52. Meiggs, Athenian Empire, 104–08, reviews the low figure of 50 ships and the high of 200, concluding that Thucydides’ inference that 200 triremes were lost in Egypt may be correct—if we understand that perhaps only 10,000 of the 40,000 lost imperial crewmen were Athenian citizens.
53. For a sampling of the litany of this antinaval sentiment, see 6.24.3; [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 1.2 and 1.10–12; Plato, Laws, 704D, 705A, 706B, 707A; Aristotle, Politics, 1327A10–1327B6. One of the few classical authors who can express heartfelt empathy for the later-fifth-century rowers at Athens is Aristophanes (e.g., Knights, 545–610; Frogs, 687–705; Acharnians, 677–78).
54. On the financial squeeze at Athens, see Meiggs, Athenian Empire, 320–39. As was always true of the genius of Athenian democracy, there was a paradox at the heart of the system: rich people at Athens who hated the poor gained prestige by outfitting ships to employ them, while the wealthier abroad were taxed in tribute to man a fleet that would usually prevent them from ever gaining control of their respective local city-states.
Chapter 9
1. Sometimes the increase of a mere obol paid per crewman, from the normal three to four in daily wages, might make a vast difference in the size of the respective Athenian and Spartan fleets. The Athenians purportedly kept the wages of rowers rather low at three obols, rather than the optimum one drachma, in the odd belief that prosperity among the rowing classes might make it impossible for them to continue to work under such demanding conditions. On naval pay in general, see Morrison, Coates, and Rankov, Athenian Trireme, 118–22.
2. No money: 8.1.2. Diodorus (13.37.1) claims the war did not end in 413 because of the recall of Alcibiades and his efforts at tampering with Persian aid to the Spartans. Thucydides believed that the Athenians were fearful that the Syracusans might have sailed directly from their success in the Great Harbor into the Piraeus. But nothing in the Syracusans’ recent naval past suggested that they were up for an eight-hundred-mile voyage in force—on the chances of suffering the disaster in the harbor of Athens that they had recently inflicted in their own. In fact, the Sicilians were soon racked by civil dissension at home and fearful of Carthaginian attack and in no mood to send precious resources half a world away.
3. 2.65.11–12. During the Archidamian War, the Athenian fleet operated mostly in enemy waters around the Peloponnese and the Corinthian Gulf, where setbacks endangered only further offensive operations. The Ionian War was an altogether different theater, where a single major defeat threatened Attica’s grain, commerce, and imperial income.
4. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.1.25–26. Xenophon presents the stereotypical view of Persians as believing that wars are won only through material advantages, which was as unrealistic a position as the old Spartan canard that courage and discipline alone would provide victory.
5. 7.39.2. Diodorus (13.10.1–3) assumes that Ariston realized that in the relatively confined waters of the harbor the disadvantage that stubby, lower rams might impair speed and mobility was more than offset by the chance that they could sink enemy ships with a single hit and often head-on.
6. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.3–4. The inept Peloponnesian response after Sicily and the failure to capitalize on the setback, juxtaposed with the amazing Athenian recovery, was proof to Thucydides that democratic governments could get themselves into and out of disasters in a way unthinkable among oligarchies. 8.i.3–4; cf. 7.28 and 8.96.4–5.
7. Xenophon, Anabasis, 1.2.9. The flotsam and jetsam of this last dirty decade of the long war washed up as mercenaries in the huge bought army of Cyrus the Younger, himself an active participant in the Ionian War. The Panhellenic nature of the Ten Thousand, and their expectation of high wages, reflected the nature of the last few years of the Peloponnesian War, in which thousands of Greeks sailed east to garner rich Persian wages in service to the Spartan fleet.
8. On these various sea battles, see 8.10, 8.41–42, 8.61, and 8.95. Once more, as after the loss at Sicily, the Athenians were paranoid that the Peloponnesians would head straight for the Piraeus—a constant fear never realized until the final disaster after Aegospotami. Cf. 8.96.2–3.
9. 8.104–6; Diodorus 13.39–40. For a description of the battle, see the discussion in Morrison, Coates, and Rankov, Athenian Trireme, 81–84. It was likely that in these far distant last battles of the Ionian War, the number of fatalities at sea rose (e.g., Thucydides 8.95), inasmuch as both sides were now less likely to take prisoners, the nearby shores were often without friendly troops, and the finite pool of skilled Athenian rowers became a matter of real concern: killing captured or wounded sailors was now seen as part of the larger strategy of the Peloponnesian War.
10. 8.106.2. There were some general truisms about the aftermath of major Athenian battles: sudden optimism or dejection not always commensurate with the actual situation on the battlefield; abrupt change of government (the so-called Four Hundred, the Five Thousand, and the Thirty all emerged in the wake of Athenian setbacks); and sudden fury or praise unleashed at generals, as the checkered careers of Cleon, Demosthenes, Alcibiades, and Thrasybulus attest.
11. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.1.14. For Thrasybulus, see Cornelius Nepos, Thrasybulus, 1.3. In theory, a land power without money could still fight for a while, given the fact that hoplites owned their own armor, might forage off the countryside, and perhaps would serve without pay given their selfish interest in protecting local croplands. But triremes were state property; and if expensive to build, they were far more costly to man and maintain.
12. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.5.5–9. Soon Athenian subjects began to revolt in earnest throughout the Aegean, for example at Andros; cf. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.4.21.
13. Hippocrates’ brief dispatch is a far cry from Nicias’ long letter explaining the Athenian plight on Sicily. Unlike Nicias, the Spartan offers no real assessment and gives no advice. Cf. Xenophon, Hellenica, i.i.24. The message is supposed to reflect the “Laconic” style: in this case, even under the most traumatic circumstances, emotion and elaboration do not creep into the official communication home. In general, see Diodorus 13.50–3 for the battle and the Spartan peace offers following the defeat of the Peloponnesian fleet; and for the circumstances surrounding Cyzicus, cf. Lazenby, Peloponnesian War, 198–204.
14. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.5.11–14; Diodorus 13.71; Plutarch, Alcibiades, 35. A great deal of the problem was that the Spartans now had a general every bit as wily as Alcibiades and far more skilled in playing the Persian card for all it was worth. And once Alcibiades had triangulated with both Sparta and Persia, there was no real place to go other than exile—and such a lack of options was never a good position to be in with the Athenian assembly. It is no accident that ambitious Spartans like Lysander, Callicratidas, and Gylippus were not really Spartiates but probably mothakes, or born to non-Spartiate mothers and raised by wealthy benefactors—their talent in war spurring them on, with no expectation that their commonplace background during peace would bring them anything special.
15. On the manpower crisis at Athens, the defeat of Conon at Mytilene, and the rise of the Spartan fleet, see Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.15–18 and 1.6.24–25; cf. Diodorus 13.77–79. For the problems of Arginusae, see Lazenby, Peloponnesian War, 229–34.
16. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.26–34; Diodorus 13.97–99.
17. See Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 34.1, for the Spartan offer of peace after Arginusae. Presumably, once more Cleophon persuaded the Athenians to spurn the peace feelers, demanding a return of all the cities that Athens had once held.
18. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.1.28. If Spartan triremes were improving at sea, their infantry was still unquestioned. Thus, if it was unwise for the Athenians to drag their ships onto an unprotected shore and without fortifications encamp so far distant from provisions at Aegospotami, it was suicidal to find themselves pitting sailors against Spartans in a land battle beside beached and idle triremes.
19. For the executions, see Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.1.28; Diodo
rus 13.106.6–8; Plutarch, Lysander, 10–11. Because the triremes captured from the Athenian imperial fleet may have numbered 160, there should have been over 30,000 prisoners. How many slaves and allies were let go, or how many simply were Athenians executed before surrendering, is unknown.
20. For the battle, see Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.1.18–28, and Diodorus 13.105–6. In the most critical naval fight since Salamis, the seafaring Athenians essentially lost it on land and before the engagement had even started.
21. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.2.13. Thus, one cousin proved traitor once and perished, and the other was a traitor three times, to Athens, Sparta, and Persia, respectively—and yet survived the war.
22. See Plutarch, Alcibiades, 38.1–2. After the war, the second exile of Alcibiades was acknowledged by the Athenians as “the greatest folly of all their blunders and stupidity.”
23. For the detail of the last years of his life, see Ellis, Alcibiades, 93–98; Plutarch, Alcibiades, 38.
24. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.3. What was the exact state of the Athenian fleet after Aegospotami? There were probably fewer than 20 triremes scattered around the Aegean or rotting in the ship sheds at the Piraeus. And the absence of both money and raw materials meant that the Athenians this time were in no shape to build yet a fourth fleet ex nihilo.
25. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.19; Plutarch, Lysander, 15.2; Pausanias 10.9.9. Turning a land into a mêloboton (“sheep walk”) was a proverbial rhetorical threat of ultimate retribution; cf. Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 10. For a brief discussion of the Morgenthau plan, which is often caricatured and not properly understood, see Weinberg, World at Arms, 794–98. Churchill also proposed that postwar Germany “be primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.”
Chapter 10
1. See Henderson, Great War, 489–90; Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, 432.
2. See Ober, Fortress Attica, 209–13, for discussion of changed strategic thinking at Athens, and cf. Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 174–84, for the mostly prosperous nature of Attic agriculture in the postbellum years. In general, Cartledge, “Effects,” 114–17, summarizes well the consensus that the war’s effects were more subtle and enervating than catastrophic and immediate.
3. The argument not only for the positive role of the Athenian empire but also for its popularity among the grass roots of its subject peoples became the life work of G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, whose spirited and often wildly wrong invective is as engaging as his prodigious scholarship is impressive. Brief summations of his journal articles can be found in his Origins of the Peloponnesian War, 289–93, and Class Struggle, 1–49.
4. 1.23. Cities like Colophon, Mycalessus, Plataea, and Thyrea were the scenes of abject slaughter, while Sollium, Potidaea, Anactorium, Scione, and Melos were ethnically cleansed and resettled by new populations.
5. Isocrates, On the Peace, 86–87. Isocrates’ numbers are perhaps suspect, inasmuch as Diodorus (13.21) says 200 ships were lost in Sicily and 180 at Aegospotami. But in the general Athenian collective memory, there must have been some notion that around 400 imperial triremes were lost in those two terrible defeats, a number that was pretty much within a reasonable margin of error. For Isocrates’ claim about the loss of the great families of Athens, see too Diodorus 13.4, 13.88.
6. Cf. the astute observations of Cartledge, “Effects,” 106–09, and Strauss, “Problem,” 170–75.
7. For 22 generals, see Paul, “Two Battles,” 308, and Strauss, Athens After, 70–86 and 172–74. It is Strauss’ argument, in addition, that disproportionate losses to the thetic class during the war explain somewhat the rise of oligarchic governments in 411 and 404, as if for a while the attenuated ranks of the poorer and more radical lost influence in the democratic politics of the time.
8. Almost immediately after the war, Thebes provided sanctuary for exiled Athenian democrats. The Peloponnesian War thus ended with Athenian democrats seeking asylum in a state that had started the war by sending oligarchic radicals against democratic Plataea, emphasizing once again that ideology was so often trumped by realpolitik and the desire to balance power among the squabbling city-states. For the maze of postwar interests, see Buckler, Aegean Greece, 3–6.
9. Hellenica Oxyrhynchia 12.3, and the sources cited in Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 153–73.
10. See, for example, Davies, Propertied Families: e.g., 44 (Archedamos lost his property after being taken prisoner); 61 (Kritodemos killed at Aegospotami, leaving three orphans); 93 (Amytheon killed at Sicily, leaving three sons); 152 (Diodotus killed at Ephesus, leaving three children); 347 (Lykomedes killed in 424, leaving behind a son, Kleomedes, one of the generals at Melos); 404 (Eukrates killed by the Thirty Tyrants, leaving behind two sons); 467 (Polystratos lost land after Decelea, was wounded, and had three sons in the Athenian military).
11. For postwar problems in Sparta, see the ancient evidence discussed in Cartledge, Agesilaos, 34–54 and, especially, Lewis, Cambridge, 16–32. “Eat even raw”: Xenophon, Hellenica, 3.3.7.
12. Laws of war: Ober, “Classical Greek Times,” 24–26. It seems methodologically unsound to question the antebellum protocols surrounding Greek warfare by pointing out occasional exceptions, such as attacks on civilian centers or desecration of shrines—as if contemporary historians might doubt the very existence of both speed laws and the public’s tendency to obey them, by evidence of law enforcement’s common ticketing of speeders. But for a different view, see, for example, again Krentz, “Strategic Culture,” 65–72, and “Fighting,” 36–37.
13. Demosthenes, Third Philippic, 48–52. For this and other reactionary nostalgia about the old simple war, see the ancient literature cited in Hanson, “Hoplite Battle,” 202–06.
14. 5.41.3; cf. Herodotus 7.9.2. It is a general law that an escalation of violence and an erosion of restraint are in direct proportion to the length of a struggle. Andersonville or the March to the Sea was in no one’s mind in early 1861. Nor did anyone envision in 1914 that in a mere three years either side in the Great War would or could blanket the other with poisonous gas; in the same fashion, the invasion of Poland by conventional German troops did not presage Hiroshima.
15. There is an enormous bibliography of the earlier “rules of war” and their violation during the Peloponnesian War, with importance for subsequent conflicts—with ample documentation from contemporary sources. See, for example, Hanson, Other Greeks, 317–49; Ober, Fortress Attica, 32–50; and, especially, Krentz, “Invention,” 25–35, for a review of the ancient and modern sources.
16. For the ramifications of eroding the census class in detail, see Hanson, “Democratic Warfare,” 16–17. By the end of the war many “hoplites” probably did not even own property (Lysias, 34.4; cf. Thucydides 6.43.1); wealthy horsemen bragged that they had served on foot (Lysias, 16.13); and some rowers were hoplite farmers (Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.24–25).
17. To the modern reader, Plato’s numerous blasts against the new warfare appear not only strident but nearly treasonous. See especially Laws, 4.707C; cf. 706B. In some sense, his criticism is analogous to the stereotypical agrarian conservatives in Roman, British, and American times who see the acquisition of empire as a destabilizing influence on existing norms—too many foreigners, too much new money, and too many obligations ruining the old landed hierarchies of the past.
18. See the famous passage on the rise of the polis in Aristotle’s Politics, 4.1297B16–24. We should remember that the city-state—the embodiment of the beginning of Western civilization—did not start out so much to guarantee personal freedom for all residents as to ensure the protection of property for a new meritocratic middling class of landowners.
19. See Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.31, for the purportedly better Peloponnesian crews. Hunt (Slaves, 83–101) presents a good argument about why the mass use of slaves at Arginusae may not have been all that unusual but, rather, the culmination of a long practice of using servile rowers in the navies on all sides during the Peloponnesian War. By the end of the war
there may well have been 500 Athenian, allied, Peloponnesian, and Sicilian triremes on the Aegean at any one time—requiring a pool of some 100,000 oarsmen who could not have all been free citizens, given infantry requirements and the need to produce food.
20. For the paradox of increased military efficacy at the price of the old agrarian exclusivity of the city-state, see the long discussion, with a list of citations to classical sources, in Hanson, Other Greeks, 351–96.
21. 1.83.2; cf. 1.80.3–4 and 2.24.1.2. A good rhetorical lamentation about the role of money in war is found at Isocrates, On the Peace, 8.48.
22. The fury of Athenian philosophers at the new war is best captured at Plato, Laws, 4.706B—C, and Aristotle, Politics, 8.1326A. In general, see Kallet-Marx, Money and Naval Power, 201–06, and Kallet, Money and Corrosion, 227–84, for the role of money and capital in the Peloponnesian War and the break that such financial sophistication marked with warfare of the past.
23. 4.40.2. There is an entire corpus of reactionary thought in Greek literature that protests loudly against missiles, archery, and artillery as somehow unfair or immoral. See a discussion in Hanson, Other Greeks, 338–49.
24. On the military revolution in the various arts of siegecraft immediately following the Peloponnesian War, see Winter, Greek Fortifications, 310–24; Kern, Ancient Siege Warfare, 163–93; and the debate between Ober, Fortress Attica, 197–207 (arguing for a postbellum new defensive policy of rural fortification in the fourth century) and Munn, Defense of Attica, 15–25 (maintaining that there was no attempt to ensure real border defense by new bases and forts in the Attic countryside).
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 51
