by John Keegan
Moreover, it is by no means certain that the idea of conquest in the modern sense was acceptable to the Greeks, at least as between Greek and Greek. The conflicts among the city states — Argos, Corinth, Thebes and especially Athens and Sparta — were real enough in the so-called ‘age of tyrants’ in the seventh and sixth centuries BC; even so, the object of warmaking was usually that of enlarging a league of allies rather than of subjecting a principal opponent to domination. From the earliest times, ‘the Greeks were always conscious that they were different from other peoples … Greek prisoners of war, for example, were not in theory to be enslaved, unlike “barbarians” … The great religious festivals of the Greek year, when people of many cities came together’ — the Olympic games pre-eminently — ‘were occasions to which only the Greek-speaker was admitted.’ For the Greeks, particularly for the Athenians and their Ionian cousins in Asia Minor who looked to the metropolis (mother-city) for inspiration, conquest was something imposed on others across the seas. They conquered widely, at least as much as was necessary to plant colonies on foreign shores; but at home, though they fought often and bloodily, they did not — with perhaps the exception of Sparta — seek to deprive each other of their acknowledged rights. By the sixth century, the city states were set in the direction of collective government; ‘oligarchies, constitutional governments or democracies spread everywhere.’33 While all states retained the institution of slavery, recent researches suggest that the proportion of slaves to freemen in the polis has been exaggerated. By the fifth century, for example, slaves in Athens were greatly outnumbered by free citizen-farmers; this explodes the supposition that Greek hoplites — except the Spartan — were set at liberty to wage war by the labours of the unfree in their smallholdings.34
During the seventh century Sparta had, through its remorselessly efficient military system, made itself an unchallengeable power in southern Greece; only through a pattern of shifting alliances could its chief rivals, Argos, Athens, Corinth and Thebes, hold it in check. But then, in 510 BC, the contest was heightened when Sparta directly intervened to attempt to set back Athens’s decisive espousal of democracy; this ensured the onset of a contest of principle, between its warrior élitism and the representative example offered by its principal rival, that lasted for more than a hundred years. Yet for much of this period Sparta and Athens were thrown into alliance by patriotic impulse. The rising power of the Persians, who by 511 BC had consolidated an empire that included the whole of Mesopotamia and Egypt as well as lands reaching up to the Oxus and Jaxartes rivers, led them on to attack the Ionian settlements in Asia Minor. These cities had earlier been subjected by Croesus of Lydia, then passed to Persian control, and in 499 BC, with Athenian support, they rebelled to assert their independence. Darius, the reigning Persian emperor, crushed the rebellion in 494 BC but was determined to deal with the root of the trouble, which he identified as emanating from mainland Greece. In 490 BC, at the head of a well-equipped army of 50,000, he took ship aboard the formidable Persian navy and landed in the plain of Marathon, thirty-six miles north of Athens. The Athenians at once marched out to oppose the Persian advance inland, joined by their allies from Plataea, but sent an urgent appeal for help to Sparta. The Spartans replied that they would arrive as soon as an impending religious ceremony had been completed. By the time their leading troops reached the scene of action, the battle of Marathon was over. The Athenians had destroyed one-seventh of the Persian host, for little loss to themselves, and the enemy withdrew into his ships.
This was the first direct conflict between the Greek phalanx and the more uncertain ranks of a dynastic Middle Eastern army, composed of subject soldiers of very uneven worth. Hanson has suggested how unnerving the enemy must have found the Greeks’ advance. He notes that Herodotus has Mardonios, the nephew of the emperor Darius and commander of the fleet that beached at Marathon, remark on the unnatural bloodthirstiness of the Athenians and their Plataean allies.
All the various contingents of the Great Army of Persia, with their threatening looks and noise, had a very different and predictable outlook on battle … But the Persians suffered from that most dangerous tendency in war: a wish to kill but not to die in the process … At Marathon they thought a ‘destructive madness’ had infected the Greek ranks as they saw them approach on the run in their heavy armour. Surely, as the outnumbered Greek hoplites crashed into their lines, the Persians must have at last understood that these men worshipped not only the god Apollo, but the wild, irrational Dionysus as well.35
The Spartans bitterly reproached themselves for their absence at Marathon, all the more because of the glory that victory brought to Athens. Nevertheless, they accepted that Persian aggression, with the threat it carried of extinction of Greek rights, obliged them to persist in their offer of assistance, and they proceeded with the Athenians to coordinate plans for resistance should the common enemy reappear. The Persians had not abandoned their determination to do so. Between 484 and 481 BC Xerxes, who had succeeded as emperor on Darius’ death, drew Carthage into an alliance that ensured the Greek colonists in Sicily would not come to their mainland cousins’ assistance, while completing elaborate logistic arrangements, including the building of a bridge of boats across the straits between Asia and Europe, to secure communications for the advance of his troops. At this news, many of the smaller Greek states sought to make their peace with Xerxes. Only Athens and the Peloponnesian states persisted in patriotic defiance. Sparta attempted to persuade Athens to send its forces south of the easily defensible Isthmus of Corinth into the Peloponnese to join those of the other cities in the Peloponnesian League. The Athenians, led by Themistocles, declined to do so, since that would mean abandoning their city; instead, they argued, their very strong navy should protect the seaward flank of a League expeditionary force, which would oppose the Persian advance much further north.
Reluctantly, for few of the allies wanted to send their troops out of the Peloponnese, Sparta fell in with Athenian strategy and agreed to hold a line where the coastal route from the plain of Thessaly passes through the defile of Thermopylae. Offshore the fleet, of which two-thirds was Athenian and under the direct command of Themistocles, inflicted a check (August 480 BC) on the Persian, which had suffered heavy losses in a gale; in the pass of Thermopylae itself Leonidas, the Spartan king, successfully blocked the Persian army’s advance, until by treachery he was taken in the rear. In an act of self-sacrifice that was to become a byword for hopeless courage, Leonidas and his bodyguard — ‘the three hundred at the pass’ — held on nevertheless, while the fleet disengaged, evacuated the population of Athens to the island of Salamis and awaited action. The rest of the League forces had by now retreated south of the Isthmus of Corinth, leaving Themistocles to demonstrate that the Persians might indeed be defeated by sea power. He, by a devious if forgivable exercise in misinformation, persuaded Xerxes that the Athenians would come over if the Persian fleet moved to action, thus tempting it into confined waters where its superior numbers, of some 700 against 500 fighting-ships, gave it no advantage. In a single day of fighting (probably 23 September 480 BC), the Athenians destroyed half of it, with the loss of only forty ships of their own, and forced the remainder to withdraw northward.
THE GREEKS AND AMPHIBIOUS STRATEGY
Xerxes’ invasion had not been completely defeated. That outcome was not achieved until the following year when, in the land battle of Plataea in July and the sea battle of Mycale in August, Athens and Sparta jointly disposed of the rest of the Persians’ expeditionary force with its Greek (chiefly Theban) allies and not only chased it off the Greek mainland but recaptured and held the Black Sea Straits.
The campaign of 480–79 BC reinforced what had first been demonstrated to outsiders at Marathon ten years earlier, that to defeat a Greek phalanx required either Greek courage, or the enlistment of Greeks themselves, or a new and more complex tactical method. Greek courage resisted transplantation, but Greek mercenaries found a market even readier for t
heir services than they had already established — the Persians had employed Greeks in their conquest of Egypt in 550 BC — and tactical experimentations, particularly with armoured cavalry, henceforth proceeded apace. The larger legacy of the campaign of 480–79 BC, however, was not military but naval. It elevated the power of fleets to a level equal to that held by armies in states that bordered an inland sea, and so set the style for a new method of warmaking, truly strategic in character, that dominated the struggle for position in the eastern Mediterranean for the rest of the century; its principles eventually passed into the lore of all maritime peoples.
The instrument of Greek, chiefly Athenian, naval strategy was the oared fighting-ship, probably developed by the Phoenicians of the Syrian coast from earlier local or even Cypriot models during the beginning of the first millennium BC. The Phoenicians were Persian subjects by the time of Xerxes, but their technology had already migrated to Greece, where at Athens the trireme, a heavy vessel with a strong armoured beak, 120 feet in length, fifteen in beam, was rowed by oarsmen sitting in three superimposed ranks, who could drive it at speeds sufficient to sink an opponent in a ramming attack.36 Athens recruited its sailors from a lower census class than that of the hoplites, who supplied the galley with fighting marines. In close action, the oarsmen might join in the fight which, as ship locked with ship, took the form of a body-to-body rather than hull-against-hull struggle for advantage.37
The strength of the Athenian navy, and the military importance the city came to attach to it, derived from the direction in which its economy and foreign relations had developed during the previous two centuries. While Sparta had maximised the military advantages supplied by its exclusive social order to make itself pre-eminent in the Peloponnese, Athens, impelled in part by the difficulty it found in feeding its population off its poor soils, had turned itself into a trading, and increasingly a political, empire with allied or dependent cities as far away as Asia Minor. It was through this system of alliances that Athens took the leadership in the continuing war with Persia that followed Salamis and Plataea, and which in 460–54 BC involved its naval and expeditionary forces in a struggle for control of Egypt. Sparta, secure and self-sufficient, dropped out of the war, while Athens, at the head of the Delian League of smaller cities, prosecuted it with vigour, largely by levying ever heavier demands for subsidy on its supporters; eventually 150 cities were paying tribute.
By 448 BC Athens had exhausted Persia’s will to sustain the war and peace was made. Peace abroad, however, did not bring peace at home. Athenian exactions had widely disaffected the tax-paying classes in the cities of the Delian League. Where Athenian intervention sometimes provoked revolution to install Athenian-style democracy, the combined effects of Athenian extortion, political subversion and widening strategic and commercial dominance eventually turned first Corinth, and eventually one city after another, against Athens and provoked an outbreak of hostilities, in which Sparta aligned herself with Corinth and Thebes. This First Peloponnesian War was concluded in 445 BC without heavy cost to either side. But Athens had set itself on a course which made a resumption inevitable. By barricading itself behind fortifications — the ‘Long Walls’ enclosing both Athens and its port of the Piraeus — that made it impregnable from the land, while, at the instigation of its dynamic leader, Pericles, concentrating its financial and military resources on expansion overseas, it set itself up as a city apart, ruthless in imposing its dominance over its former allies in the Delian League and in challenging both the interests of the other large commercial cities and the status of Sparta as chief military power on the mainland. In 433 BC war broke out between Athens and Corinth. In 432 BC Sparta joined in, bringing with her the cities of the Boeotian and Peloponnesian Leagues.38
This conflict, the Peloponnesian War proper, lasted until 404 BC, when it culminated in Athenian defeat and Spartan victory, but it exhausted the Greek city-state system for good; the residual hostilities that persisted in its aftermath laid Greece open to conquest and enforced unification at the hands of the Macedonians, brothers to the Greeks but semi-barbarians in their eyes, after which the splendour of Greek independence as a civilisation of free peoples on the periphery of an expansionist, Asiatic empire, and the glories of the intellectual and artistic life it had inspired, were finally overlaid. The war itself was a conflict of opposites, land power against sea power, in which advantage eluded either side. In the opening stages Sparta attempted to bring Athens down by starvation, invading its hinterland almost annually; Athens rode out this strategy of blockade by effectively abandoning its rural population and surviving on maritime imports, particularly those brought down the route from the grain centres around the Black Sea. When Sparta in 424 BC sent an army to capture the Thracian ports by which this route was maintained, Athens was driven to seek a truce, but Sparta failed in the diplomacy which might have brought lasting peace. Some of its allies deserted, reviving Athenian hopes of eventual victory and prompting the city in 415 to enlarge the war with the object of bringing on a decisive crisis. Athens launched an expedition against Syracuse in Sicily, in the hopes of capturing the whole island and so ensuring itself of a centre of supply that would conclusively secure its economic position.
The Sicilian expedition brought on a crisis, but one far larger than that for which Athens had bargained. Perceiving that the issue was now which city should hold primacy in the Greek world, Sparta abandoned the patriotic position it had sustained since Thermopylae and invoked the aid of Persia. Between 412 and 404 BC, in a series of land and sea campaigns that ranged as far as the entrance to the Black Sea, the Spartan army and the Persian navy inflicted a series of defeats on the Athenians which eventually drove their forces to take refuge within the Long Walls. The Persian fleet, after destroying the Athenian at the battle of Aegospotami in 405, appeared off the Piraeus; in April 404, under blockade by both sea and land, Athens was forced to surrender.
MACEDON AND THE CULMINATION OF PHALANX WARFARE
The end of the Peloponnesian War did not mean the end of war between Greeks. The fourth century was, indeed, to be a doleful time, both on the mainland and in the overseas colonies, as the protagonists persisted in their struggles for advantage, shifting alliances in increasingly arbitrary fashion and involving Persian help in a self-interested spirit wholly at variance with that of the patriotic movement which had united the Greeks in the face of Darius and Xerxes. Between 395 and 387 Athens and its confederates allied themselves with Persia against Sparta, which had taken up the cause of the Greek cities in Asia Minor: a combined Athenian-Persian fleet destroyed Sparta’s navy at the battle of Cnidus, in 384. The consequent resurgence of Athenian power then alarmed Persia into sending surreptitious help to Sparta, and through the resulting stalemate, the Greeks were actually brought to recognise nominal Persian suzerainty at home and abroad. Sparta nevertheless persisted in attempts to sustain the decision of the Peloponnesian War, particularly by efforts to subdue Thebes, now its chief rival on land. Thebes won two remarkable victories, at Leuctra in 371 and Mantinea in 362, where its outstanding general, Epaminondas, demonstrated that the phalanx system could be adapted to achieve decisive tactical manoeuvre in the face of the enemy. At Leuctra, outnumbered 11,000 to 6000, he quadrupled the strength of his left wing and, masking his weakness on the right, led his massed column in a charge. Expecting the battle to develop in normal phalanx style, when both sides met in equal strength along the whole front of engagement, the Spartans failed to reinforce the threatened section in time and were broken, for considerable loss to themselves and almost none to the Thebans. Despite this warning, they allowed themselves to be surprised in exactly the same fashion at Mantinea nine years later and were again defeated. Epaminondas was killed in the moment of victory, an effect in part of the greater degree of exposure risked by a commander who experimented with the phalanx form, leaving Thebes bereft of leadership while the crisis persisted.
Power in Greece was now shifting from the established cities of
the south and centre to the north, where Macedon, under an energetic new king, Philip, was transforming itself into a local hegemony. Philip, who had known and admired Epaminondas, reorganised the Macedonian army along lines that enhanced its powers of tactical manoeuvre, subdued enemies on his western and northern borders, and then turned to involve himself in Greek affairs. In the Third Sacred War (355–46) he achieved leadership of the Amphictyonic (north-eastern) Council, after defeating Athens and seizing many of its allied cities. Once he had consolidated his position and extended his conquests outside Greece, he was placed to extend his authority further. Demosthenes had warned his fellow Athenians and the rest of Greece that the Macedonian danger challenged them to unite, as they had once united against Persia, but he had gone unheard. In 339, in a renewed effort, Athens and Thebes declared war against the Amphictyonic Council, were met by Philip at Chaeronea (338) and utterly crushed. In the following year he summoned a council of all the Greek city states, at which all but Sparta accepted his leadership and his challenge to join Macedon in a campaign to throw off Persia’s influence over the Greek lands by an expedition to Asia Minor.