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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  38. Ravaging tools: Plutarch, Cleomenes, 26.3. For ancient passages about the devastation of Attica: Aristophanes, Acharnians, 232, 509–12; Peace, 319–20. Cf. Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 164. The Persian occupation of Attica left tangible records of destruction, most prominently on the Acropolis and the shrines of Attica that were burned. In comparison, there is almost no archaeological evidence of the five Spartan invasions of the Archidamian War—or, for that matter, from the effect of the near-decade-long occupation of Decelea.

  39. Cf. 3.26.3, 7.27.4, and Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 12.4. Of course, it is possible that the anonymous fourth-century B.C. historian was, in fact, drawing on Thucydides himself as a source for marginal damage during the Archidamian War.

  40. For Aristophanes, see Acharnians, 1089–93; Peace, 557–63, 573, 1320–25. The nature of the Aristophanic evidence for agricultural damage is discussed at length in Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 138–43. On the indestructibility of the olive tree, see Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 694 ff. “A terror to its enemies” perhaps makes sense to anyone who has started the unenviable task of chopping down or uprooting an olive tree.

  41. 2.57.2; cf. 2.65.2. Thucydides seems not terribly interested in these latter four invasions. His description of the plague, the revolution at Corcyra, and the Pylos campaign all merit more attention. Before 425 the Spartan army was used briefly at the siege of Plataea and for combating a few raids in the Peloponnese. But the idea of constant war making during the first seven years is absurd inasmuch as real infantry battle did not start until 425, with the subsequent clashes on Sphacteria, at Delium, and near Amphipolis.

  42. See Pericles’ outline of strategy on the eve of the war at 1.141.3–7. Once Sparta failed in Attica, the poverty of its strategic thinking was apparent: besieging the marginal town of Plataea, giving only nominal support to the critical insurrection on Lesbos, and parrying Athenian attacks in the Peloponnese. Not until Brasidas’ long march to the Chalcidice was there anything inspired about Spartan military planning that might change the course of the war.

  43. 3.26.1–4. For the Spartan anger over the fact that Athenians were down in the Peloponnese while they were up in Attica, see Diodorus 12.61.3.

  44. 3.15.2–16. One of the common themes of Aristophanes’ contemporary comedies is the Panhellenic revulsion for the destruction of property and crops. In both his Acharnians and Lysistrata, Greeks flock together from the countryside to protest the stupidity of destroying property.

  45. Other than Acanthus, it is hard to cite any city that simply capitulated in fear of losing its crops. On Sicily, the Athenians, we are told, “burned the grain” of some of the nearby allied towns of the Syracusans, but such ravaging seems to have had no effect in either drawing hoplites outside their walls or in inducing starvation. In general, see 4.84.1–2 and 4.88.1–2; for the luxuriousness of the Sicilian countryside and the systematic efforts to evacuate it during times of invasion, see Diodorus 13.81. And cf. Herodotus 5.34.1, 6.101.2.

  46. 4.66.1–3, 2.31.2; for the proverbial sufferings of the Megarians, cf. Aristophanes, Acharnians, 535; Peace, 246–50. The passes over Megara were always a source of contention, as the Athenians realized that their occupation meant that a Peloponnesian army might be preempted or even stopped before arriving in Attica. See de Ste. Croix, Origins, 190–95.

  47. Decelea clearly fascinated Thucydides, who makes much of the strategy of epiteichismos inside Attica (1.122, 6.91.6–7, 7.18.1). For the effects of Decelea, see Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 153–73. Most famously, more than 20,000 slaves were said to have left Attica for Decelea, the majority of them probably from the countryside of Attica. See Hanson, “Thucydides,” 225–28. Agis arrived in Attica “earlier than ever before” (7.19.1), inasmuch as he was building a permanent fort, not engaging in seasonal devastation.

  48. For this repeated theme of “fear,” see 1.236; cf. 1.881, 1.118.2, and 1.75.3. Cf. Van Wees, Greek Warfare, 258n4. Donald Kagan has often emphasized the accuracy of Thucydides’ assessment; see Origins, 8–9, 71–74. And for a spirited defense of Pericles’ strategic thought, see Delbrück, Warfare in Antiquity, 135–39, and, in general, his Die Strategie des Pericles Erläutert durch die Strategie Friedrichs des Grossen (Berlin, 1890). Emotions, not reason, are often cited for the motivations of states; cf. 1.75.3 for the Athenians’ own excuse for empire: “Fear was our motive, afterward honor and finally self-interest.” See also 1.76.2 for the importance of honor (timê), fear (deos), and advantage (ôphelia).

  49. 1.121. For the table of Athenian expenditures, see Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, 437. Money seems to have been thematic in all early discussions of the war, and the asymmetrical nature of the two adversaries’ reserves became a primary reason for Pericles’ antebellum optimism. For this new idea that money, not courage, numbers, or traditional warfare, was the arbiter of military success, see Kallet, Money and Corrosion, 285–94.

  50. Alcibiades and the ephebic oath: Plutarch, Alcibiades, 15.1; Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 5. For information about the property, family, and early life of Alcibiades, see Davies, Athenian Propertied Families, 20–21. In Thucydides’ account (6.91.6), Alcibiades is one of the strategic architects of the Decelea operation. Perhaps as an earlier cavalryman he understood how difficult it might have been to stop Spartan ravagers had they stayed on in permanent fortifications.

  Chapter 3

  1. 1.23.3. Thucydides’ statement on the plague is quite astonishing; what he implies is that the disease was the greatest disaster to befall the Greeks during the war—worse than Sicily, the chaos at Corcyra, the carnage of the Ionian War, and a variety of other catastrophes from Decelea to Melos. Perhaps the reason why we find that generalization hard to believe is that the plague broke out in the second year of a conflict that, nevertheless, went on for another quarter century.

  2.Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 12.3. It is surprising that Thebes experienced a growth of refugees, given the rarity of Athenian attacks across the border. There was plenty of raiding across the highlands of Mount Parnes, but most of the aggression came from the Thebans. Athenian-inspired attacks on Mycalessus and Tanagra were mere excursions. The only sizable invasion—that of Demosthenes and Hippocrates, culminating at Delium—was an abject failure.

  3. For the Long Walls, see 2.13.8; cf. 1.89.3, 1.93.8, 1.107.1, 1.108.3, and Gomme, Commentary, 2.39–40. Although the line of twin fortifications stretched over four miles, they were completed in just a fraction of the fifteen years devoted to the construction of the Parthenon. Together with earlier municipal walls, they formed a network of fortifications found almost nowhere else in fifth-century Greece.

  4. See 2.51.2–5. Diodorus (12.45) has a few wrinkles in his description of the outbreak, stressing the role of overcrowding.

  5. Thucydides on the social consequences of the plague: 2.53. For the contrast of accommodations before and after the evacuation, see 2.17, 2.52; cf. Diodorus 12.45.2–3. On the number of Athenians working on municipal projects, see Aristophanes, Wasps, 709, and Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 24.3.

  6. Wasps, 792–93; on two houses, see Plato, Laws, 5.745B, and Aristotle, Politics, 6.1330a14–18. On evacuation in general, see Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 112–21. Many argue that the refugees gave city folk their first real intimacy with the rustics of Attica, a rather different picture from the usual view that ancient Greek cities drew little distinction between city and country, rural and urban citizens. For the controversy, see Jones, Rural Athens, 204–07.

  7. 2.54. In part, Thucydides gave a great deal of detail about the evacuation of 431 because it was prior to the plague and seemed the most extensive. On areas of Attica that were never evacuated during the war, see again Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 151, 161–66.

  8. Plutarch, Pericles, 35.3. Apparently, the Greeks understood that the disease could be spread by infected carriers, even by those who had yet shown no real symptoms of the malady.

  9. On Solon’s purported use of chemical war
fare, see Pausanias 10.37.7; cf. also Aeneas Tacticus 8.4. Mayor, Greek Fire, 99–118, has an interesting discussion of the classical equivalents of biological warfare, citing a number of ancient passages to show how diabolical the Greeks were in an age well before our modern notion of weapons of mass destruction.

  10. For the plague and the Peloponnesians, see Pausanias 8.41.7–9 and 10.11.5; for the oracles at Athens, see Thucydides 2.54.3; cf. 2.54.4. For the general ancient consensus that population density and cramped quarters resulted in the disease, see Diodorus 12.45.2–4; cf. Mayor, Greek Fire, 126–27, for ancient plagues in the context of war.

  11. A good review of the history of the debate and the issues involved is found at Sallares, Ecology, 244–62, and Gomme, Commentary, 2.145–62.

  12. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.10–11. Did the fear of another outbreak influence the survivors, now crammed into Athens once again, to be terrified about a new round of pestilence and thus more ready to capitulate in a way not true three decades earlier?

  13. 2.51. Two critical aspects of the infection—contagion and acquired immunity—seem to have been widely recognized very quickly. On various aspects of the plague, with close attention to Thucydides’ vocabulary, see again Gomme, Commentary, 2.150–61.

  14. Initial mention can be found in the brief summaries in Parlama et al., City, 272–74. Full discussions of these salvage operations await further scholarly publication.

  15. John of Ephesus, fragment II E—G; Procopius, Persian Wars, 11.23. Constantinople, like Athens, was a great port and thus visited by traders from three continents who traversed the Mediterranean.

  16. Resentment against the new arrivals: Plutarch, Pericles, 34.4. For the various reasons why the Spartans stayed home or left Attica early, cf. 2.71.1, 3.89.1, 4.61, and Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 135–37.

  17. On the unburied dead, see Euripides, Suppliant Women, 16–17, 168–69, 308–11, and 531–36. For the bones of fallen Syracusans during the Carthaginian War, see Diodorus 13.75.2–3.

  18. 2.48.2. In this sense, his analysis of the plague also serves as a blueprint for the narrative of the Peloponnesian War itself, which was no accident but a chronic malady that had prior clear symptoms, allowing a diagnosis and demanding a prognosis.

  19. 2.52–53; cf. 2.53.4. We do not know quite how long the rampant rate of death from the disease lasted, but in Thucydides’ description the resulting social pathologies seem to have followed from the outbreak almost immediately—and lasted well beyond the cessation of the mass infection.

  20. 2.53.1. We sometimes forget that the Athenian assembly that voted to execute about i,000 Mytileneans in 427 had themselves seen far more death and destruction than that which they were going to sanction on Lesbos. It may well be that in some terribly ironic fashion the plague also accounts for the destruction of Plataea, in that had it not broken out, Sparta would have gone to Attica in 428 and bypassed Plataea, which apparently could not be stormed or starved out through the Thebans’ efforts alone. Had the disease broken out in the last, rather than the second, year of the war, and had 80,000 Athenians perished in 404 rather than in 430, the nature of Athenian conduct in the conflict might have been far different.

  21. 3.87. After the less virulent second outbreak of 426, we are never told precisely when the plague left for good.

  22. 3.87.3; cf. Diodorus 12.58.2. Also see Strauss, Athens After, 75–78; he discusses at length the effects of the plague on the manpower reserves of the Athenian military.

  23. 2.49.8. Although Thucydides says that the survivors were often left maimed, we do not hear anecdotal reports in later literature about those who were disabled. Cf. Pausanias 3.9.2.

  24. 3.3.1. In his funeral oration (cf. 2.35–41), Pericles had bragged about the Athenians in Kennedyesque terms, saying that they would pay any price and meet any danger to respond to the needs of their national security. But by 428 Thucydides could remark, “The Athenians, inasmuch as they were suffering both from the plague and the war that had recently broken out and was now at its height, considered it to be serious business to make an enemy out of the island of Lesbos. It had had a fleet and unimpaired power, and so at first they would not give credence to the charges [that some of the Lesbians were fomenting rebellion], instead attributing more weight to the desire that they might not be true” (3.3.1).

  25. 6.26.2. Despite the use of the Greek adverb “just” (arti), a major outbreak had not hit the city for at least a decade.

  26. See variously at 2.31.2, 2.61.3, and 3.13.3–4. Just five years into the war, the Mytileneans could make the public argument that Athens was ruined (ephtharatai)—an odd description for a still powerful state that would soon savagely put down the rebellion on the other side of the Aegean and execute over i,000 ringleaders.

  27. Plutarch, Pericles, 36.4. From Plutarch we learn that Pericles perished after a drawn-out bout of disease, which slowly tapped his formidable powers of resistance, the force multiplier to a rash of miseries in his last years, which had seen the death of his legitimate sons, sister, relatives, and close friends to the disease, as well as an earlier divorce and later estrangement from his eldest son, Xanthippus. He perished before seeing his last illegitimate son executed in the hysteria following the victory at Arginusae: Plutarch, Pericles, 36.7.

  28. Pericles: 2.65.10. We must remember that the initial Athenian strategy of withdrawal behind the Long Walls was the logical result of nearly three decades of Periclean leadership that had sought to systematize and institutionalize Themistocles’ earlier ad hoc idea of abandoning the Attic countryside and avoiding pitched infantry battle. Thus, Pericles’ death early on in the war meant that some thirty years of military policy ended with him, to be replaced by uncertain strategies that had not previously been a part of the decision to build fortifications, create the empire, invest in the fleet, and shy away from hoplite battle.

  29. Diogenes Laertius 26; Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, 15.20.6; cf. Plutarch, Aristides, 27. Most of the evidence comes from later derivative sources that in some cases could have confused remarrying after the death of a spouse with polygamy—or seek in gossipy fashion to suggest extramarital relationships among prominent Athenians.

  30. Plutarch, Pericles, 37.4–5. In some sense, this exemption was all for naught: after sharing in the successful command at the climactic naval victory of Arginusae, the younger Pericles was summarily executed on the insane charge that along with the other generals he had been derelict in retrieving the corpses of Athenian sailors. His illustrious pedigree won him no leniency from the mob—some twenty-three years after his father had fallen to the plague.

  31. Diodorus 12.45. Ancient observers were fascinated by the plague precisely because of the relative rarity of such mass death in classical Greece.

  32. Plutarch, Pericles, 38.2–3. Anyone who has suffered a chronic and debilitating disease will not be surprised by how quickly the confidence in rational medicine fades and one enters the realm of faith, superstition, and speculative treatment in search of relief.

  33. Diodorus 12.58.6; cf. Thucydides 3.104. We should not be surprised at the return of such traditional palliatives. After the initial outbreak of 431–430, the disease waned until a second, but weaker flare-up in 426, before gradually going dormant and disappearing. And despite the crowded conditions brought on by Decelea (413–404) and the final blockade of the city by Lysander (405–404), Athens never again experienced anything like the annus horribilis of 429—ongoing proof enough for most surviving Athenians that such piety and cults had paid off handsomely.

  34. Plutarch, Pericles, 37.1–2. For all the obvious pathologies of Alcibiades, our contemporary sources—Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Xenophon—agree on his remarkable unconquerable spirit. Fed by both ego and natural talent, Alcibiades quite literally never gave up: despite personal exile, treason, scandal, financial ruin, and military defeat, he fought to the very end amid a host of enemies.

  35. For the farms of Alcibiades’ family, see Davies, Athenian Pro
pertied Families, 20. Everything he owned—and his real and movable property was worth perhaps 100 talents (in today’s dollars about $48 million!)—was confiscated after his exile in 415 and perhaps largely returned when his sentence was lifted in 407, before being lost again when Alcibiades left in the last years of the war.

  36. Socrates did not get the plague: cf., e.g., Diogenes Laertius, 2.25, and Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, 2.1.4–5, who also wrongly claims that the philosopher was the only one who did not succumb—impossible when we remember that the second outbreak of 426 was especially virulent and that prior exposure had given thousands of earlier survivors immunity from reinfection.

  37. 5.41.2. The proposed treaty—never enacted—is interesting in that it suggests substituting a single pitched battle in lieu of an open-ended conflict to adjudicate potential disputes. The Spartans, hoplites par excellence, at first labeled the idea moronic (môria) before promising to discuss it further. The nature of the first decade of the Peloponnesian War, coupled with news of the horrific plague at Athens, had apparently prompted nostalgia for the old Hellenic idea of such simple solutions.

  38. For a description of these later great plagues, see Lucretius, On the Nature of the Gods, 6.1138–1286; Virgil, Georgics, 3.478; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 7.523; and Pro-copius, History of the Wars, 2.23.1.

  Chapter 4

  1. Plutarch, Pericles, 34.1–2. In the first year of the war (431) Pericles personally commanded the massive expedition against Megara (“the greatest Athenian army that had ever been assembled in one body,” 2.31.2). And in the next season, even before the Spartans had left Attica and while the plague raged inside the city, Pericles led a formidable force of 100 ships, 400 hoplites, and 300 cavalrymen on a punitive expedition against the Peloponnese—all this from a man sixty-four years old and with a mere year to live.