reserves, a hoped-for destruction of the Athenian phalanx, or panic and capitulation on the part of the Athenians. For Brasidas, see 4.85.2; cf. 3.79, 5.14.3, and Hornblower, Commentary, 2.38–61.

  10. 1.114.1 and 2.21.1. Rumor had it that King Pleistoanax had earlier been bribed by wealthy Athenians to go home, which might explain the later stories that Pericles’ own estates were to be saved in a similar private deal or through collusion with Archidamus. In fact, Pleistoanax had quit at Eleusis because of advance word that the Athenians would grant sizable concessions to Sparta, which explains why King Archidamus tarried in hopes of a similar brokered deal in 431.

  11. 1.124.1; cf. 1.121.4. The Corinthians’ confidence was perhaps grounded in their own experience with long walls across the Isthmus, which had a poor record of keeping enemies out of Corinthian territory—an expanse, however, that was far more difficult to fortify and defend than the Athenian-Piraeus corridor.


  12. 1.81.6. Whether Archidamus really said that in 431 or whether, years later, after the verdict of the Archidamian War was in, Thucydides put such “prescient” words into the mouth of one of his favorite Spartans we are not sure. But the sentiment was probably widely shared by at least a handful of pessimistic conservative Spartan elites who had gotten word of the growth of both Athenian fortifications and a 300-trireme fleet. See also 2.11.6–8, 2.12.1, and 2.18.5.

  13. The reserve fund: 2.24.1; the Spartan sneak attack: 2.93.3. It would have been far cheaper for the Athenians to meet the Spartans in the plain of Attica to wage hoplite battle than to send hundreds of its ships on patrol in the Aegean and around the Peloponnesian coast to monitor the allies and attack enemy villages. Far from being merely passive, Periclean strategy was ambitious and thus enormously expensive.

  14. For the promise that a defeat of the Thebans would keep Sparta out of Attica, see 4.95.2. This irony is noted in Krentz, “Strategic Culture”: a Spartan force designed to harass and thus to prompt battle was so formidable that it had precisely the opposite effect of ensuring that no one in his right mind would march out to confront it.

  15. See Thorne, “Warfare and Agriculture,” 249–51, which offers interesting though theoretical scenarios on the difficulty facing Athenian farmers evacuating their harvests into Athens. Much of his revisionist work argues that we underestimate the damage that could be caused by torching grain; i.e., that it was not that difficult to time an invasion right at the combustible period of wheat and barley maturity, while much harder for the defenders to harvest it and bring it inside the city in time. These are interesting hypo-theticals, but many of his arguments—e.g., that ravagers in a parched Attic countryside could have poured sufficient amounts of water into grain granaries to spoil stored crops—seem unlikely.

  16. Plutarch, Pericles, 33.4; cf. Thucydides 1.143.5. Athens’ youth or, rather, a new generation of inexperienced Athenian hotheads, posed a challenge for Pericles as well: the older hoplites had known conflict in Boeotia and Megara, before the war; but the younger were the most likely to rush out foolishly to fight the Spartans; cf. Diodorus 12.42.6, and de Ste. Croix, Origins, 208–09. For Agis, see Diodorus 13.72–73, who locates the incident in 408.

  17. Cf. Diodorus 12.42.7–8. Cf. Thucydides 2.25.1–2, 2.26.1–2, 2.30.1–2, 2.56.1–6, and in general Westlake, “Seaborne Raids.” In terms of destroying large amounts of Spartan war matériel, the raids accomplished little. Yet Peloponnesian farmers were subject to the same fears as their Attic counterparts. Thus, the notion that Athenian seaborne raiders were attacking the rural communities of Peloponnesian ravagers back home was unsettling.

  18. 6.105. Thucydides said the ravaging of Laconian soil gave the Spartans a “rather more plausible excuse” (euprophasiston mallon tên aitian), inasmuch as the crop devastation violated the peace treaty in “the most manifest way.”

  19. Aristotle, Politics, 1269B. The best account of the Spartan paranoia over the helots, and how that fear played into the hands of its enemies, is still found in Cartledge, Agesilaos, 170–77.

  20. 3.18.5; cf. 1.101.2. The Mytileneans could say that in 427, but only in light of four failed Spartan invasions of Attica. Before the war maritime states such as the Corinthians had, in fact, urged an invasion of the Attic hinterlands as a mechanism to relax the Athenian grip on its overseas empire. Cf. 1.122.1.

  21. Plutarch, Pericles, 33.4–5. Cf. 1.43.5. We have no information that Pericles ever, in fact, contemplated a scorched-earth policy. Had the Athenians been able to destroy all their crops, the arriving Spartan ravagers were nevertheless just a few miles from the border of the friendly and especially rich heartland of Boeotia.

  22. Euripides, Medea, 824; Plutarch, Pericles, 31.1–2. Cf. 3.851; 4.84, 88, 130; 5.84. It was another irony of the war that much of civic-inspired tragedy and comedy inside the walls would have a larger audience in the early years of the war only because of the forced evacuation of thousands from the countryside—and thus for perhaps the first time began to portray rural themes in earnest.

  23. For the trauma of the evacuation of Attica, see 2.17 and 2.52.1; Diodorus 12.45.2; and Aristophanes, Knights, 792–93. Thucydides focuses on the emotion and pain of the first withdrawal into the city in 431. But there were four other such evacuations that he does not mention in any such graphic way, and these treks may have been just as difficult. In general, the historian describes fully a “typical” siege, battle, or civil strife, and then assumes that the reader is familiar with the details of subsequent events that are more cursorily noted.

  24. 2.54.1. We do not quite know what Pericles meant by such a bleak assessment. Presumably Athenian countermeasures after 430 might have been even more muscular and effective around the shores of the Peloponnese had the state not been so devastated by disease. Plutarch believed that had the plague not hit, Sparta might shortly have given up the idea of defeating Athens altogether (Plutarch, Pericles, 34.2).

  25. On Alcibiades’ warning: 8.18.7. There has been a long controversy among scholars about the actual legal basis of Pericles’ enormous power, a debate nicely summarized by Hamel, Athenian Generals, 9–12. One of the indirect means of running Athenian politics was the decision about whether or not to convene the assembly. Obviously, in times of crisis and acrimony a sober general like Pericles would prefer to postpone debate, cool down tempers, and not subject state policy to the collective wisdom of 7,000 or so enraged citizens crammed onto the Pynx.

  26. 2.65.9; cf. 2.65.4, 4.83.3, 6.17.2, 6.63, 8.2. Elsewhere Thucydides uses the terms ochlos and homilos in a manner that is not always pejorative but perhaps reflects the potentiality, rather than the inevitability, of the “people” to be fickle and mercurial. Cf. Cawkwell, Thucydides, 7–8.

  27. 2.12. Cf. 2.10.1–2. Although Thucydides began the second book of his history with the March 431 Theban attack on Plataea, he apparently felt that the war proper started only with the direct confrontation of Spartan and Athenian troops more than two months later. See Gabriel and Metz, Sumer, 104, for the length of marching armies of about 65,000.

  28. 2.8.4. It is also unclear to what degree such anti-Athenian sentiments were based on a cynical assessment of being on the winning side—that Sparta might well either beat or at least humiliate Athens in a brief, cheap, and lucrative campaign. On the farms of Attica, see the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 12.3–5. The anonymous historian suggests that the Athenians themselves may have stocked their farms in part from the plunder and booty from military operations abroad. Cf. Hanson, “Thucydides,” 212–26. What exactly was rural “plunder” in the ancient world? Most likely anything valuable left behind, from household fixtures (furniture, wooden doors, window frames) to roof tiles, wagons, farm implements, and stock animals. On evacuation and the difficulty in burning grain, see Foxhall, “Farming and Fighting,” 140–43.

  29. For eleventh-hour discussions at both Athens and Sparta, see Kagan, Outbreak, 310–42.

  30. Plutarch, Pericles, 33.3. For the nature of the deme of Acharnae and its relationship to Athens, see Jones, Rural Athens, 92–96. See Foxhall, “Farming and Fighting,” 142–43, for the idea that Archidamus sought to provoke domestic friction and strife by targeting the farms of conservative Athenian hoplites.

  31. Plutarch, Pericles, 33.5. There is surely irony here: the angriest of all Athenians, the farmers of Attica, rarely served in the cavalry or the navy, and thus sat tight while others risked their lives to take revenge upon their enemies.

  32. An entire corpus of literature has emerged assessing Pericles’ strategy: Was it really all that passive? Was it effective? Did the cavalry and sea patrols constitute an offensive mind-set? See a review of the arguments in Ober, “Thucydides,” 186–89, and Spence, “Perikles,” 106–09, which credit Pericles with a strategy that was more sophisticated than is usually acknowledged. Krentz (“Strategic Culture,” 68–72) believes that the Spartans ironically appeared with such a large force that they precluded any chance of their hoped-for At
henian hoplite response. For Pericles as strategist, see the classic treatment of Delbrück, Warfare in Antiquity, 135–43.

  33. Later the Athenian general Hippocrates urged his troops on the eve of the battle of Delium to remember that a victory over the Boeotians might rob Peloponnesians of cavalry support and thus ensure that the enemy would never invade Attica again—an odd statement since by autumn 424 they had not been in Attica for almost a year and a half, and would not return for over a decade. Cf. 4.95.2.

  34. Isocrates 7.52; cf. Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 16.5, and Alciphron, Letters, 3.31. We assume that the ubiquitous phrase “the Athenians” included residents of Athens; but, in fact, perhaps two out of every three “Athenians” actually lived in rural Attica, either in small villages or isolated farmhouses outside the walls of the city. These rural folk may have rarely come into Athens at all.

  35. 1.82.4. Archidamus’ advice reveals that even after the outbreak of the war, there was something still phony about the conflict. The Spartans believed that there was room for discussions should they not attack the Athenian countryside without restraint.

  36. 2.13.1. Thucydides (2.55) and Diodorus (12.45) often talk of “all” the land being ravaged even as they assume that it was not seriously damaged (e.g., 3.26 and 7.27.4). In almost every contemporary comedy of Aristophanes’ there is some reference to the devastation of Attica, an experience that must have traumatized the Athenians for many years. See Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 138–43.

  37. 2.14.1–2 and 2.16.2. The problem with the Long Walls was that while they followed the successful Athenian strategy of withdrawal before a superior land army, the sacrifice now fell largely on the country folk, rather than, as before the battle of Salamis, on the urban and rural population alike. On the radical cultural and social changes that came about from the evacuation, see the arguments of Jones, Rural Athens, 195–207. For premonitions of a Spartan invasion, see Lazenby, Peloponnesian War, 23–24.