A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Too many of the Spartans had also forgotten that during the invasion of Xerxes of 480, well before the construction of the Long Walls, Athens under Themistocles had survived not only the complete evacuation of its farmland but even the very abandonment of its city as well. Of this fact Pericles would later remind his far wealthier and larger citizenry. If a weaker Athens in 480 could have overcome 250,000 Persians arriving by land and sea, and endured the torching of its Acropolis, surely a half century later, with far greater assets, Athens in its maturity could once more survive the temporary loss of its farmland to a force one-quarter the size of that of its old enemies.43

  At the eleventh hour, even Archidamus finally seemed to grasp the dilemma of fighting the new war the old way. On the eve of invasion, he warned his followers in vain that Athens had ample “public and private wealth, ships, cavalry, weaponry,” as well as allies, tribute, and a vast population. It could be opposed only when there were sufficient Peloponnesian “money and ships.” Athens’ hinterland was no larger than Sparta’s. But the key difference was that, unlike the Peloponnesians, Athens had plenty of ways to augment its impressive local harvests with food imported from as far away as the Aegean Islands, Asia Minor, the Black Sea region, and Egypt.44

  The Logic of Athens

  The Long Walls, built between 461 and 456, and connecting the city to the Piraeus, were the most revolutionary development in the history of Greek strategy. At a single stroke the fortifications provided immunity from the age-old tactic of attacking agriculture to prompt pitched battle or induce starvation through the burning of a dry grain crop. With the Long Walls, Pericles had vastly expanded on Themistocles’ earlier achievement. He grasped that with the proper fortified lifeline, only the countryside, not the city proper, needed to be evacuated before the onslaught of a superior enemy. This was a brilliant twist perhaps, but also utterly ruthless and divisive in abandoning the property and livelihood of thousands of his citizens to the enemy.

  Athens understood that its ramparts not only offered the city a greater range of defensive options but also had the effect of strengthening democratic constituencies inside the walls. Thus, it later began promoting the concept of long walls at other Greek states such as Argos and Patras.45 The deleterious consequences were not confined to conservative Athenian rustics, who were left outside the municipal walls. Sparta and her allies also later complained that the construction of such extensive fortifications had changed the very strategic calculus of Greece itself, giving one state an unfair immunity from traditional pitched battle, and thus should have never been allowed to happen. No wonder they hired flute players to mark their destruction at the war’s end.46

  Athenian silver “owls” were the common currency of the Aegean world.* At the beginning of the war, Athens garnered 600 talents of annual tribute, in addition to perhaps some 400 talents of internal income generated through mining, trade, overseas rent, and commerce. By 431 there were some 6,000 talents in reserve in the temple treasuries on the Acropolis. That pile was the equivalent of 36 million man-days of labor, or over 100 drachmas per person among the 300,000 residents in Athens and Attica, enough wherewithal, in theory, to build 6,000 triremes!47 In today’s purchasing power, the treasury would be similar to a medium-sized American city of about 300,000 people possessing an endowment of some $3 billion in cash reserves. In this regard, tragedy, comedy, and the Parthenon were not so much expressions of native genius as reflections of lots of money.

  After the Persians withdrew in 479, a Hellenic defense league insidiously, over a half century, transmogrified into an Athenian empire of nearly two hundred states run by seven hundred imperial officials. Due to fifty years of naval construction, tribute, and the integration of subject states, Athens was far more powerful at the outbreak of the war than at any time in its history. To maintain such an empire, in the fifth century Athens had fought three out of every four years, a remarkable record of constant mobilization, unrivaled even in modern times.48

  The population of Athens grew at over 2 percent per annum for most of the decades preceding the Peloponnesian War. And Athens, unlike Sparta, crafted a more inclusive society, whose critics complained that to the naked eye slaves, metics, and citizens were nearly indistinguishable in such a crass culture—in opposition to the more utopian efforts at Sparta to create a republic of virtue among a smaller and more static number of citizens.49

  Athenian infantry, nearly 30,000 of both frontline and reserve garrison hoplites, was at its core probably as good a fighting army as any except for the Spartans and Boeotians. Yet like the Victorian British army, which was hardly designed to fight imperial German divisions in the trenches of Europe, the Athenian phalanx was never intended to face anything like Spartan hoplites, but was perfectly capable as a seaborne force for putting down recalcitrant tributary allies. In addition, there were reserves of imperial manpower far from Attica that were safe from Spartan ground intrusions—what King Archidamus worried about as the “plenty of the other land” out of his army’s reach.50

  True, the states of the Peloponnese could marshal a large alliance of autonomous Greek militaries, among them real powers like Corinth, Elis, and Thebes. Yet the Athenians retained two real advantages in such coalition warfare. First, Athens had the more ideologically zealous friends. It led not only democratic subjects in the Aegean but also outcasts like the Plataeans in Boeotia, the Messenian expatriates scattered around Greece, and the quarrelsome Corcyraeans, all of whom had real enemies in Thebes, Sparta, and Corinth quite apart from their alliance with Athens.

  Second, Athens was a true hegemon, not, like Sparta, the premier state in a coalition of the willing. Thus the Athenians could craft strategy in a unilateral fashion impossible among the Peloponnesians. Another of the ironies of the war was that oligarchic Sparta was far more democratic in its attitudes toward its coalition members than was democratic Athens in relation to its own imperial subjects and allies.51

  In the eleventh hour before the fighting, Pericles outlined to the Athenian assembly a conservative strategy of attrition. He called for a plan “to overcome” or, better yet, “to survive,” counting on the inability of the enemy to kill or starve Athenians. To win, Sparta really needed a fleet. For all its grand talk about creating a vast armada of 500 ships, without foreign money and long training it had little chance of matching the Athenian navy for at least a decade. Instead, faced with unsustainable expenditures of marshaling a huge army to invade Athens, the Spartan oligarchy would soon appreciate the futility of the war. This plan of exhaustion—the enemy would tire itself out without getting inside the Long Walls of Athens or disrupting its empire—counted on time and patience insidiously to do their work.52

  If Athens’ immediate strategy did nothing to prevent a war, its ultimate logic might at least achieve a stalemate that, in turn, would be defined as victory: (1) evacuate the rural population and infantrymen inside the walls for a month or so during the annual Spartan invasions; (2) keep morale high, mitigate losses, and defend the countryside through cavalry patrols and rural garrisons; (3) launch naval patrols in the Aegean to guarantee that the subject states were timely in their dues and grain ships protected; (4) send out triremes with marines to harass and blockade the Peloponnesians far to the rear of their expeditionary army, while besieging rebellious subjects; (5) look to occasional opportunities in nearby Megara or Boeotia to pick off allies friendly to Sparta by either fomenting democratic revolution or even invading places where Spartans could not or would not easily deploy; (6) at all costs, avoid both expensive expeditions abroad and pitched battles against the Spartan phalanx.

  Do all that, Pericles implied, and the city’s message of Greek equality and the prosperity of an Athenian Aegean might find greater resonance. If one were poor, it might be preferable to be a subject of a democratic Athenian empire than a nonvoting citizen of an autonomous agrarian oligarchy. The trick was to back such idealism with action, since what states would like to do and what they could were two e
ntirely different propositions, always predicated on whether a Spartan phalanx or Athenian trireme was closer at any given moment.53

  So confident was Pericles of a draw that he apparently envisioned a war of no more than three or four seasons of campaigning. By then Sparta, frustrated in Attica and furious over attacks on its sacred coastal plains, would sue for peace. Perhaps another war of attrition—like the First Peloponnesian War, which had lasted fifteen years (461–446)—would lead to another stalemate that, likewise, would allow another spurt of unimpeded growth of Athenian power.54

  Relating the War

  How, then, should one tell such a complex story? The contemporary historian Thucydides, who sought to provide a military and political framework for the war, chose to narrate events in the annalistic tradition. He recorded the fighting year by year from 431 to 411. But at that point his incomplete history breaks off nearly in midsentence. The last seven and a half years are continued by his successor Xenophon, down to the end of the hostilities in 404–403.

  Thucydides is a brilliant narrator. Yet, again, he is not easy to follow in Greek or English. Nor, speeches aside, is he always lively. His greatest moments are when he turns to graphic descriptions of representative horror: the ordeal at Corcyra, the blockade of Plataea, the battle of Mantinea, and the killing spree at Mycalessus. Most of the really gifted modern narrative historians of the Peloponnesian War of the nineteenth century—Julius Beloch, Hermann Bengtson, Georg Busolt, George Grote, and Donald Kagan—have followed Thucydides’ notion of a war told by campaigning seasons. They relate events of the Peloponnesian War in roughly the same chronological order as the great historian narrated them. It is the most logical method for traditional history, but it also presents problems because the Peloponnesian War was fought not merely between Athens and Sparta but rather by a host of other powers as well—Corinth, Thebes, Argos, Syracuse, and Persia—which sometimes conducted operations on their own without coordination with either of the chief belligerents.

  But even within his rather neat annual presentation of the events, Thucydides himself sometimes swings widely back and forth from fighting on mainland Greece and in the Aegean to Sicily and Asia Minor, a sentence noting an Argive expedition here, suddenly a paragraph devoted to Sicilian civil strife there. He seldom makes tactical or strategic connections between nearly simultaneous operations. It is not because he is ignorant of the main plot of the war but, rather, because there often was none: Spartans, Athenians, Sicilians, Argives, Corinthians, and others fought in a series of often disjointed and confusing battles, and then seemingly did not fight much at all for months and even years on end. Local rival states, like Argos and Epidaurus, for example, might suddenly battle over disputed pastureland, yet often called such brief and confined struggles part of the larger ideological and ongoing war.

  There are other problems in a chronological presentation of events. Indeed, Thucydides’ contemporaries were not sure, as he apparently was, that there really was a distinct and continuous “Peloponnesian War” at all that started in 431 and ended with the defeat of Athens in 404. Some Greeks thought the war had begun in 433, when Corinth fought Corcyra at sea, or in March 431, when Plataea was attacked by the Thebans, rather than in May 431, when Spartan soldiers reached Attica. A few ancient historians, such as Theopompus and Cratippus, doubted that the war had even ended in 404 with Lysander’s destruction of the Long Walls. Instead, in their views perhaps it did not cease until Athens defeated the Spartan fleet at Cnidus (394) and thus at last the two belligerents put aside their century-long rivalry.

  In any case, here is a brief synopsis of the war, one providing a generally accepted outline of events that gives the reader a political and strategic context to the sometimes-confusing experience of battle that follows.55

  PHASE ONE: THE ARCHIDAMIAN WAR (431–421)

  Chapters: Fire, Disease, Terror, Armor, Walls

  431 Thebans attack Plataea (March)

  Spring evacuation of Attica and first Peloponnesian invasion (May)

  Athenian ships raid the Peloponnese (July)

  First Athenian invasion of Megara (September)

  430 Second invasion of Attica (May–June)

  Great plague breaks out at Athens (June)

  Besieged Potidaeans surrender city to Athens (winter)

  429 Peloponnesians arrive to besiege Plataea (May)

  Phormio’s Athenian fleet defeats the Peloponnesians in the Corinthian Gulf (summer)

  Athenian maritime raids against northwestern Greece (summer)

  Death of Pericles (September)

  428 Third invasion of Attica (May–June)

  250 Athenian ships deployed in the Aegean and in the west (summer)

  Athenians besiege Mytilene on Lesbos (June)

  427 Fourth invasion of Attica (May–June)

  Capitulation of Mytileneans and debate over their fate at

  Athens (July)

  Surrender of diehards at Plataea and destruction of the city (August)

  426 Return of plague at Athens (May–June)

  Demosthenes conducts campaigns in Aetolia and Amphilochia (June)

  First Athenian expedition to Sicily (winter)

  425 Athenian occupation of Pylos (May)

  Fifth and last annual Peloponnesian invasion of Attica (May–June)

  Spartan surrender on Sphacteria (August)

  Athenian raid on the Corinthia and battle of Solygia (September)

  424 Boeotians defeat Athenians at Delium (November)

  Brasidas captures Amphipolis (December)

  Athenians sail home from first expedition against Sicily (winter)

  423 Athens moves against Mende, Scione, and Torone (April)

  Walls of Thespiae razed by the Boeotians (summer)

  Brasidas active in northwestern Greece (summer)

  422 Cleon and Brasidas killed at Amphipolis (October)

  Peace negotiations between Athens and Sparta (winter)

  PHASE TWO: THE PEACE OF NICIAS (421–415)

  Chapters: Terror, Armor, Walls

  421 Athens evacuates Messenians from Pylos (winter)

  Boeotia, Corinth, and Argos discuss various alliances (summer)

  420 Alcibiades urges anti-Spartan alliance of Athens, Argos, and Mantinea (July)

  Elis bars Spartans from participation in the Olympic

  Games (summer)

  419 Alcibiades marches small force into the northern

  Peloponnese (summer)

  Argos and Epidaurus renew border war (summer)

  418 Victory of Sparta at Mantinea (August)

  Argos and Mantinea return to Spartan alliance (November)

  417 Civil strife at Argos and defeat of the democrats (winter)

  Athenian fleet active in northern Greece (summer)

  416 Athenian attack on Melos (May)

  Debate over sending an armada to Sicily (winter)

  PHASE THREE: THE SICILIAN WAR (415–413)

  Chapters: Horses, Ships

  415 Alcibiades, Nicias, and Lamachus set sail for Syracuse (June)

  Recall of Alcibiades, death of Lamachus, and stalemate on Sicily (September)

  414 Arrival of Gylippus with various Peloponnesian relief forces (August)

  Second Athenian armada under Demosthenes prepares to

  leave (winter)

  Spartans arrive at Decelea, on the Athenian plain (winter)

  413 Thracian mercenaries attack Mycalessus (spring)

  Defeat of Athenians on Epipolae and in the Great

  Harbor (July–September)

  Execution of Demosthenes and Nicias (September)

  PHASE FOUR: THE DECELEAN AND IONIAN WARS (413–404)

  Chapters: Ships, Climax

  412 Athenians construct a new fleet (spring)

  Persian and Spartan military alliance (summer)

  Revolts of Athenian allies in the Aegean (June–July)

  411 Oligarchic revolution at Athens (June)

  Spartan admiral Mindarus sends fl
eet into Aegean (September)

  Dramatic Athenian naval victory at Cynossema (September)

  410 Athenian naval victory at Cyzicus (March)

  Failure of oligarchic revolution and rehabilitation of

  Alcibiades (summer)

  Spartans garrison bases in Asia Minor (winter)

  408 Athenians seek to regain Byzantium (winter)

  407 Cyrus arrives as satrap of Asia Minor and gives greater aid to Sparta (spring)

  Alcibiades dismissed (spring)

  406 Spartan admiral Callicratidas defeats Athenians in the Aegean (June)

  Athenian victory at Arginusae followed by trial of victorious generals (August)

  Athens rejects Spartan offers of peace (August–September)

  405 Athenian defeat at Aegospotami and loss of fleet (September)

  Lysander prepares to sail to Athens (November)

  404 Ongoing naval blockade of Athens (winter)

  Lysander sails into the Piraeus and Athens surrenders (April)

  Ascension of the Thirty Tyrants (summer)

  * Corinth was angry at Athens for not backing its disputes with its former colony, Corcyra (the modern island of Corfu), and fearful that its own fleet would be no match for an envisioned Athenian-Corcyraean alliance. The key city-state of Megara was strategically located about halfway between Corinth and Athens on the main route from the Peloponnese, and subject to a trade embargo of sorts by Athens aimed at discouraging its pro-Spartan sympathies.