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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  2. See P. Krentz, “Deception,” 186–91; Pritchett, Greek State, 2.163–70. We must be careful in making such generalizations given the nature of our incomplete sources; that being said, in the fifty years following the Persian War, Krentz counts only ten instances of such unconventional tactics, which might suggest that the Peloponnesian War really was a watershed event in the history of Hellenic military practice.

  3. 4.93.3 to 4.94.1. See also Rawlings, “Alternative Agonies,” 234–49, for the use of hoplites in the Peloponnesian War well apart from the phalanx. After the terrible hoplite defeat at Delium in 424 (cf. the context of Thucydides’ remark that Athens had no properly organized light-armed corps), Athens never again invaded Boeotia—except in 415 to dispatch the infamous Thracian peltasts under Diitrephes, who slaughtered the poor schoolboys at Mycalessus (7.29).

  4. 4.28.4, 4.111.1; Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.2.1. “Peltast” originally denoted a Thracian light-armed warrior who carried on the forearm the crescent-shaped hide shield (peltê); but later it seems almost to have meant any light-armed soldier, without specific reference to either Thrace or the nature of his shield.

  5. 6.43.2; cf. 2.81.8, 4.100.1. See Pritchett, Greek State, 5.7–10, for a list of stone throwers and slingers in the Peloponnesian War.

  6. 4.55.2. Cf. Bugh, Horsemen, 94–95. The Spartans, remember, were not exactly unacquainted with diverse enemies. Their hoplites had fought and defeated Persian cavalry and archers at the battle of Plataea (479) and for some fifty years hence put down helot insurrectionists. The inadequate nature of the Spartan cavalry would be a chief complaint in the fourth century; cf. Xenophon, Hellenica, 6.4.10–11.

  7. For laments about the new warfare, see the ancient citations in Hanson, “Hoplite Battle,” 204–06. Agrarian warfare prior to the Peloponnesian War assumed that a state would not bring to bear all its potential resources to conflict but fight in accordance with reigning cultural, political, and social protocols. Archers were objects of universal disdain in Greek literature; see the discussion of such passages in Hanson, Western Way of War, 15–16.

  8. Controversy surrounds Periclean strategy: his defenders claim it was not defeatist or passive but, in fact, entailed a variety of offensive measures, such as these raids. Its chief supporter was Hans Delbrück (Warfare in Antiquity, 135–43), who, disillusioned over the carnage of World War I, saw Pericles as the progenitor of the strategy of “exhaustion” or “attrition” (Ermattungsstrategie), which was far preferable to the waste of “annihilation” (Niederwerfungsstrategie). Thus, a wealthy empire like Athens could win by not losing, tying the Spartans down in a variety of distant and diverse theaters while avoiding a knockout blow from their vaunted phalanx. On Tolmides, see Diodorus 11.84.3.

  9. 2.25–32; Diodorus 12.42. For a modern catalog of these raids, see Westlake, “Seaborne Raids,” and Grundy, Thucydides, 346–59. For their expense, see Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, 436–37. Occasional resistance to Athenian raiding could be stiff. In Elis, for example, during the second reprisal of 430, the Athenians ravaged and besieged small towns with impunity, until the Eleans at last came out en masse to offer hoplite battle and thus quickly drove the Athenians back to their ships; cf. Diodorus 12.44.

  10. The various elements of the Athenians’ first seaborne response are found at 2.23, 2.25, 2.26–27, 2.31. For the expense of Greek temples, see Gomme, Commentary, 2.22–25, which weighs ancient evidence that the Acropolis buildings may have cost more than 1,000 talents each, before concluding that they probably did not.

  11. 3.95.2. For the attack on Thyraea, see Diodorus 12.65.8–9; on the Aetolians, cf. 3.98.2–5. There were about 300 hoplite marines committed to the campaign; so the butchery of the 120 meant losses in infantry alone of some 40 percent. There is uncertainty whether hoplites who embarked on triremes (epibatai) were from the hoplite (middle-class) census, or drawn from the ranks of the poorer (thetes).

  12. 3.111–13. The irony of it all is that Athenians were bushwhacked in Aetolia by native light-armed troops and then a few months later themselves did the same to the Peloponnesians with the help of similar native tribes in Amphilochia. To those who were cut down in the mud and grime of these hilly backwaters, oligarchy versus democracy meant little, if anything.

  13. Plato, Laws, 4.706 B—D. We must remember that Plato was talking mostly about Athens and drawing on the strong memories of youthful acquaintance with Socrates for the dramatic landscape of his dialogues. In Plato’s middle age, there were a number of fourth-century hoplite battles—Coronea, Nemea, Leuctra, second Mantinea—that belie his pessimism that the Greeks either could not or no longer would fight a “fair fight.”

  14. 2.67, 2.90.5, 2.92; cf. Herodotus 7.137. Throughout the war there were Peloponnesian ships off the Megarian coast, enormous plunder taken around Pylos and Decelea, and constant Boeotian raids across the Attic border. At various times these zones of chaos were something altogether different from either war or peace—but apparently the domain of thieves, exiles, and killers; e.g., 3.51.2, 5.115.2, and Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 12.4–5. The anonymous Oxyrhynchus historian reminds us that the Boeotians carted off goods from Attic farms that the Athenians themselves had plundered from others.

  15. 3.32; cf. 2.67.4. In one of the great understatements voiced during the war, some Samian envoys visited Alcidas when he harbored at Ephesus and remonstrated with him that his policy of executing innocents who were probably unwilling subjects of Athens “was not a very good way of freeing Greece.” For the butchery of Alcidas and other examples of murdering during the Peloponnesian War, see Pritchett, Greek State, 5.212–15.

  16. 3.34.2–4; 3.36. Behind the butchery of the two fleets was a larger strategic question. After four invasions of the Attic countryside and the loss of a quarter of the population to the plague, was there still the material strength and willpower to retain the empire—or could local oligarchs and a few Spartan ships cause widespread revolt that would soon stop money and food from entering the Piraeus?

  17. See also Thucydides 2.6.2 and Diodorus 12.65.8–9; cf. 4.57, 5.84, 6.61. While there was always an immediate logic to terrorizing local populations and taking prominent suspects into custody, it is hard to fathom how the slaughter of any of these hostages led to the strategic advantage of either Sparta or Athens.

  18. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.1.30–32, 2.2.3–4. At war’s end in 404 there was at least some cooling of barbarous passions, in the sense that the Spartans themselves did not engage in wholesale executions of the captured populations, nor did the Athenian democrats who returned to power within the year mete out death sentences to the failed oligarchs associated with the Thirty Tyrants. Cf. Plutarch, Lysander, 9.5–7 and Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.1.31–2; we are not quite sure whether the decision was to cut off hands (to prevent rowing entirely) or merely thumbs (to guarantee no captive could ever again wield the spear). Cf. also Hamel, Athenian Generals, 51–52.

  19. 4.80. Cf. Diodorus 12.67.3–5, which relates that the most prominent Spartans were entrusted with the grisly business of liquidating the 2,000. The tally of corpses is no guide to what captured the attention of ancient historians. Thus, the fate of these 2,000 helots merits a fraction of the narrative of the few hundred who died at Plataea or the long account of the 1,000 Mytilean rebels who were executed by Paches. See Cawkwell, Thucydides, 9. The mysterious massacre of somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 Polish officers in April 1940 by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk was part of a larger bloodbath that saw the Soviets eventually murder over another 20,000 Poles, whom they’d captured after dividing up the country with Hitler in autumn 1939. The Russians blamed the Nazis for the atrocity—at first a seemingly credible charge, given that they shot the officers with German bullets—and did not accept responsibility until the Gorbachev era.

  20. 4.48; Although it was far more difficult to kill thousands with iron-edged weapons, we should not thereby think it taxed the ingenuity of the Greeks—after all, a less sophisticated Aztec priestly caste may have murd
ered over 80,000 in a mere four days with obsidian blades, exceeding the daily carnage of industrial murder at Auschwitz centuries later. The Aztec king Ahuitzotl inaugurated the Great Temple to Huitzilopochtli in Tenochtitlán by using four convex stone tables and rotations of fresh executioners to kill some fourteen victims a minute for some ninety-six hours. Cf. Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 194–95.

  21. For a variety of statistics relating to the practice of insurrection and the use of traitors by both sides, see Losada, Fifth Column, 16–29.

  22. Athenian subject states were prone to revolt after the Sicilian disaster, and in turn Spartans worried about their own allies after a series of reversals such as Sphacteria, Cyzicus, and Arginusae. A cynic might conclude that most Greeks had no strong political prejudices toward either democracy or moderate oligarchy but simply preferred to live under the political system that offered the greatest hope of peace and tranquillity, and thus made the appropriate corrections to match the ebb and flow of the war. For Thucydides’ famous metaphor of war as a “harsh schoolmaster” (biaios didaskalos), see 3.82.2.

  23. On the slogans of revolutions and the role of intervening outside powers, see, in general, 3.82, and especially Lintott, Violence, 94–103. The nature of the mesoi is discussed in Hanson, Other Greeks, 179–218. For the class alliances of the hoplites at Athens, see Hanson, “Hoplites into Democrats,” 289–93.

  24. See Plato, Seventh Letter, 322B–C. Part of the strange attraction of Athenian conservatives for Sparta was the notion that it embodied something like Athens’ prior rural past before the advent of empire. Thus, it is natural that part of the Spartan demands at war’s end was to force the Athenians to accept the “ancestral constitution” (patrios politeia) that had existed in the sixth century before the rise of the democracy. Cf. Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 34.3, and Diodorus 14.3.2.

  25. 3.36.4. See the long, depressing account at 3.25–50. Cleon’s fingerprints seem to have been on a number of both audacious and bloodthirsty Athenian actions, from success on Sphacteria to failure at Amphipolis. Indeed, he may well have been behind the Athenian proposal in 430 to execute the Peloponnesian ambassadors captured in Thrace; cf. Gomme, Commentary, 2.201.

  26. 3.75.3–5. The idea that there was now an enemy within remained constant throughout the rest of the war. In 411 the Athenian fleet off Samos was paralyzed for a time, unsure of the loyalty of crews after the political upheaval on the island (8.63.2).

  27. 3.81.5. In the end, Corcyra remained an ally of Athens, and the thousands who died had no strategic effect on the outcome of the war. See a modern discussion by Price, Thucydides, 34–5, 274–77. The Spartan strategy in detaching from Athens important naval allies and subjects such as Mytilene and Corcyra was aimed at reducing the numerical superiority of the imperial fleet but also reflected that, for much of the first decade of the war, the Peloponnesians simply had no real idea of how to counter the military resources of Athens.

  28. For surmises about numbers of those killed, see Lintott, Violence, 109; later violence on Corcyra and a long account of why stasis plagued the Greek world are discussed at Diodorus 13.48.

  29. For the calamities on Chios and the executions at Samos, see 8.21, 8.24, 8.38, 8.40, 8.56, and 8.73–75. Chios, Lesbos, and Samos were among the most important subject states of the Athenian empire. The calamity on Sicily (wrongly) convinced them that, unlike earlier miscalculations during the plague years, Athens now really was weakened to such a degree as to be unable to patrol the Aegean with any real force.

  30. Cf. 2.27.1–2, 5.1, 5.116 and Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.9. The war, of course, had begun with the effort to take Plataea, which upon surrender was cleansed of Plataeans and the land handed over to Boeotian opportunists.

  31. For Sitalces’ war with Macedonia: 2.98; Messana: 4.1, 4.24; Epidaurus: 5.54.3–4, 5.55.2–4; Carthaginians and Sicily: Diodorus 13.44–115.

  32. 4.2.4. “If he wished” (ên boulêtai). Usually the Athenian assembly exercised ironclad control over their generals in the field, who understood that failure, as Thucydides himself could attest, meant exile at best, with a death sentence not all that uncommon. Demosthenes seems not to have been an elected general at the time of Pylos.

  33. 4.28.5. See Kagan, Archidamian War, 322–33, for a proper appraisal of Cleon’s military talents, which apparently were considerable despite the character assassination so prominent in both Thucydides’ history and Aristophanes’ early comedies. Cleon may have been one of the prominent demagogues responsible for Thucydides’ exile during the Amphipolis campaign a few years later.

  34. For Thucydides’ various quotes, see 4.32.4, 4.34, 4.40.1–2. Thucydides often places great weight on morale and reputation. While the Pylos campaign made sense strategically (and should have led to even more helot defections), the real importance was more intangible, involving the ability of a successful power to transmit fear and win respect.

  35. See Diodorus 11.72 (Sicily); Herodotus 5.31 (Naxos); Thucydides 8.40 (Chios) and 7.27.5 (more than 20,000 Attic slaves that fled to Decelea). On the fall of Pylos in 409, see Diodorus 13.64.6.

  36. For a sampling of Spartan paranoia, see 4.41.3, 4.55.1, 4.80.2–3, 4.108.7, 4.117.1–2, 5.14.3, 5.15.1, and 5.34.2. For the number of slaves involved in the fighting on both sides and their strategic importance during the war, see Hunt, Slaves, 56–101. Cf. Thucydides 4.41. Kagan, Archidamian War, 248–51, has a good analysis of how the psychological trauma of the Spartan loss translated into immediate Athenian strategic advantage.

  37. 4.55.3–4. To fathom the Peloponnesian War it is crucial to understand that the capture of 120 Spartiates affected the Spartans as much as the plague and the Sicilian expedition (an aggregate 120,000 or so dead) did the Athenians. Spartans were just as resolute as Athenians, but there were simply not many of their elite left when the war broke out in 431.

  38. For Thucydides’ observations about the effects of the new Athenian confidence in raiding, fortifying, and plundering the Peloponnese, cf. 4.45, 4.53, 4.55.3–4, and 4.80.1.

  39. On Brasidas’ various successes in northern Greece, see 4.85–87; 4.105, 4.110–13, and 4.120–35; many of these events are discussed later under sieges. For his career, see Cartledge, Spartans, 185–97. And for his corps of former helots, see Hunt, Slaves, 58–60, 116–17.

  40. 3.114, 4.118, 5.18, 5.23, 5.77, and 5.79; cf. 8.18. Formal treaties inscribed on stone (as reported by historians)—as state documents rather than private narratives—are good indicators that once atypical conduct in war had now become enshrined as part of contemporary Hellenic custom and practice.

  41. 5.84, 6.61, 8.65.2, 8.90. On Alcibiades’ more nefarious schemes in general during the war, see Ellis, Alcibiades, 72–97, and Henderson, Great War, 291–97.

  Chapter 5

  1. Herodotus 7.9; Plutarch, Pericles, 33.4. Herodotus finished his Persian War histories perhaps in the first decade of the Peloponnesian War, at a time when the general course and duration of the conflict were still unclear. True, Pericles may well have actually said what Plutarch wrote; but the biographer compiled his biography in the Roman era almost five hundred years later, with knowledge of the Athenian hoplite disaster at Delium and the alliance’s failure at Mantinea.

  2. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.1.33; Diodorus 13.72.3 From Diodorus’ account the Spartans went to absurd lengths to draw the Athenians out from their walls by setting up a victory trophy in front of the Academy and challenging the Athenians to ease their humiliation by coming out and contesting the monument in open phalanx battle. But shame as a catalyst to battle had been discredited since 431.

  3. 3.91. In some ways, such small successes misled the Athenians terribly about the quality of leadership needed for the Sicilian expedition of 415–413. The general Nicias had a fine record at Solygia and Tanagra, both brief, small amphibious operations of limited scope. The problem was that these mostly inconsequential victories were sometimes equated with strategic wisdom and thus served as models for future operations—with d
isastrous consequences, as Delium and Sicily both showed. By the same token, Demosthenes’ own setbacks in Aetolia and Boeotia might have warned the Athenians that his impetuousness did not always lead to triumphs like Amphilochia or Pylos—and thus that he really was a questionable figure to lead the second armada to save the first in Sicily.

  4. Diodorus 12.69.2. Perhaps due to the modern fascination with special operations (as, for example, in the various Israeli counterinsurgency and rescue missions) or the mystique of intelligence (as in the case of the ULTRA intercepts of German intentions in World War II), we tend to see Demosthenes as a visionary who sought to avoid simplistic hoplite battles or conventional sea fights. In fact, most of his campaigns were poorly thought out, and when they went awry led not to stalemate but to retreat, if not abject defeat. See the sober assessment of Roisman, General Demosthenes, 73–74.

  5. 5.14.1. We must be careful here in downplaying entirely the role of hoplite battle based on the evidence of its relative infrequency during the war. Given the clarity and hallowed tradition of such fighting, it retained a psychological importance that went well beyond the numbers who died in any one encounter. Had the Athenians won at Delium or their allies at Mantinea, in a few hours they could quite literally have changed the course of the war. By the same token, the key figures that did alter late-fifth-century and fourth-century Greek history—Brasidas, Cleon, Lysander, Cleombrotus, Pelopidas, and Epaminondas—all died in hoplite armor on the battlefield.

  6. The battle is described at 4.93–96; cf. 5.72–73 for the battle of Mantinea. Diodorus 12.69–71 adds some valuable details on Delium omitted by Thucydides, such as the postwar establishment of a Delia, a commemorative Theban festival funded by the spoils of the battle. For a modern account of the engagement, see Hanson, Ripples of Battle, 171–243. For the details of the Athenian objectives in the campaign, see Roisman, General Demosthenes, 33–41.