Ripples of Battle

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The first group of dialogues is usually considered to deal primarily with moral issues and the need to establish proper definitions of ethical problems—in contrast with Plato’s middle and later interests that turn to metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology. In addition, Socrates is the primary figure of Plato’s first eleven dialogues. But he seems to fade somewhat in importance in later texts. Indeed, in the Laws, considered one of Plato’s last treatises, he does not appear as a questioner. Some scholars believe that Plato began his early dialogues while in his late twenties (e.g., 408–399 B.C.), at a time when Socrates was still alive.

  In any case, at least eleven of his most important works were written within a decade and a half of Socrates’ death, employed Socrates as chief questioner, and dealt with concerns made famous by Socrates during the last years of his life. Had Plato never met Socrates, then, these eleven dialogues either would not exist or would not exist in their present form.

  Plato’s middle and later dialogues, in contrast, when the memory of a Socrates was decades past, show renewed interest in the work of Parmenides, Protagoras, and Empedocles, drawing on their notions of causation, change, sensation, cosmology, and reincarnation. Like the younger Socrates, Plato seems to regard these earlier thinkers—who, unlike Socrates, wrote substantial works—as the most influential philosophers of the Greek tradition. As Plato matured, as the memory of life and conversations with Socrates dimmed, and as the value of the written philosophical texts of others was more appreciated, Plato diverged from Socrates in important areas of philosophy and relied more and more on these earlier giants.

  An irony thus arises. The philosophical interests of the elder Plato resemble somewhat the thought of the younger Socrates. This suggests that the last two decades of Socrates’ life were an exceptional period in the history of Greek philosophical thought, devoted far more to the practical and ethical, and attuned to debunking the false knowledge prevalent in the streets of Athens during the stressful period of the Peloponnesian War. Had Socrates died at forty-five at Delium, at least a third of Plato’s most interesting work would either be gone or not exist in its present form. His entire corpus might better resemble his middle and later dialogues—and thereby belong more to the mainstream of Hellenic cosmological and ontological speculation.

  Finally, Plato himself seems to have sensed that Delium was a momentous event in Socrates’ life, one that was related over and over to the younger student by a variety of associates. Not only is the battle mentioned three times in his work, but there are a number of veiled allusions that arise unexpectedly elsewhere as well. In the utopian Laws and Republic, the nightmare of Delium is never far away. Both the disgrace of the Athenian loss and the Theban sacrilege in the battle’s aftermath offer implicit lessons for the military reformer. In the Laws, for example, Plato urges regular peacetime military drill, regardless of weather and lasting for an entire day (Delium atypically took place in the late afternoon in November). All residents—men, women, and children—are to join in, but in an ordered and disciplined manner (surely unlike the chaotic levée en masse at Delium).

  Plato also makes it clear in his Republic that the dead shall not be stripped or desecrated. And he insists that the corpses of the defeated must be returned to their countrymen for a decent burial (in contrast to the notorious Theban behavior). Nor should the Greeks (as the Thebans did after Delium) display the weapons of the defeated in sanctuaries as dedicatory offerings but instead regard such desecration as “pollution.” Many of Plato’s discussions about war, then, as we have seen in veiled references to his stepfather Pyrilampes, probably drew on the experience of the horrifying tales of the battle surrounding the elder Socrates and his friends.

  One of the most moving texts in Western literature is Plato’s Apology—the account of Socrates’ final rebuttal before his peers in the Athenian jury (dramatic date 399 B.C.). The influence of Plato’s version of the speech has been enormous in the past two and a half millennia. Two fundamental traditions in the practice of Western philosophy followed from that majestic defense. First is the accepted notion that even a free society through its legal institutions can kill those who question its authority and values. Thus the role of the true philosopher is properly to be tragic. As a principled outsider he will inevitably meet with the revenge of the more unenlightened masses if he remains true to his ideas.

  Second, democracy—not oligarchy or autocracy—killed Socrates. In large part because of its trial and execution of Socrates—so vividly portrayed through four moving dialogues of Plato—Athenian democracy suffered a terrible reputation among subsequent political thinkers, from Cicero and Machiavelli to almost every major philosopher until the late-eighteenth-century revolutionaries in France and America.

  In addition, the early Christian apologists of late antiquity, many responding to the renewed interest in Socrates among the Neoplatonists, found the parallel with the martyr Jesus especially unmistakable. Both men were teachers who wrote nothing but were quoted widely by a close cadre of disciples. Both were also dragged before the mob, publicly humiliated, and then executed by lesser men who made use of a frightened and paranoid establishment. In the view of the early Christian apologists, Socrates’ courageous end—and his advocacy of preferring to be hurt rather than to hurt others—was confirmation of his prescience: he surely had a blessed premonition of Jesus—and therefore, like Jesus, preached that we do not die with our bodies but rather have an eternal soul that lives on after our physical death. Socratic thought, via Plato, became critical to the early exegesis of the Christian Church.

  Needless to say, there would have been no image of Socrates as pre-Christian pagan martyr had he died at Delium. Rather than a tragic man of conscience, he would have been a nondescript Athenian patriot and sophistic thinker who fell during an Athenian rout. In that sense, Socrates perhaps would have been embraced by, rather than at odds with, Athenian democracy. Nor would we have quite the negative appraisal of Athenian democracy itself, had it honored Socrates as a fallen hero of 424 rather than executed him as the perceived subversive agitator and tutor to the right-wing revolutionaries of 404 B.C. who, for a time, overthrew the government.

  Perhaps the chief significance of the entire battle is the philosopher’s close escape from Theban pursuers. On that autumn late afternoon in 424 B.C., Western philosophy as we know it was nearly aborted in its infancy. Had Socrates been speared or ridden down by the enemy, today we would know almost nothing about him. The philosophical tradition would claim him only as an early and rather obscure cosmologist and natural philosopher in the tradition of Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Empedocles—or perhaps a budding Sophist. He wrote nothing. So his legacy was entirely dependent on the remembrances of others.

  There would have been no Platonic or Xenophonic Socrates. Plato’s own work—even if Plato would have gone on to write about philosophy without the tutelage and inspiration of Socrates—would be far different and probably exist as rather abstract utopian and technical theory with far less concern with everyday ethics or politics in general. A large percentage of Xenophon’s treatises would never have been written. The Clouds of Aristophanes, produced a year after Delium, not the Apology of Plato, would be the sole source of Socrates the man, a character not much different from the other rogues that inhabit the Athenian comic stage. A dead Socrates at Delium might mean today there would not be a book in any library or bookstore on Socrates. Plato himself might be as little known to the general reader as a Zeno or Epicurus.

  More important, Socrates’ death at seventy—why and how he was killed—had fundamental repercussions in the Western liberal tradition. Had he fallen to a spear thrust in the twilight of Delium and not been dragged away to be executed on the verdict of a jeering and ignorant mob, the image of the philosopher would be entirely changed today, the heritage of Athenian democracy far brighter, and the obvious association between Socrates, martyr and founder of Western thought, and Jesus, who died on the cross to establish Western reli
gion, not so apparent.

  But Socrates did not die at Delium. He instead fought courageously. Bolstered by that record of bravery, he withstood the attacks of Aristophanes. His proven courage helped him weather the assaults of radical demogogues, as he went on to teach Plato and Xenophon—before as an old man earning a martyr’s death at the hands of the very democracy he fought so hard to save a quarter century earlier on that terrible autumn afternoon.

  Beauty from the Dead

  Boeotia was a fertile region of nearly 1,000 square miles and home to about 250,000 residents, with a rich heritage that dated back to Mycenaean times. Yet it was a land mostly agricultural. There were neither great cosmopolitan cities, major seaports, rich gold and silver mines, nor tourist attractions, major Panhellenic festivals, or strategic trading centers. The intrigues of the ancient royal house of Thebes were grist for the mill of Athenian tragedy across the border, where playwrights felt at ease chronicling the tales of hereditary incest, fratricide, and parent-killing among their bitter enemies over the mountains.

  So tragedy was mostly an Athenian, not a Boeotian, event. The same was true of Hellenic literature in general—Hesiod, Pindar, Corinna, and Plutarch are notable exceptions—that was usually associated with Athens, Sicily, Ionia, and Corinth rather than with the agrarian states of the northern interior.

  The same generalization applies to Greek art and architecture. Although some remarkable treasures have been unearthed in Boeotia—decorative Mycenaean terra-cotta sarcophagi, Archaic miniature clay figurines of men and women at work, and marble statuary from the Hellenistic age—the best Greek vase painting, the most impressive temples, and the great bronze sculptures come from Athens, the Peloponnese, Ionia, Sicily, and southern Italy.

  In the ancient world, mastery of art usually required large cities. Only there could commerce and money provide artists with either patronage or sales, in addition to the knowledge of novel rival work. In contrast, in a society of farmers it is difficult for both artists and their audience to find either time or money. The isolation of the farm offers seclusion rather than the fellowship of cities. For all the protestations of the artist that he is a creature of independence and solitude, his stock and trade are people—viewers of his paintings, buyers of his pots, rivals for his trade, teachers and students of his craft, coteries of genuine admirers and flatterers alike. The great Theban general, patriot, and democrat Epaminondas once boasted to his Athenian enemies that should they continue to pry into Boeotian affairs, he might well storm their acropolis and carry off the Propylaea, the monumental entranceway to the Periclean temples, only to rebuild it on the Theban Cadmea—a provocative boast of Theban military power, but also an admission that there was nothing in Boeotia at all like the majestic buildings of the Athenian acropolis.

  Yet for a single day in November 424 B.C., a small plain near Delium was the greatest city in Boeotia, where some fifty thousand men crowded together in an area less than a mile wide, comprising a population twice the size of Thebes herself. The equipment of the respective combatants alone might have totaled eighteen tons of wood and metal. In the battle’s aftermath from those warriors came much death and spoil, and from death and spoil tragedy and money—and so from tragedy and money at last art!

  Greek armor was not cheap. The helmet, breastplate, and greaves were cast and worked from bronze, the sword, spear tip, and spear-butt forged from iron. The massive three-feet-in-diameter shield required careful fabrication of planks of cured oak along with a hammered and polished bronze veneer. Altogether the hoplite’s ensemble might weigh from sixty to seventy pounds and cost 100 to 300 drachmas—the equivalent of three months’ wages for a laborer.

  Seven thousand Athenian hoplites fought at Delium. Although only a thousand were killed on the battlefield, the majority of the rest fled in panic and must have jettisoned most of their armor to escape their Boeotian and Locrian pursuers. Perhaps at least 5,000 panoplies were lost, somewhere around 500,000 drachmas’ worth of bronze and iron—enough capital to put a thousand men to work every day for nearly a year and a half, or to pay the staging costs of two hundred lavish Greek tragedies. In addition, most Greeks took money for food and expenses with them to battle, so there may well have been even more loot among the detritus of Delium. What the ultimate tally of captured treasure was is not recorded, but it must have been a vast sum.

  In any case, nearly four hundred years after the battle the historian Diodorus remarked of the radical effects that the windfall of captured booty had upon the city of Thebes, in a passage that emphasizes the often forgotten relationship between military lucre and the creation of art:

  From the proceeds of booty, the Thebans not only built the great stoa in their marketplace, but also adorned it with bronze statues. In addition, they also covered with bronze the temples and the colonnades of their marketplace by nailing up the armor from the spoils of the battle. And finally, they instituted the festival called the “Delia” from money they acquired from the spoils.

  This money from the sale of the captured armor and any other loot found on the bodies also found its way into other avenues of artistic expression in Boeotia. Some of the most beautiful of all Boeotian art consists of larger-than-life painted and incised grave steles, with figures of the last moments of hoplites etched into black limestone. Interestingly enough, at least two of the inscribed names of the fallen heroes on these six extant sculptures—Saugenes and Koironos—also appear on a stone casualty list uncovered from the Boeotian town of Tanagra, in the neighborhood of Delium, where some of the steles themselves were unearthed. Since the left wing of the Boeotian battle line—made up of hoplites from the hamlets of Thespiae, Tanagra, and Orchomenos—suffered the majority of the casualties from the battle, it is likely that an entire series of grave sculptures was commissioned to commemorate the ghastly losses that these small communities suffered at Delium.

  The annihilation of the left wing at Delium, and the enormous amount of booty captured from the battle, together account for the creation of these extraordinarily beautiful and moving sculptures. The trove perhaps suggests that some unknown gifted artist was hired by these otherwise rural and poor communities to craft a series of commemoratives on premium black limestone for their fallen townsmen. In fact, some scholars believe the painter and sculptor was the famous Pythagorean innovator Aristeides of Thebes.

  In the Saugenes stele, the Tanagran warrior steps forward to fight with short sword and shield. His broken spear rests at his feet, along with several stones that have apparently been hurled at him. The ground is uneven and hilly—as we know was true of the Delium battlefield. The scene most likely accurately captures the desperate last moments of the Theban left, where the overwhelmed hoplites must have had their spears shattered and were forced to turn to their secondary swords. In an artistic sense, Saugenes himself is not merely sculpted to a near-perfect human proportion, but the entire scene displays a mastery of perspective, as the artist is able to make the hoplite’s shield appear concave rather than merely round, and to capture trees in the distance. On the right border of the stele an enemy spear point intrudes, aimed right at the face of Saugenes, leaving no doubt that we are witnessing the last seconds of the doomed defenseless warrior. At the top of the sculpture are scenes from a banquet scene—the first example of Greek funerary sculpture to equate death with dining—emphasizing the Pythagorean idea that the departed are treated to perpetual feasting in the hereafter.

  The steles represent the high point of classical Boeotian sculpture and match the excellence of any inscribed figures in Greece. What prompted Aristeides, if indeed he was the artist, so lavishly to sculpt these otherwise nondescript rural warriors must have been both the fame of their sacrifice—and the money—that accrued after sale of the Athenian loot. These black limestone incised warrior steles—their polychrome painted finishes have mostly faded—seem to appear out of nowhere, suggesting that Delium was an important day in the artistic history of this rural province. As in the cas
e of the great paintings that followed the Christian celebration of the victory over the Ottomans at Lepanto (1571), a magnificent victory and the accompanying spoils of battle can be the catalysts of artistic genius.

  The Birth of Tactics

  All societies war with each other. Since the birth of civilization in the Near East during the fourth millennium B.C., with the advent of large settled populations and agricultural surpluses, states steadily enhanced their ability to field vast armies that sought to annihilate their adversaries in set battles. The early Hittite and Egyptian clash at Kadesh in Syria (1283 B.C.), for example, purportedly involved thousands of mounted troops, infantry, and chariot forces. Civilized war could not only evolve on a monumental scale, but also become so frequent as to resemble an annual event. During the first centuries of the Greek city-state (700–500 B.C.), small rural communities frequently faced off against the militias of neighboring states in near ritualistic duels between phalanxes of heavily armed hoplite infantrymen.

  Yet until the fifth century B.C., ancient armies usually collided together in rather simple fashion. Both forces lined up, charged on signal, and then jabbed and pushed until one side collapsed. Victory went to the army with the largest number of brave, well-armed combatants. While ruse and ambush were common among light-armed skirmishers and guerrilla fighters during raids, plundering expeditions, and nighttime attacks, sophisticated feints and deception on any large scale were rare in set infantry battles. Usually the major face-offs in the early Greek-speaking world followed mutually recognized conventions and were fought during the day and on level ground. In some ways, pitched battle was seen more as an intramural contest of nerve and muscle between like states than a military operation hinging on generalship, tactics, or training aimed at annihilating foreign enemies.