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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  16. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.3–4; cf. Hellenica, 2.1.15. What saved the Athenians from suffering the fate that they had so often meted out to others? Perhaps three considerations: Athens was an enormous city of some 100,000 urban residents with a preeminent reputation for cultural achievement; a right-wing cabal was in the process of creating a government sympathetic to Sparta; and the Spartans themselves were already growing suspicious of their onetime allies the Thebans, who had suffered and contributed relatively little during the war, argued over the booty collected from Attica, and were soon to challenge Sparta itself for the hegemony of Greece.

  17. 7.29.4–5. In Thucydides’ narrative the fact that the peltasts are Thracian is presented to explain their brutality and gratuitous killing of animals and children; but given the random slaughter of civilians at Corcyra, it is hard to see how the Thracians were any more callous or cowardly than the Greeks on occasion.

  18. Cannibalism: 2.70.1. Centuries later, during Sulla’s siege of Athens (87–86), cannibalism was reported to be widespread; when his legionaries entered the city they found preparations of human flesh in many of the kitchens (Appian, Mithridatic War, 38).

  19. On various forms of bloodletting, see 2.5.7, 2.67.4, 3.32.1, 3.50, 3,81,2, 4.57.3–4, 4.80, 5.83.2, 5.116, 7.29.5, 8.21, 8.38.3, and Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.19–20. Compare these slaughters with the two hoplite battles of Delium and Mantinea to appreciate either how war itself had changed or that the Peloponnesian “War” was not so much an interstate conflict as a messy civil war between landed pro-Spartan oligarchs and poorer pro-Athenian democrats. For captives, see Pritchett, War, 1.78–79. His figures include only those instances where a specific number of prisoners is provided; the real tally was far higher.

  20. Aeneas Tacticus, 1.1.2. Aeneas wrote in the mid-fourth century at a time when city-states sought to invest in fortifications as never before—perhaps in response to the carnage of the Peloponnesian War. While the technology of hoplite battle continued to remain static after 404, the arts of siegecraft—artillery, rams, masonry, and architecture—were transformed and refined following the fall of Athens.

  21. Minoa: 3.51; Lecythus: 4.115.3. It is hard to know whether innovative siege techniques—the mound at Plataea, the tower at Lecythus, or the fire cannon at Delium—were ad hoc affairs or reflections of incipient breakthroughs in the art of siegecraft. For the difficulty of old-style hoplites mounting ramparts, see Ober, “Hoplites,” 180–88.

  22. Samos: Diodorus 12.28; Plutarch, Pericles, 27; cf. 7.43.1. For the elaborate preparations at Potidaea and the machines, see Diodorus 12.45. “Rams” is a vague term; it could cover anything from ad hoc timber and ropes to sophisticated metal-plated sheds on wheels that protected bronze-tipped rams.

  23. 4.88.1. Why did Acanthus surrender on the arrival of enemy ravagers when, for example, Athens did not? From Thucydides’ description it seems that Acanthus was entirely dependent on income from its vintage, and may well have had little grain stored, much less a protected port and superiority at sea, which could ensure a steady supply of imported food.

  24. See Ducrey, Warfart, 166–68. The great exception, of course, was Syracuse, which was neither stormed nor handed over through negotiations—the one great failure that destroyed the supposed vaunted reputation of Athenian siege engineers.

  25. Spartan claims about the need for an unwalled Greece: 1.90.2, 1.91.7.

  26. Plato, Laws, 778D—779A. For the general philosophical sentiment against walls, see Ober, Fortress Attica, 50–63, which notes a difference in attitudes emerging during the post—Peloponnesian War fourth century, when the populace no longer believed that either urban fortifications or the martial prowess of their armies were sufficient to protect the entire citizenry. Cf. Thucydides 1.5.1 on the unfortified nature of the early Greek city-state; and for a history of the rise of wall building among the Greek city-states in the aftermath of the Persian Wars, see Winter, Greek Fortifications, 300–08. For the Athenian promotion of fortifications at Argos and Patras cf. 5.82.

  27. After the calamity of 413, about the only other city that Athens sought to besiege was Chios, where a civil war threatened to lead to mass rebellion in the empire (e.g., 8.55–56).

  Chapter 7

  1. The various reasons why the Athenians thought it necessary to go to Sicily—treaties, empire, pride, profit, and advantage against Sparta—are discussed by both Thucydides (6.15–18) and Plutarch (Nicias, 12.4). Thucydides has Alcibiades provide the Athenians with a variety of antebellum reasons to sail, and then ex post facto explain to the Spartans the true Athenian intent of the expeditions, leaving us in somewhat of a quandary as to when, where—and if—Alcibiades was telling the truth.

  2. 8.2.I. The expedition of 427: 3.86.4. Opportunistic neutrals were also wrong in their predictions that Athens would shortly capitulate after the debacle on Sicily. As a general rule throughout the war, observers usually overestimated Athenian power in the wake of its successes and underrated its resiliency after abject defeats, failing to understand that Athens was by far the most powerful polis, and yet not so strong in and of itself to master or even unite the other fifteen hundred states of the Greek world.

  3. For grain and the strategy to go to Sicily, see Diodorus 12.54.23. Peter Green’s account of the invasion is predicated on the idea that food was the primary motive for the Athenian invasion; see Armada, 16–19. True, his book was written prior to more sophisticated comparative studies of the food-producing capacity of Attica, which tend to downplay the poverty of Athenian domestic grain resources. But Green pays close attention to our literary sources and is right in arguing that at least the Greeks themselves felt that Attica needed imported food and that Sicily was a good place to get it. On the idea of stopping potential Sicilian aid to the Peloponnesians, cf. 6.6.2 and 6.10.4.

  4. 6.91.3–4. As in all of Alcibiades’ reported speeches, the problem is not just that he distorted facts and analyses for his own personal interest but that so often his assessments were nevertheless astute, if for entirely different reasons from those he intended. After all, after Athens was defeated on Sicily, the security of the Peloponnese was remarkably enhanced and that of Athens herself almost irreparably harmed. Thucydides said that “the truest pretext” was the Athenian desire to add all of Sicily to its empire (e.g., 6.6.1).

  5. Kagan, Peace, 159–91, reviews the various pretexts for the invasion. Thucydides’ particulars of the great debate to go to Sicily are found variously at 6.8–25. Until Thucydides grasped that the Sicilian campaign and what followed was a continuum from the Archidamian War, most contemporary Greeks may well have seen them as two separate wars: an initial conflict with Sparta that ended in stalemate in 421, and then an entirely separate Sicilian War that broke out in 415 and ended in Athens’ defeat by Syracuse two years later—which led to a second, distinct round of the old hostilities with Sparta that dragged on until 404–403, until the ultimate defeat and occupation of Athens. Athens’ finances: Andocides 3.8; Thucydides 6.26.2.

  6. 7.55.2, 8.1.4, 8.96.5. Most inhabitants of Sicily were Greek speakers from the time of the colonizing movements of centuries earlier. For the logic of Athens defending the poor abroad, see Xenophon, Constitution of the Athenians, 3.10–12. See also Thucydides’ equally well-known encomia to the resiliency of Athens in the face of overwhelming odds at 2.65 and 7.27–28. On these inherent advantages of ancient democracies at war, cf. Hanson, “Democratic Warfare,” 24–26; Carnage and Culture, 27–59.

  7. 6.43–44. Diodorus (13.2.5) gives even higher numbers. If we think that 10,000 Athenian hoplites and perhaps as many as 600 cavalry marched out yearly (or perhaps even twice annually) to plunder and ravage Megarid (and yet could not take the nearby city), it is difficult to believe that not more than 5,000 hoplites, essentially without mounted escort, could do much against a city and its countryside with a resident population of about 250,000 and with numerous allies and subject states spanning a far distant island of some 10,000 square miles.

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p; 8. For the importance of presenting an image of strength upon arrival, see variously 6.11.4, 6.18, and 6.44.8–9. If Alcibiades thought political alliances with Sicilian states might defeat Syracuse, and Nicias counted on betrayal and treachery to deliver Syracuse, Lamachus at least grasped that only hard, prompt fighting could win the war.

  9. See 2.79. There is a sort of hoplite mania in the speeches leading up to the voyage: Alcibiades claims that the Syracusan rabble are hardly the sort of people who can field an army of hoplites (6.17.4–5). In turn, Nicias, although giving passing mention to the light-armed, missile, and mounted troops that must counteract Syracusan cavalry, harps that “it seems to me that it is necessary for us to take along lots of hoplites, both our own and those of the allies, and in addition any we are able to get from the Peloponnese either through pay or persuasion” (6.21.2). Yet hoplites would play almost no role in preventing Athenian defeat or ensuring Syracusan victory—in fact, after 418 they would be irrelevant in deciding the Peloponnesian War.

  10. Diodorus 13.7.5–6. Both the ease with which the Athenians had defeated the hoplite army of Syracuse and their abject failure to follow up the victory made a profound impression on the generals, who belatedly realized that they had sorely miscalculated the type of forces necessary to take the city.

  11. For the details of the campaign, see 6.64–82. Cf. Polyaenus, Stratagems, 1.39.2, on horse traps. Despite the rout and flight, only 260 Syracusans were killed, a fraction of the city’s available forces. “The cavalrymen of the Syracusans, being numerous and undefeated in the battle, checked them—and if they spied any of the hoplites running ahead in pursuit they fell upon them and drove them away” (6.70.3).

  12. Note that Alcibiades’ tale of his proposed combined land and sea operations against the Peloponnesians actually offered Athens the only real hope of defeating Sparta—an irony when such an insightful strategy seems to have been aired only to enemies and under circumstances of dubious veracity. On purported Athenian imperial ambitions, see 6.90. Cf. Plutarch, Pericles, 20.3–4, for the idea that the Athenians wished to expand their empire to include Egypt as well.

  13. 6.95–98. Diodorus claimed that they were able to assemble 800 horsemen. Because of the poor state of Greek siegecraft, both Alcibiades before his recall and Nicias more likely expected to take Syracuse through a variety of political machinations and intrigue, when the best hope was always to have sailed directly to Syracuse and either defeated a reckless enemy in a massive hoplite battle or begun immediate circumvallation by land and blockade by sea—as was more or less advanced by Lamachus on arrival in summer 415.

  14. Syracusan despair: 6.103.3. The entire idea of sending thousands of precious sailors and infantrymen abroad while thousands of enemies invaded Attica underscores the irony of the Sicilian expedition. By the same token, disease played a pivotal role in the campaign, but mostly by enervating the Athenians, who had unwisely encamped in the low-lying marshes around the harbor. The relative vulnerability of Syracuse to circumvallation and maritime blockade, coupled with an unhealthy climate in much of its environs, made it susceptible to plague during a time of siege. But lethal disease struck not in 414, during the Athenian siege, but in 406, when the Carthaginians sought to cut off the city—and it had the desirable effect of sending the invaders back to North Africa with thousands dead rather than reducing the city (Diodorus 13.114).

  15. One of the keys to the Spartans’ successful siege of Plataea was that well before building their elaborate double wall of circumvallation, they had first constructed a rough ad hoc rampart around the city, to start the clock of famine and isolation as soon as possible. Had the Athenians upon arrival thrown up a makeshift wall, and then gradually replaced it with a permanent double rampart, Syracuse might have been near capitulation by spring of the next year. But such audacity required a confident general and horsemen to ward off mounted counterattacks. Cf. 5.28 for Spartan depression on the eve of the peace of 421, and for the peace in general, see Lazenby, Peloponnesian War, 106–10.

  16. 7.2.4. During the subsequent brutal tyranny of Dionysius I (405–367), the entire upper city was brought into the city’s fortification to prevent just the type of siege that the Athenians had attempted in 414. For Titus’ siege of Jerusalem (seventeen days spent on earthen work, three days to wall around the city), see Josephus, Jewish War, 5.502, 509; cf. 5.46.

  17. A cynic might read the sudden desire of Greek states—on Sicily, the mainland, and among the islands—to help Syracuse as confirmation of sorts that many nations can entertain little ideology other than ending up on the winning side; cf. 7.18, 19, 21 for a list of the new diverse allies of a Syracuse on the rebound.

  18. See the historian’s famous remarks at 7.42, where he states that the Syracusans were “stunned” at the appearance of Demosthenes’ relief forces, wondering “whether there would ever be any relief from their danger”—inasmuch as “despite the fortification of Decelea, an army, equal or almost equal to the first one, had now reinforced it, and that the power of Athens seemed to be considerable in almost every place.” Earlier he concluded that despite the antebellum prognosis that Athens would not last more than three years, they had not only held their own against the Peloponnesians for seventeen but had now undertaken a distant additional conflict in no way inferior to the first. In Thucydides’ judgment all this was nearly unfathomable; cf. 7.27.

  19. 7.44.1. Even during the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks rarely fought at night—except to make an approach on a city’s walls in hopes of finding the ramparts unguarded, as happened in the Theban assault on Plataea and a later attempt from Decelea by King Agis to catch the Athenians napping (Diodorus 13.72–73).

  20. 7.69–73. Or as Diodorus reports the Athenians exclaiming, “Do you think we can return home by land?”

  21. 7.87.6; cf. Diodorus, 13.19.2, 13.21.1, and 13.30.3–7, for discussion over the fate of the captives, and for the figure of 18,000 killed at the Assinarus and 7,000 captured, in total more than 40,000 lost in all who were sent to Sicily. For controversy over the number who actually perished in the last days of the campaign, see Gomme et al., Commentary, 4.452; Green, Armada, 352–53, and 340–44, for a few names of the dead. A decade later a speaker in the Athenian assembly could brag that as a cavalryman he had persisted in raids on the Syracusans from Catana, and gathered plunder to ransom prisoners from the quarries; cf. Lysias 20.24. By way of modern analogy, in 1955 there were still 2,000 German prisoners in Soviet hands—out of an original 120,000 captives—who had survived the Stalingrad disaster, and who were released twelve years after the battle through the intervention of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s visit to Moscow. Cf. Antony Beevor, Stalingrad, 430–31.

  22. From both vase paintings and literary evidence we know quite a lot above the nature of both ancient riders and their mounts. For the pragmatics of classical Greek cavalry and horses, see the relevant discussions in four recent standard works: I. Spence, Cavalry, 35–120; Gaebel, Cavalry Operations, 19–31; Bugh, Horsemen, 20–35; Worley, Hippeis, 83–122.

  23. Perhaps the Greek disdain for horses was best exemplified by the defiant quip made by Xenophon (who wrote handbooks on the proper command of cavalry and the art of horsemanship) that unlike infantrymen, mounted troops had to fear falling as well as fighting enemy hoplites (Anabasis, 3.2.19). In fact, there is an entire corpus of passages in Greek literature that reflect the chauvinism of the hoplite in regards to the horseman. Cf. Hanson, Other Greeks, 247–48.

  24. A great deal of research has emphasized the uneconomical nature of horse raising. See especially the arguments of Sallares, Ecology, 311: “The useless animal par excellence in ancient Greece was the horse.”

  25. The costs for buying and maintaining horses are known mostly from inscriptions on stone from Athens, and discussed in association with surviving literary evidence by Spence, Cavalry, 272–86.

  26. The central theme of Hanson, Other Greeks (cf. especially 179–218), is the importance of this new agrarian class th
at created the institutions of the citystate, many of which were challenged by radical Athenian democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries. For the effect of Athenian literature, art, and rhetoric elevating the hoplite over light-armed fighters, missile troops, and horsemen, see Pritchard, “The Fractured Imagery,” 44–49; Hanson, “Hoplites into Democrats,” 289–310; and Lissarrague, “World of the Warrior,” 39–45.

  27. The wealthy Athenian Mantitheos, for example, boasted that in an early-fourth-century battle he faced danger as a hoplite rather than serve “in safety” as a horseman (Lysias 16.13). References to the disdain for horsemen are found at Plato, Symposium, 221b, and Aristophanes, Knights, 1369–71. Mantitheos knew well the general prejudice against cavalrymen—made worse by a perception that aristocratic, pro-Spartan knights had played an instrumental role in the failed revolutions of both 411 and 404, which sought to replace the democracy with oligarchies of varying degrees. See Bugh, Horsemen, 116–53.

  28. Much is made of the cavalry breakthroughs of Philip and Alexander, who formed corps of lancers whose long spears, along with armor for both horse and rider, made them true shock forces. But we forget that only at the battle of Chaeronea (338) did the Macedonians face a uniform hoplite enemy, and won there largely due not just to greater shock but to Athenian lack of discipline that opened gaps in the Greek line. Otherwise Alexander’s horsemen battered mounted Persians or inferior infantry that lacked the Greek bronze panoply, closed ranks, and serried spears. After Alexander’s death, the Hellenistic craze for elephants arose in part from a need to break apart the columns of phalangites that still were mostly invulnerable to charges of even heavy cavalry.

  29. 4.68.5; cf. 4.72.3. For the extent of Athenian cavalry operations, see Bugh, Horsemen, 79–119; his catalog of deployments during the war demonstrates a frequency of usage unmatched by hoplites.