Ripples of Battle

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The Athenian army was commanded on the right wing by another young aristocrat in his early thirties, Hippocrates, son of Ariphron, who had just reached requisite age to be elected to the board of generals two years earlier. Thucydides records his speech to the army in the moments before it was surprised by Pagondas and his Thebans.

  If we conquer, the Peloponnesians will never again invade your native soil with the help of the Boeotian horsemen. In just a single battle, you will win not only this ground here, but also ensure the freedom of your own. So charge out against them in a manner worthy both of your city—the most preeminent in Greece which as your fatherland each of you adore—and of your fathers who once vanquished these same men at the battle of Oenophyta under Myronides and so became the lords of Boeotia.

  The rhetoric, if it was really Hippocrates’ and not the historian’s own, shows flashes of brilliance and a determination to lead his ragtag army head-on against the best infantry in the Greek world. What little we know of Hippocrates suggests that he was an avid supporter of an aggressive Athenian pursuit of the war and a coplanner of the invasion of Boeotia. Hippocrates was also the nephew of Pericles, the distinguished imperialist who had led Athens into the Peloponnesian conflict before dying from the plague in the second year of the war.

  In most Greek battles, generals were posted on the right wing, occupied the front line, led the charge, and perished in defeat. Frequently their sudden deaths in the melee served to hasten the collapse of the phalanx itself. For Athens, the ruin of its right wing at Delium had irrevocable effects on the ultimate course of the battle. We do not know whether Hippocrates’ death preceded or followed the ruination of his elite right—Pausanias in his Description of Greece relates that he was killed rather early on in the fighting. But had he survived and perhaps held together his already victorious hoplites, the Athenians may well have won the battle outright, and then either annexed parts of Boeotia or at least forced a Boeotian withdrawal from the war—a coup that may well have brought the Spartans to negotiations at the end of 424 B.C.

  From all accounts, despite his youth Hippocrates was a capable and energetic leader at the forefront of those Athenians determined to press home the war. Earlier in the conflict he had proposed Athenian citizenship for the survivors of the small Boeotian town of Plataea that had been overrun by Theban oligarchs and their Spartan supporters. And weeks before Delium, Hippocrates had attempted to stir up insurrection in nearby Megara and bring this critically important city near the Isthmus over to the Athenians. Moreover, the battle at Delium was part of a strategically ambitious theater campaign that failed largely due to the incompetence of his fellow general Demosthenes. Hippocrates’ entire tenure as general is evidence of relentless support for radical imperial democracy in the tradition of his uncle Pericles, advocacy of continued aggression toward Sparta, and keen interest in conquering or neutralizing neighboring Boeotia.

  But even more intriguing, Hippocrates’ father was Ariphron, making him the nephew of Pericles—and the stepbrother of the adopted Alcibiades, who was six years his junior. We know little else about the personal life of Hippocrates other than he orphaned three children with his death at Delium. Yet his brief career suggests that his stepbrother Alcibiades was influential in his bold decision to invade Boeotia, and no doubt was stationed among the mounted Athenian elite that guarded the right wing. Hippocrates’ death, coupled with the bravery of his adopted sibling, had the effect of enhancing Alcibiades and removing a talented rival from among the radically democratic leadership. For Hippocrates and Alcibiades, Delium was the key moment in two stepbrothers’ promising careers, one aborted by death, the other launched in defeat. For Athens it would have been far better had their fates been reversed.

  Other notable Athenians at Delium were also connected to Alcibiades through mutual acquaintances. Plato, the best remembered pupil of Socrates, nearly a half century after the battle wrote his Laches nominally on the subject of courage. The dialogue takes place between the Athenians Socrates, Laches, and Nicias. Purportedly set sometime around 420 B.C., four years after the Athenian defeat, the discussion draws on the battle in a variety of interesting ways. Laches was a prominent democratic statesman and general who is often mentioned as a leader in most of the Athenian campaigns and political initiatives during the first decade of the Peloponnesian War. In the Laches, the speakers have just watched young men training in armor. The question then arises as to the best type of education necessary for young Athenian infantrymen—should they learn set military moves and skills or simply rely on traditional bravery to win battles?

  Nicias—the conservative general whom Alcibiades outmaneuvered to win approval of the Sicilian expedition—argues for specialized training. In doing so he seems to recall the situation at Delium:

  The greatest advantage [of being trained in using weapons] arises when the ranks of the phalanx become broken, and the need arises for one-on-one fighting, either in pursuit attacking someone who is fighting back, or in flight defending against the attacker. Whoever possessed such skill, would not suffer anything in single engagements, nor even if attacked by a host of enemies; he could prevail in any situation.

  Well over four decades after the battle, Plato here explicitly uses Socrates’ skill in escaping the Boeotians as proof that young men of his own age must learn how to use their weapons through set moves. Only that way can infantrymen of fourth-century Athens avoid just such a debacle as the defeat of a generation past. Delium serves the philosopher’s larger goal of stressing that education and training are not antithetical to innate ability, but rather, if properly pursued, refine and improve upon nature. Laches is made the foil to Socrates in his own eponymous dialogue. He confesses that the middle-aged philosopher “made his way with me in the retreat from Delium, and I can tell you that if the other Athenians had been willing to be like him, our city would be standing tall and would not have suffered such a terrible fall.” Later in the dialogue Laches reiterates that Socrates was alongside him during the rout and proved unshakable in the ensuing calamity.

  Plato was only five when Delium was fought. Yet he must have grown up with general stories of the Athenian disgrace and Socrates’ own extraordinary courage in particular—so that the battle once again found itself immortalized in classical Athenian literature. A final footnote to the career of Laches: although he had been instrumental in brokering the peace with Sparta in 421 B.C., he also led the Athenian contingent at the battle of Mantinea in 418 B.C.—a result of the anti-Spartan confederation engineered by Alcibiades. The latter, who helped force the battle, was not present at the actual fighting. Laches, however, was. And six years after Delium, he seems to have experienced once more a similar failure of courage. Although cogeneral of the Athenian contingent at Mantinea, he joined in the panicked flight of his men from the pursuing Spartans. This time, however, there was no Socrates at his side. He, along with some two hundred Athenian hoplites, was killed. Plato must have had these two incidents in mind when he wrote Laches decades later: a shaky Laches saved at Delium by his proximity to the redoubtable Socrates, only to be later killed at Mantinea when he once more lost his nerve.

  What explains this strange interest of Plato in Delium, a battle fought when he was a tiny boy? Besides the towering figure of Socrates, we also know that Plato’s own stepfather Pyrilampes was part of the call-up of the home guard, fled the battlefield, was wounded and then captured—only later to be ransomed from the Boeotians. Pyrilampes was probably fifty-six at Delium. His age reminds us again that Hippocrates’ home guard had drawn from the reserves of Athenian manpower and was full of hoplites well past their prime. Pyrilampes was a notorious Athenian bureaucrat, infamous for his lavish junkets to Persia to conduct state relations, and ridiculed as well for the prized peacocks he brought home from one such trip—and habitually showed off at public displays for years afterward. If Plato first met Socrates a decade and a half after Delium (somewhere around 410 B.C., when he was about twenty), he would have h
eard of the battle even earlier from his stepfather—and Pyrilampes’ own retreat, capture, and ransom would contrast markedly with Socrates’ successful fighting withdrawal. In fact, that very divergence in mettle between stepfather and mentor at Delium may have haunted Plato for the rest of his life.

  In his utopia of the Republic, for example, a middle-aged Plato presents a variety of ideas about military service, along with advice to the state about how to improve the spirit of its soldiers. Fathers (does he have his stepfather Pyrilampes in mind?) are to take their sons out to the battlefield to make them watch the fighting, with the guarantee that the “older guides” can direct them away in safe retreat “if the need arises.” But those who are caught alive (again, like his stepfather?) are not to be ransomed but left to the desires of the enemy: “Any one of them who leaves his assigned rank or tosses away his arms, or is guilty of any similar act is to be demoted to the farmer or craftsmen class.”

  Plato goes on to be quite clear about the fate of captives: “And anyone who is taken alive by the enemy, should we not give him over to his captors to deal with their ‘catch’ any way they please?” In contrast, the courageous—i.e., the Socratic—shall be given military prizes for their heroism, be greeted by all as heroes, even to the point of being publicly kissed by well-wishers. Had his general policies come true, Plato’s own stepfather would have languished in a Boeotian jail or have been summarily executed after the battle.

  Delium affected a handful of individuals in the most remarkable ways—Alcibiades emboldened, Hippocrates finished, Laches and Pyrilampes embarrassed. The Socratic and Periclean common connections between all four are uncanny and perhaps provide a small glimpse into a close-knit cadre of friends and associates, mostly very young and middle-aged, who marched and rode out together somewhere on the Athenian right wing, hardly expecting to collide without support against the finest infantry in Greece. While the later careers of these notables affected the course of Greek history itself, one man’s experience at Delium—the common nexus to them all—changed the ages.

  Socrates Slain?

  Classical Greek thinkers saw no contradiction between a life of action and contemplation, even in the extreme polarities between military service and philosophy. Plato sighed that fighting “always exists by nature between every Greek city-state.” In classical antiquity philosophers rarely argued for pacifism or conscientious objection to military service. The idea of a “just war” centered on only two criteria—neither involving the moral question of killing the enemy in battle. Fighting instead was to follow the laws of the Greeks pertaining to the treatment of prisoners, heralds, and civilian populations; and war should be in the true interest of the state.

  Nor did the intellectual class find it either fashionable or compelling to castigate war itself. Instead they were more likely to find themselves with spear and shield than in a study condemning man’s folly. A number of Greek writers, thinkers, and statesmen fought in the phalanx. The lyric poet Archilochus was killed in battle on the Aegean island of Thasos. The poets Tyrtaeus, Alcaeus, and Callinus, the playwrights Aeschylus and Sophocles, the democratic leader Pericles, the historian Thucydides, and the orator Demosthenes all took their slot in the files of the phalanx or on the banks of a trireme.

  Plato himself may have served as a hoplite in the Corinthian War. At the siege of Samos (440 B.C.), Melissus, a Samian philosopher and student of Parmenides, led his ship into battle against Pericles’ fleet. Sophocles was also at sea there, among the elected high command of Athenians who came to enslave the island. The philosopher and mathematician Archimedes died in the storming of Syracuse, in his final hours employing his novel military machines against the Roman besiegers.

  Likewise Socrates, the father of Western ethical philosophy and veteran of the fighting in the campaign of Potidaea, found himself on the battlefield at Delium. He is not mentioned by either Thucydides or Diodorus in accounts of the battle, who must have either not known of his presence there or felt that his battle service was not unusual and thus not worthy of special mention, given that only elected officers on both sides are expressly noted. Instead, what we know of his ordeal derives from Plato and the Platonic tradition that turns up in later writers such as the biographer and essayist Plutarch. In these sources Socrates fought heroically and was nearly killed. While we have mention of his actual hand-to-hand fighting in the melee, his fame derives from his stubborn retreat and refusal to join the panicky frenzy that overtook most of the Athenian army.

  After the appearance of the Theban cavalry reinforcements and the subsequent hysteria that infected the Athenian right wing, and the continual battering on the left by Pagondas’s deep columns, most of the Athenian army took off at a run to the rear for safety in different directions. They headed in four directions—either to nearby Mount Parnes, to the fortified sanctuary at Delium proper, to the beach and the refuge of Athenian triremes, or to the woods in the Oropus along the border in Attica.

  There were already over 10,000 lightly armed Boeotians present at the battle in addition to 1,000 cavalry and another 500 light-armed skirmishers. With the Locrian reinforcements and the victorious hoplites, there may well have been a swarm of nearly 20,000 or so enemy pursuers, many of them either mounted or agile, lightly equipped auxiliaries. The early evening chase turned into a massacre. The routed Athenians, without much cavalry support or auxiliary skirmishers, and struggling to fling away their heavy armor, were vastly outnumbered, slower, confused, and in many cases disoriented in the growing twilight. Theirs was a nightmare long remembered at Athens.

  Socrates—he later thanked his “divine” voice for directing him out of danger—wisely avoided both the escape routes to Delium and the high ground of Parnes. And so he found safety in a third way through the forested borderland of the Oropus. Again, the disaster of this Athenian “home guard” must have quickly taken on mythic proportions and been recounted constantly throughout Athens: Hippocrates, nephew of Pericles, stepbrother of Alcibiades, and general of the army, killed; Alcibiades’ bravery during the retreat soon to inaugurate his meteoric political career; Laches’ dubious courage in the flight from Delium foreshadowing his demise at the subsequent battle of Mantinea (418 B.C.); and Plato’s own stepfather and great-uncle, Pyrilampes, captured when Plato was but a mere boy.

  In three later dialogues—Laches, Symposium, and Apology—Plato makes direct mention of Socrates’ gallantry in the flight, how he backpedaled and made an orderly withdrawal toward the borderland of Oropus accompanied by both Laches and Alcibiades. In the Laches, Socrates is made to lecture about the proper technique of attacking and fending off blows when in isolated combat, with a clear allusion to his own nightmarish experience after Delium. Laches brags of Socrates that “if other Athenians had been willing to be like him, our city would be standing tall and would not then have suffered such a terrible fall.”

  In Plato’s Apology, the last speech of Socrates’ life, the seventy-year-old philosopher reminds his accusers, who sought to have him executed on spurious charges, that long ago in three terrible battles he had kept rank and not left his position. The man they charge as a corrupter of youth and blasphemer of traditional religion was in fact a war hero. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades gives a detailed description of the acute danger Socrates found himself in during the general rout after Delium:

  I happened to be riding; he was serving as a hoplite. As the army was scattered he was retreating with Laches when I happened on him. At first sight I told them to keep their courage up as I told them I would not abandon them. Then I had even a finer view of Socrates than at Potidaea. For my part I was less afraid since I was mounted. First off I noticed how much more in control of his senses he was than Laches, and how—to use your own phrase, Aristophanes—he made his way there just as he does here in Athens, “swaggering and glancing sideways.” So he looked around calmly at both his friends and the enemy; he was clearly giving the message to anyone even at a distance that if anyone touched this
man, he quickly would put up a stout defense. The result was that he and his partner got away safely. For it is true that attackers do not approach men of this caliber but instead go after those fleeing headlong.

  Plutarch, centuries later in his life of Alcibiades, also recalls this widely circulated story that Alcibiades rode past Socrates and his isolated contingent who were in dire straits. But in Plutarch’s version Alcibiades’ mounted presence saves the life of Socrates as the enemy “was closing in and killing many.” In his Moralia, Plutarch adds an additional twist—that Socrates’ choice of escape alone saved him and his friends, as most other Athenians who headed over the mountains were ridden down and slain, while those who reached Delium were eventually besieged.

  The disparate ancient evidence nevertheless points to two characteristics of Socrates’ retreat: Delium was a horrific Athenian catastrophe where hundreds were mercilessly hunted down and killed right on the border of Attica, and where Socrates’ courage and good sense brought him out alive when most around him were killed. Had the middle-aged philosopher been stabbed by an anonymous Locrian horseman, or if his small band had been overtaken by pursuing Theban infantry, or if he had chosen to flee toward either Delium or Mount Parnes, where most of his terrified comrades were killed, the entire course of Western philosophical and political thought would have been radically altered.