Ambush

by Rose Mary Sheldon

  In 440 when the Athenians sailed to Samos with forty ships and set up a democracy, they took as hostages from the Samians fifty boys and fifty men who were deposited at Lemnos. The Athenians then withdrew from Samos, leaving a garrison behind. Some of the Samians escaped to the mainland and recruited 700 mercenaries. They crossed over by night to Samos. First they attacked the popular party and overpowered most of them. Then they secretly got their hostages out of Lemnos and revolted from Athens, handing over the Athenian officers and garrison that were on the island. The unit then prepared an expedition against Miletus.48

  Withdrawing after a battle was often done at night. In 429 in Acarnania, Cnemus and the Peloponnesians retreated with their army to the Anapus river (see map 6), which was eighty stadia from Stratus at night. On the following day they took up their dead under truce and since they were helped by the Oeniadae, Cnemus withdrew to their country before the combined forces of the Acarnanians arrived.49

  Another escape from a siege occurred at Plataea in 428. After the Plataeans had finished their preparations, they waited for a night that was stormy with rain and wind and at the same time moonless, and then set out. They were led by the men who were the authors of the enterprise. They crossed the ditch that ran around the city, then they reached the foot of the enemy’s wall unobserved by the guards, who could not see ahead in the all-pervading darkness. The guards also could not hear because the clatter of the wind drowned the noise of the enemy’s approach. The invaders kept a good distance apart as they advanced and were lightly armed so that their weapons might not rattle against each other and cause detection. We are told they only had their left feet sandalled for security against slipping in the mud. They came up to the battlements at a space between two towers, knowing that this area would not be guarded. Those who carried the ladders went first. Next twelve light-armed soldiers with only a dagger and a breastplate; six went to each tower.50 Then came another party of light troops armed with spears, but no shields so they could advance more quickly. Eventually, the invaders were discovered by the sentinels in the towers because of noise made by a tile knocked down by one of the Plataeans as he was laying hold of the battlements. The alarm was instantly given, and troops rushed to the wall, not knowing the nature of the danger owing to the dark night and stormy weather.

  An interesting example of manipulating signals intelligence occurred during this same incident. Fire signals were raised to alert the Thebans of the attack and call for help, but agents in the city displayed a number of other signals at the same time to confuse the Thebans. It rendered the call for help unintelligible and prevented them from getting a clear idea of what was happening or coming to the aid of their comrades.51

  A night march through Acarnania (see map 1) was executed by Eurylochus 426/5. He arrived at Mt Thyamus, which was located in the friendly territory of the Agraeans, and from there he passed into Argive territory after nightfall. He succeeded in passing unobserved between the city of Amphilochian Argos and the Acarnanian guard posts at Crenae. There he joined the Ambraciots at Olpae, where they united at daybreak52 (see map 6). They halted at a place called Metropolis. The Athenians eluded them by making their landing by night and the Corinthians were notified by the raising of fire signals. Demosthenes had 200 Messenian hoplites and sixty Athenian archers, but realised he might be outnumbered, so he placed some of his troops in an ambush in a sunken road overgrown with bushes.53 Demosthenes lost many men, but emerged victorious when the battle was completed later that day.

  Brasidas staged a surprise attack with its objective being Amphipolis (see map 4). He set out in stormy weather in December 424 with snow in the air.54 He began with an epic march, by day and night, from Arnae in the Chalcidice round the Strymonic Gulf to Amphipolis, fording a river en route and covering more than forty miles (sixty-five kilometres) in under twenty-four hours. He forced the lightly guarded bridge over the Strymon river below Amphipolis before dawn and appeared without warning before the city walls, taking a few prisoners and throwing the citizens into a panic.55 Thucydides suggests that he could have captured the city then and there if he had attacked at once.56 This suggestion is a bit hasty. A walled city protected on two sides by steep cliffs and a river 200 yards (200 metres) wide with a majority of its citizens against surrender would not have been stormed that easily.57 Nor were the Spartans experts on siege works. Brasidas was, no doubt, expecting a betrayal; his allies the Argillians had already subverted some of the citizens. When, as at Megara, this did not happen, he camped outside to await events. According to Diodorus, the city surrendered on the day after Brasidas’ arrival.58 At least one modern commentator criticised the Athenians for not getting reinforcements there sooner and perhaps making ‘a surprise attack on Brasidas’ in return.59

  To be successful, a night retreat must be orderly. When Arrhabaeus, a king of Lynkestis, revolted against his sovereign, King Perdiccas II of Macedon, in 424 Brasidas the Spartan helped Perdiccas against Arrhabaeus. In the summer of 423 the defection of the Illyrian allies to Arrhabaeus forced Perdiccas and Brasidas to retreat. When night came on, the Macedonians and the mass of the barbarians immediately took fright ‘in one of those mysterious panics to which great armies are liable’.60 They believed the advancing enemy was many times more numerous than they really were, and that they were surrounded. At daybreak, when Brasidas saw that the Macedonians had already decamped and that the Illyrians and Arrhabaeus were about to come against him, he formed his hoplites into a square. He put the light-armed troops in the centre. He instructed the youngest troops, who were certainly the fastest, to sally against the enemy in case they attacked at any point. Brasidas himself took 300 picked men to form a rearguard and repulse the enemy’s attacks.61 Brasidas addressed his troops, suggesting that the enemy’s hit-and-run tactics were born of cowardice, but he knew how dangerous they were. Brasidas faced the same difficulties here that Demosthenes had faced in Aetolia, but he took the necessary measures to counteract them.62

  Night operations were used for the purposes of security for secret negotiations. Scione, a city in Pallene, revolted from the Athenians and went over to Brasidas in 423. On their revolt, Brasidas crossed over by night to Scione, a friendly trireme sailing ahead and he himself following in a skiff at some distance behind. His idea was that, if he should meet with any boat larger than a skiff, the trireme would protect him, but if another trireme of equal strength should come along it would turn not against the smaller boat, but against the ship, and in the meantime he could get safely across. He succeeded in crossing and calling a meeting of the Scionaeans.63

  A night escape from Mende occurred in the summer of 423 during the same operation. By that time both Mende and Scione on the Chalcidice had revolted against the Athenians. The Scionaeans and the Peloponnesians had come against the Athenians and taken position on a strong hill in front of the city of Scione. They hoped to capture it before the city was taken by the Athenians and invested with a wall. The Athenians made a furious assault upon the hill and dislodged the occupants. They encamped and, after raising a trophy, prepared for the work of circumvallation. While they were at work, the auxiliaries who had been previously besieged on the acropolis of Mende (see map 4) forced their way by night along the shore through the guard and reached Scione, and most of them made it through the besieging army and got into the city to help their fellow revolters.64

  An example of a decampment by night to avoid battle occurred in 418. The Argives were tracking Spartan movements and made contact with them at Methydrium in Arcadia. Each party took position on a hill, and the Argives prepared to fight with the Spartans, thinking they were isolated, but King Agis III eluded them by breaking up his camp at night, and he marched to Phlius to join the rest of his allies. At dawn, the Argives discovered what had happened and marched first to Argos and then took the road to Nemea, where they expected the Spartans with their allies to pass by, but Agis had taken a different route.65

  A night march and escape from a besieging arm
y was carried out at Orneae in 416/5. The Athenians arrived with thirty ships and 600 hoplites, while the Argives joining them went out in full force and besieged the garrison at Orneae for a single day. Under cover of night, however, when the besieging army had bivouacked at a distance, the garrison at Orneae escaped. The next day, the Argives, on learning this, razed Orneae to the ground and withdrew and later the Athenians also went home with their ships.66

  At Syracuse in the summer of 413 we see a stratagem designed to prevent the Athenians from marching at night. Hermocrates the Syracusan suspected that the Athenians intended to retreat by land at night to some other part of Sicily to regroup and renew the war. He pointed out to the authorities that they should not let the enemy get away by night. The Syracusans, he said, should march out at night, block the roads and seize and guard the passes.67 The authorities agreed, but the problem was that people were celebrating their recent victory, which coincided with a festival to Heracles. Most of them would be too drunk to show up for night duty. What Hermocrates feared the most was that the Athenians would quietly get ahead of them by passing the most difficult places by a night march. Therefore, when dusk came, he took his friends to the Athenian camp with some horsemen. They yelled out at them as if they were well-wishers and said to tell Nicias not to lead the army off by night because the Athenians were guarding the roads. Instead, he should make his preparations at his leisure and to retreat by day. The Athenians who heard this informed the Athenian generals, who put off going out that night on the strength of this disinformation.68 While the Athenians took an extra day to pack, the Syracusans used the time to occupy strategic points along the possible escape route and to tow off Athenianships without opposition.69

  Night Assaults

  Night movements were not just used defensively to escape, but could also be adopted to stage offensive operations. A night landing of hoplites occurred in 426 along a night march to Tanagra. The Athenian fleet left Melos and sailed to Oropus in Graean territory. They landed at nightfall and the hoplites then proceeded by land to Tanagra in Boeotia. In answer to signals that had been arranged beforehand, they were met by the Athenian army from Athens itself, which had marched out in full force under the command of Hipponicus and Eurymedon. They made camp there, spent that day ravaging Tanagran territory and remained in their position for the night. The next day, after defeating those Tanagrans who sallied out against them and some Thebans who had come up to help the Tanagrans, they took some arms, set up a trophy and retired – one group back to Athens and the other back to their ships.70

  We can see the planning stages of a surprise night attack at Embaton in 427 when a proposal was put forward to capture Mytilene (see map 9):

  So that if we were to attack suddenly and by night, I think that, with the help of those inside the town who are still on our side, we ought to be able to gain control of the place. Let us not be afraid of the danger, but let us remember that this is an example of the unknown factor in warfare, and that the good general is one who guards against such unknown factors in his own case, but exploits them for attack in the case of the enemy.71

  This certainly sounds like an endorsement of surprise attack in spite of the dangers of night operations.

  A classic example of a night assault was carried out by the Melians in 416 against an Athenian position:

  … the Melians made a night attack and captured the part of the Athenian lines opposite the marketplace. They killed some of the troops, and then, after bringing in corn and everything else useful that they could lay their hands on, retired again and made no further move, while the Athenians took measures to make their blockage more efficient in future.72

  Attacking Towns, Escaping from Towns and Building Walls

  The easiest way to capture a city was to have traitors within the walls, who would open a gate in the dead of night. We see this in action when Brasidas made his assault on Torone, the chief town of the Sithonian peninsula in Chalcidice, in 424/3 by a surprise night attack73 (see map 4). Torone itself stood on a hill, but was also protected against naval attack by an outer wall on the seafront. This side was foolishly unmanned, and traitorous elements from the city were able to admit a small party of light-armed allied troops, armed with daggers, from Brasidas’ force. These men stole uphill in the dark, killed the guards at the key watch-post below the city walls, and with the traitors’ help broke open a gate on the south side and the main gates opening into the market square. Brasidas sent 100 peltasts out in front so that when the gate was opened they would rush in first. At a pre-arranged fire-signal, they entered. Brasidas and the main army formed up at the double into the square, all shouting to create confusion. This roused the fifty Athenians hoplites who had been sleeping in the square who now broke and ran, most of them to the nearby fort of Lechythos. Brasidas with the army continued up the hill to cover all possible escape routes, and by dawn the whole city was in his hands. The entire episode shows advanced planning, accurate intelligence gathering and superb execution.74 Thucydides devotes more space than usual to this episode and rightly so. He thought it was worth reporting the taking of a fortified city with an Athenian garrison, done in only a few hours and with almost with no bloodshed, by means of a well-planned and skilfully executed surprise assault by night.75

  At Plataea in 431 some 300 Thebans under the command of the Boeotarchs entered Plataea during the first watch of the night. They had been invited over by some of the Plataeans, Naucleides and his partisans, who opened the gates for them. The intention was to put power in the hands of the partisans, destroy the citizens of the opposite party and give the city over to Thebes. They found it easier to make entry unobserved because no watch had been set to guard the city.76

  Defensive wall-building could be a night operation. In defence of Athens after the Spartan occupation of Decelea in 413, Thucydides says the Athenians were worn out trying to defend the walls during the day by turns, and then at night everybody except the cavalry was used.77

  Another example of wall-building at night as a defensive strategy and a night attack on the wall comes at Epipolae in Syracuse in the summer of 414 (see map 5). Gylippus led forth his hoplites outside the walls and closed with the enemy. He had his cavalry and javelin men posted on the flank of the Athenians in open space where the work on both walls ended. In the battle, his cavalry attacked the left wing of the Athenians, which was opposed to them, and routed it. In consequence, the rest of the army was also beaten by the Syracusans and driven headlong within the fortifications. On the following night they succeeded in building their wall beyond the walls of the Athenians so that they themselves were no longer hampered by them and thus altogether deprived the Athenians, even if they should be victorious, of the possibility of ever investing the city in the future.78

  In the winter of 412/11, the Spartan Hippocrates sailed from the Peloponnesus with ten Thurian ships commanded by Dorieus and two other commanders. He arrived at Cnidus, where a revolt had been organised by Tissaphernes. They were to use half their fleet to guard Cnidus and keep the rest at sea off Tropium. Hearing of this, the Athenians sailed out at night from Samos hoping to help the beleaguered city. They captured the six ships looking out at Tropium, although the crews escaped. After this they sailed to Cnidus and attacked the city, which was unfortified, almost capturing it. The next day they made a second assault, but with less effect because the inhabitants had strengthened their defences during the night and had been reinforced by the crews who had escaped from the ships at Triopium. The Athenians could not do so much damage as before, and so they withdrew and, after ravaging Cnidian territory, they sailed back to Samos.79

  Night Operations: Common or Uncommon?

  W. K. Pritchett was correct when he claimed that there was no example of a night assault on an encamped enemy by a Greek hoplite army previously drawn up in a plain in what Thucydides calls pitched-battle formation.80 Hoplite armies were sometimes arrayed against each other for several days with only a short distance between them,
but no effort was made at a surprise attack by night. This is, however, a very narrow definition of Greek warfare and the wrong place to look. As we see from the examples given in this chapter, both Greeks and their enemies used night operations and ambush, and these things were well known already by the time of Herodotus. Pritchett gives Epipolae as the only apparent exception to the rule since the Syracusans were on much higher ground and in part behind walls, but there were numerous operations in the fifth century, related by both Herodotus and Thucydides, when night operations were required and, when properly executed, were successful. In fact, the single most common motif in Herodotean military accounts is deception or trickery.81

  The more we proceed through the fifth and into the early fourth century, the more common these tactics become, and we have the benefit of an experienced military writer to comment on the phenomenon. Aeneas Tacticus, writing two generations after the Peloponnesian war, specifically warns against the danger of betrayal at night.82 If the Greeks thought the enemy might attack them at night, then they had to prepare for such eventualities, whether they were in a camp or behind the walls of a city. The Plataean fifth columnists admitted the Thebans at night;83 the betrayal of the long walls at Megara took place before dawn;84 the betrayal of Amphipolis began at night;85 Brasidas’ entrance into Torone was accomplished at night while Athenian hoplites were sleeping in the agora;86 the betrayal of Selymbria occurred at night;87 and Byzantium was betrayed at night.88 On two occasions the weather also provided cover for the betrayals. If a pre-emptive strike on the enemy at night might give them an advantage, then they would be foolish not to use such an advantage. Night fighting, while difficult and risky, could pay off big time if applied at the right time and the right place. Brasidas pushed on to Amphipolis on a stormy, snowy night, trying to escape notice by everyone except the traitors inside the city.89 The stormy weather was also a factor in his capture of the territory outside the walls.90 The night Plataea was betrayed it was rainy.91 The fact that it was rainy and no guards were posted helped cover the betrayal.92