To label these tactics as ‘un-Greek’ is simply wrong. The Greeks certainly had their military traditions, but they were also flexible enough to know that traditions may change even in the space of one war. Removing an army from a location and evading an enemy, escaping a walled city under siege, attacking the walls of a city, removing a fleet by sea were all tactics recognised and practised by the Greeks. In a case such as Brasidas’ attack on Torone, we see the use of light-armed troops for infiltration, clandestine communications, killing a garrison at night and forcing entry into a city. The successful use of the cover of darkness for a surprise attack was not uncommon.
CHAPTER 7
Surprise Landings, and Assault by Sea
ATTACKS AND RETREATS BY night or surprise assaults in Greek warfare were not confined to the land. Navies as well as armies were moved into position at night in preparation for an attack at dawn. Setting out during the night by sea could be dangerous, and such manoeuvres were attempted when achieving surprise was absolutely necessary.1 Triremes were both too fragile and too uncomfortable for long stays at sea. Trireme fleets did not mount blockades in the modern sense of the word. Rather, they moored in a harbour near the enemy and then ventured out to challenge the opposing fleet. In order to be ready, they used scouts both on land and sea to follow enemy movements and to signal information.2 So, for example, when Themistocles planned the attack at Artemesium for the evening, we assume it was so that the engagement would be brief. One scholar refers to it as being ‘less of a battle than a raid, and, indeed, an experiment’.3 As we will see, however, this tactic was not as much of an oddity as modern commentators suggest. There are many examples of night sailings and at least five examples of assaults from the sea, all of which were successful.
Herodotus
Surprise landings are already documented by Thucydides as occurring during the Ionian Revolt. In 494, Histiaeus had been pushed to the island of Lesbos. Accepting eight triremes from the locals, he began raiding to make ends meet and descended upon Chios. He had a small force of 320 hoplites (forty per ship) plus some lightly armed rowers. He knew the Chian strength would be greater so he exploited the element of surprise and made a secret landing to set up a trap in the heavily wooded countryside at a place known as The Hollows. Having arranged the ambush, his men made their presence known by openly attacking nearby cropland. When the Chians raced towards the fields, they fell right into the waiting ambush. The raiders butchered most of the defenders on the spot and captured the rest. Chios capitulated without further resistance.4
Some historians such as Barry Strauss believe the famous Battle of Salamis was set up as a surprise ambush.5 At Salamis in 480 the Persians received a message carried by the slave named Sicinnus, who appeared in the Persian camp. He was probably sent by Themistocles as a provocation. The message he sent was that the Greeks had lost heart and were planning to flee. An intelligence bonanza of this magnitude should have seemed too good to be true; nevertheless, the Persians believed the message.6 First they landed 400 of their men on the islet of Psyttaleia, which lies between Salamis and the mainland.7 Then, at midnight, they advanced their western wing towards Salamis for encirclement (see map 11), and they also put out to sea the ships that were stationed off Ceos and Cynosura. They held all of the passage with their ships as far as Munychia. The purpose of their putting out to sea was so that the Greeks would not even have the liberty to flee, but would be hemmed in at Salamis and punished for their fighting off Artemesium. The purpose of their landing Persians on the islet of Psyttaleia was that, after a sea fight, the men and wrecks would be washed ashore there, since the island lay in the very path of the forthcoming battle. From here they could save their friends and slay their opponents. They did all of this in silence to keep it secret from the Greeks and, naturally, they made these preparations at night without resting.8
Once the battle was in full swing, the Greeks broke the Persian line and turned the Phoenicians and Ionians to flight. The battle should have effectively been over, except for the Greek pursuit, and yet the struggle went on for hours afterwards. The narrowness of the straits made it impossible for Persia’s front lines to flee towards Phalerum without crashing into the ships that were still coming forward. By the evening of September 25 the Greeks had pushed the chaotic mass of Persians back. The action in the Battle of Salamis had returned to where the Persians had begun the night before, at the eastern end of the straits. While the Aeginetans lurked at the exit of the channel, the Athenians inside the straits drove the Persian ships into their hands. Meanwhile, a small Athenian unit had landed on the islet of Psyttaleia, which lay just to the south of the Aeginetan squadron.
For Aegina’s ambush to succeed we may imagine that it was crucial first to remove the Persians from Psyttaleia. Had they remained there, they could have signalled to their ships about the ambush, which would have allowed some of the Persian triremes to escape by speeding up, hugging the coast or perhaps by steering a zigzag course. On top of that, if the Aeginetans had tried to hide their vessels in the shadow of Psyttaleia, the Persians might have threatened the men with arrows, so the Persians had to be removed. The mission was entrusted to a corps of Athenian infantrymen under Aristides’ command. He did not have command of a ship during Athens’ greatest naval battle. This is not surprising since he was a returned political exile. Instead, he had his great moment when the Greeks broke the Persian line and chaos reigned among the Great King’s triremes. At this point it was safe to thin the ranks of the Athenian infantrymen lining the Salamis shore. Aristides gathered a large number of them – we do not know how many – and put them on small boats. They landed on Psyttaleia and slaughtered the Persians there down to the last man. Both the carnage on Psyttaleia and the Aeginetan ambush represent mopping-up operations because the Persian navy had been defeated.9 But they were still important parts of the war and reliant on ambush as a tactic.
Not surprisingly, a night sail was used by the Persian admirals in retreat after Salamis in 480. By the king’s command, they put out to sea from Phalerum and made for the Hellespont again with all speed, to guard the bridges for the king’s passage.10
Thucydides
Sea landings, in and of themselves, could be dangerous. In 430 a fleet of forty ships sailed from Corinth to land 1,500 hoplites at Astacus and they quickly took the town. It was their last success because the fleet failed to take any other towns, although they struck numerous times along the coast of Acarnania. The fleet’s commanders decided to make one last attempt and landed on Cephallenia to assault the town of Cranae. This final effort proved a worse failure because the landing party fell into an ambush by a defending force less than half its size. The survivors were chased back to their ships.11
As often happens when a superior force attacks, the defenders will use ambush as a force multiplier. In 426, the Athenian admiral Laches crossed from Italy to Sicily and set the Messenian colony of Mylae as his first target. He had forty ships, half of them Athenian and could land 1,600 hoplites, eighty archers and at least a few armed crewmen. This was enough to give him numerical superiority, since his opposition amounted to only two Messenian tribal lochoi, with perhaps 1,000–1,200 hoplites and 200–300 psiloi (light armed). Facing such an imbalance in manpower, the defenders decided to spring an ambush. The defence, however, did not work, probably because the scouts revealed the trap before it could be sprung. Exposed, the Messenians had to either run or fight. They chose to fight and took heavy losses.12 Later in that same year Laches’ Siculi reinforcements were set upon in a surprise attack by Syracusans.13
Demosthenes and Procles planned a surprise attack on a garrison responsible for the killing of their colleague Asopius two years earlier. In 426, the Athenians came ashore on the mainland territory of Leucas, where they made a feint towards the town of Ellomenus. As planned, the small group of marines fell back upon the approach of the local guard unit, whose 600 or so spearmen took the bait and pursued them right into the trap. The unit was decima
ted, and Demosthenes and Procles were able to cross over and invest the city of Leucas.14
Withdrawal of an army or fleet by night to avoid battle was not uncommon. There are eleven examples, of which only one was unsuccessful. The case that failed involved the Peloponnesian fleet at Rhium in 429, the third year of the Peloponnesian war. The Corinthian admirals Machaon and two colleagues were on their way to Acarnania to prevent the coastal Acarnanians from joining their countrymen in the interior.15 As they sailed along out the Crisaean Gulf (see map 3), they realised they were being followed by Phormio and his twenty Athenian vessels that had put out from the mouth of the Euenos river and were hoping to attack them on the open sea.16 The Corinthians, for their part, had no thought of engaging in a sea battle since their vessels were being used more like transports for carrying soldiers. Besides, they never thought the twenty Athenian vessels would dare attack their forty-seven ships.17
The Corinthians altered their plan of passage and returned to the Peloponnesian coast, putting in at some point near to Rhium, the narrowest part of the strait. Their bringing to was a feint intended to deceive Phormio and to induce him to return to his own camp.18 The Peloponnesians then slipped from their moorings in the middle of the night hoping to get across the narrowest part of the Gulf and sneak away unobserved in the dark. But they were spotted and forced to fight the Athenians in mid-passage.
The Peloponnesians ranged their forty-seven vessels in as large a circle as possible without leaving an opening; the prows were outside and the sterns in. They placed within the circle all the small craft together with their five best sailors who could move out at a moment’s notice and strengthen any point threatened by the enemy.19 The twenty Athenian warships around them forced them to contract their circle, keeping them in mid-channel by continuously brushing past and feigning attacks. They had been warned by Phormio only to fake the attacks, but not attack for real until he gave a signal.20 Phormio was hoping that the Peloponnesians would not retain their order like a force on shore, but that the ships would fall afoul of each other as well as the small craft in the centre and cause confusion. He was waiting for the wind, which usually rose towards morning and blew in from the Gulf. Phormio wanted to be the one to attack since he felt he had better sailors and that an attack timed to coincide with the wind was the best strategy.21
When the wind came up, the enemy’s ships were in a narrow space, and with the wind and the small craft dashing against them, they at once fell into confusion. The ships fell afoul of each other while the crews tried pushing them off with poles. All their shouting, swearing and struggling with one another made captains’ orders and boatswains’ cries inaudible.22 At this moment, Phormio gave the signal and the Athenians attacked. Sinking first one of the commander’s ships, they then disabled as many of the rest as they could. Those who managed to escape fled for Patrae and Dyme in Achaea (see map 8). The Athenians gave chase, captured twelve ships and took most of the men out of them. They then sailed to Molycrium. After setting up a trophy on the promontory of Rhium and dedicating a ship to Poseidon, they returned to Naupactus.23
Assaults at sea certainly relied on the element of surprise. Thucydides tells of such an assault when the Peloponnesians attacked the Athenians and ravaged Salamis in the winter of 429/8, the third year of the Peloponnesian war. The Megarians persuaded the Spartan (Brasidas) and Cnemus (the Spartan admiral), plus the other Peloponnesian commanders, to make a daring surprise attack on Piraeus, the port of Athens. No one in Athens ever dreamed such an open attack would be tried, since they had such obvious superiority at sea. They had left Piraeus unguarded and open. According to the plan, each man was to take either an oar, a cushion or a rowlock thong,24 and going overland from Corinth to the sea on the Athenian side, to get to Megara as quickly as they could. There they would hijack forty vessels that were in the docks at Nisaea and sail at once to Piraeus (see map 10). There was no Athenian fleet on the lookout in the harbour, and the Athenians had no idea that the enemy was going to spring a surprise attack. The Athenians assumed they would detect any open attack on Piraeus.25
Planning a surprise attack, however, is not the same thing as successfully executing one. The party arrived at Corinth at night, and launched the vessels from Nisaea, but rather than sailing to Piraeus as they had originally intended, they suddenly became afraid of the risk. Some of this was due to the weather having changed and the wind stopping, and partially because the forty ships had been in dry dock and might not have been watertight.26 In any event, they decided to sail to Salamis, an island off the coast of Megara. There the Athenians had a fort and a squadron of three triremes to prevent any vessels from sailing in or out of Megara. The Spartans assaulted this fort, towed off the triremes empty and surprised the inhabitants by laying waste to the island. Although they did not reach their original target, they succeeded in panicking the Athenians when news of the raid was signalled from Salamis.27
Nighttime always provides an excellent opportunity to make an escape, especially when one is under siege. The famous uprising at Plataea in 427 had the population revolting against the Thebans. Even the women valiantly assisted the men by pelting the Thebans with tiles from the houses. Towards dusk, the oligarchs were in full rout and feared that the victorious commons might assault and carry the arsenal and put them all to the sword. The inhabitants set fire to the houses around the agora and the lodging houses, in order to bar their advance, sparing neither their own nor those of the neighbours. A great deal of commercial merchandise was destroyed, and the city risked total destruction if a wind fanned the flames. When hostilities ceased, both sides kept quiet, passing the night on guard against another attack. A Corinthian ship escaped from the island at night, and most of the mercenaries got away secretly to the mainland.28
Another night escape came when the Spartans not only sailed for home at night coasting along the shore, but also hauled their ships across the Leucadian isthmus in order to avoid being seen, as they would be if they sailed around, they got away.29
Cover of darkness could be used for provisioning troops by sea. During the siege of the Spartan hoplites on Sphacteria in 425, night operations were used to supply food and water to the embattled soldiers. The Spartans called for volunteers to convey to the island ground wheat, wine and cheese, and other food that might be serviceable in a siege. They were willing to pay a high price: they promised freedom to any helot who could get food in. Many took the risk, especially the helots, who put out from any and every point in the Peloponnese and came to shore during the night on the side of the island facing the sea. Divers also swam underwater from the harbour, dragging by a cord skins filled with poppy seed mixed with honey and bruised linseed. The Athenians had imagined it would take only a few days and were extremely frustrated by the unexpectedly long time it took to reduce a body of men shut up on a desert island with only brackish water to drink.30
The Athenians finally made their own landing on the island at night. While it was still dark, they embarked all their hoplites on a few vessels and put off, landing a little before dawn on both sides of the island, on the side towards the open sea and on that facing the harbour. They numbered about 800, all hoplites. Then they advanced at a run against the first guard post on the island31 (see chapter 5).
Sneaking in troops by ship at night was a typical tactic. It was used at Solygeia in 425. The Athenians made an expedition into Corinthian territory with eighty ships and 2,000 Athenian hoplites together with 200 cavalry on board horse transports; allied forces also went with them. But the Corinthians, having previous intelligence from Argos that the Athenian army was coming, had long before occupied the isthmus with all their forces except those who dwelt north of the isthmus and 500 Corinthians who were away doing garrison duty in Ambracia and Leucas. All the rest, to a man, were now there watching to see where the Athenians would land.32 How did the Corinthians get advanced news from Argos of the intended Athenian invasion? This is an interesting piece of lax security. Presumably, the
re had been free talk by people who had attended the relevant Assembly meeting and the news passed down to Piraeus. The generals of the Council of 500 should have been able to make military plans with reasonable expectation of confidentiality.33
In 424, the Athenian general Demosthenes was presented with an attractive offer to betray Megara to Athens.34 Megara was close to Athens and controlled the land communication from the Peloponnesus to central Greece, where Sparta had important allies and friends. Taking Megara could block a Peloponnesian invasion at the isthmus and could provide Athens with easy access to Corinthian territory. The Athenians jumped at the opportunity.35 Demosthenes planned an approach to Megara by land and by sea. The first phase of the plan called for a seizure of the long walls between the city of Megara and its harbour of Nisaea in order to prevent the Peloponnesian troops who guarded the walls and harbour from helping the Peloponnesian sympathisers in the city. It was a classic deception operation setting up the ambush. The Athenians sailed under cover of night to Minoa, the island situated opposite Megara, taking 600 hoplites under the command of Hippocrates, and took cover in a stone quarry not far from the town.36 A second company consisting of light-armed Plataeans and frontier patrols (peripoloi) under the command of Demosthenes stationed themselves in the temple of Enyalius, just outside the city. Security was so good that all that night no one perceived what was going on except the men who were part of the plot. At the approach of dawn, their accomplices within the city began their work.37 They succeeded in leaving their hiding place and entering the city gates. After they and their associates had gained the upper hand in the first skirmish with the alarmed Megarians, they handed over the gate to the Athenian hoplites, who had hurried to the scene. Immediately after this the walls were occupied. The vanguard of light infantry who had been hiding nearby captured the gate, after which the hoplites consolidated the occupied positions. The operation took place at night to ensure maximum panic among the Megarians, in which traitors and loyal citizens were indistinguishable. It goes without saying that light-armed men were the most suitable choice for a surprise attack because of their speed. The Peloponnesians deserted their watch and fled to Nisaea.38
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