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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  In 404, for example, after the debacle of Aegospotami and the destruction of the Athenian fleet, which brought the war to a close, Lysander’s enormous 200-ship fleet scoured the Aegean, sending tens of thousands of expatriate Athenians back home to a city shut in by the continual presence of the Spartan king Agis at the nearby fort of Decelea and another army marching northward from the Peloponnese. Contemporary sources report fears of widespread famine and starvation at Athens at war’s end, but not another outbreak of the plague.

  A quarter century later, the lack of a similar outbreak among the hungry, cooped-up Athenians at war’s end might suggest either that there were enough plague survivors in the city with immunity to prevent an easy flare-up or that after years of evacuation the Athenians were more adept at accommodating sudden demands on housing, garbage removal, water, and sewage treatment. In any case, it was probably the vain hope of the victorious admiral Lysander that a cramped and besieged Athens in 404 might re-create the horrific nightmare of 430, which a quarter century earlier had proved to Spartan advantage.12

  The outbreak seems to have originated in Africa. Then the plague made its way northward from Ethiopia into Egypt and Libya. From there it settled into various parts of the Persian Empire before arriving at the Piraeus. Greece and the surrounding eastern Mediterranean were just days away by sea from the millions in Africa and Asia, and a natural nexus for tropical disease. Most plagues in Greek and Roman times arose in the south and usually broke out during the summer, presumably when microbial life best survived outdoors amid stagnant water, foul sewage, active insects, and rotting food. Still, the Athenians had never seen an epidemic of this magnitude, even though less virulent forms of similar maladies had apparently swept the Aegean Islands, especially Lemnos, in the immediately prior decades.

  The Infected

  Although Thucydides obviously drew on his own clinical experience, and recognized that the disease affected individuals in different ways, he sought to provide a generic description of the infection. Typically, the dreaded signs started with a violent heat in the head, the eyes quickly burning and turning red. Both the throat and tongue appeared bloody and became malodorous.

  After these initial symptoms, those infected soon began sneezing and became hoarse, maladies shortly accompanied by severe coughing. Once the stomach was affected, the sick began vomiting bile of all sorts. At the same time they experienced dry heaves and violent spasms. These convulsions sometimes immediately followed the initial symptoms, but on other occasions they became manifest only much later. In some patients the infection seemed to attack both the respiratory and intestinal tracts almost simultaneously, which explains in part the terror of a disease that could strike so comprehensively. In an age when vaccination has rid us of the worst infectious diseases of our past, it is hard to imagine a worse sort of malady, as if a modern patient experienced the flu, dysentery, measles, and pneumonia all at once.

  The ill appeared neither warm to the touch nor especially pale in appearance. Instead, the body was flush and livid, with an outbreak of small blisters and sores. The unfortunate afflicted soon felt so hot that they could not endure even the slightest touch of clothing or linens. Many often found it preferable to remain naked. In their last stages, the more aggrieved patients often wanted to throw themselves into cold water. Some jumped into cisterns in vain hopes of quenching a terrible thirst, a fact prompting some nineteenth-century scholars to wrongly identify the plague with rabies.

  Still, if most people believed that tainted water had caused the outbreak, in their death throes they felt no compunction about plunging into it for immediate relief. Whatever the actual etiology of the disease, common medicine of this time did not grasp the danger of passing microbes from person to person by contaminating common drinking water.

  Worse still, there was no respite through sleep. The victims were restless and suffered constant insomnia. Yet even at the apex of the affliction, most sufferers did not immediately perish; many endured until the seventh to ninth day, when they succumbed to fever and exhaustion. Even when the more hearty passed that point of crisis, many subsequently experienced both ulceration and watery diarrhea, which, for these survivors, ultimately resulted in exhaustion, dehydration, and death.

  For the remainder who held out even after the intestinal attacks, the infection descended into the extremities. Once there it sometimes rendered the genitals, fingertips, and toes deformed and useless. Others were left blind or with brain damage. Thucydides suggests that the deformed and maimed limped around Athens for decades after the initial outbreak of 430. They were perhaps still visible, like ghosts after the war, when he returned to finish his history after his twenty-year exile—prompting us also to wonder exactly how the historian himself struggled with the residual effects of his own bout with the malady while composing his work. Although the mortality rate stymied Athenian military operations for a decade, there is no real evidence of a similar toll on Athens’ war-making ability from so many weakened and maimed survivors.

  Careful nursing or simple neglect—it seemed not to matter much to the sick, since so many died anyway. In such a miserable climate, the first symptoms of the plague usually sent the afflicted into a profound depression. Only those who had survived the disease and acquired resistance showed any real pity for the suffering—because of both their trust in their newfound immunity and a shared empathy acquired from their own ordeal.

  We moderns must put the infection in even a wider context of suffering to comprehend fully the dire predicament of ancient Athens in 430. Most of us when sick with a fever go to bed, and feel pangs of real worry with the onset of secondary symptoms such as vomiting or diarrhea. Despite familial care, a doctor’s visit, patient caregivers, and plentiful medications, postillness fatigue can affect us for days or even weeks. But imagine such sickness in a time of war. While enemies at the gates were trying to kill the infected’s family, he clung to life in delirium. Medicine, clean water, toilets, bedding—all the appurtenances of modern convalescent care—were not available to ailing Athenians. To the terror of enemy soldiers, add the daily trauma from the deaths of children, siblings, and spouses, attributable to a disease of unknown cause, duration, cure, or prophylaxis. Amid such calamity, someone must provide food, tend the ill, take away the bodies, and keep the ramparts manned and the sorties sent out.

  In such a chaotic climate, had the Spartans themselves not feared infection during the second invasion of 430 and assaulted the walls, or had they returned the next year rather than gone to Plataea, they might well have taken the city, given the skeleton garrisons and the general despair at Athens. On the contrary, Spartan worries over manpower—especially the sense of how precious and few were the state’s hoplite class of elite, full-citizen infantrymen—made the army go home earlier and not return until its soldiers were sure the chance of catching the malady was over.13

  Even the half dead soon fell prostrate in the streets and fountains. Their last visions were the moldering remains of friends and family and the realization that they too would soon experience such a grisly fate. How could a city under siege dispose of thousands of corpses within its walls? Recent excavations of a proposed Athenian subway station near the ancient Kerameikos cemetery revealed one such mass grave and over a thousand tombs quite near the surface. In some cases dozens of skeletons were found thrown helter-skelter into large shafts, apparently without the normal care and usual offerings accorded the dead. The evidence of hasty group interment suggested to the excavators that the subway engineers had stumbled upon one of the many mass burials necessitated by the epidemic of 430, something apparently not repeated in the subsequent twenty-five-hundred-year history of the city.14

  A similar nightmare of mass burials on a far larger scale in the ancient world occurred during the bubonic plague at Constantinople a millennium later, during the reign of Justinian, in the sixth century A.D. There the cemeteries soon filled, causing rotting bodies to pile up in the streets and along the seash
ore. Even huge pits that were dug with the intention of holding 70,000 corpses soon overflowed, causing the dead to be thrown into towers on the walls.15

  At Athens, within days the responsible officials were unable to cart away, much less bury or burn, the mounting piles of corpses. Individuals lacked the resources to care for their fallen family members. Sometimes they stole fuel or entire pyres—or heaped their own lost ones onto the biers of others. Dissension broke out. Many of the longtime residents of the city blamed the newcomers from the countryside, whose numbers and rustic habits purportedly might explain the sudden onset of a novel pestilence. Such tension may well have simmered for decades, laying the foundation for political upheaval some twenty years later.16

  The scene of rotting corpses and bodies unburied throughout the city made an indelible impression on the Athenians. Just six years later, in the aftermath of the battle of Delium (424), the victorious Thebans allowed the Athenian dead from the battle to rot while haggling over concessions, an outrage that encouraged Euripides to condemn it a year later in his Suppliant Women (423). In similar fashion, the hysteria that swept the city after reports that the bodies of Athenian seamen were not picked up after the victory at Arginusae (406) prompted a trial of the triumphant generals. That suicidal act seems an inexplicable madness until one remembers that the Athenians never really recovered from the horrific images and memories ingrained in that most disastrous year of 430. And on Sicily, corpses were often left to decompose in the fields, the bones of the dead picked up only months later, when hostilities ceased.17

  Culture and Mass Death

  Why did Thucydides devote such a prominent place in a supposedly military history to discussion of the disease, careful to chart in detail the descent into barbarism on the part of the Athenians? Besides his own recovery from the malady, he had both wider historical and philosophical interests. First, as a product of the Athenian enlightenment of the mid-fifth century that sought to explain natural phenomena through scientific rather than religious or folk exegesis, Thucydides, the didactic historian, wanted to demonstrate to his readers his own faith in the rationalist method of identifying symptoms. Careful clinical observation might lead to a diagnosis of some previously known illness. Only that way could the rationalist in turn provide a prognosis for the patient. So he wished “to set out its symptoms by which it might be known should it ever break out once more.”18

  Thucydides often takes special pains to dismiss false knowledge, such as the preposterous idea that recovery for the lucky ensured their future immunity from all other illnesses. He also rejects a supernatural cause for the epidemic. And he ridicules those who sought to explain the outbreak by associating it with the old prophecy about a Dorian invasion. Again, overcrowding, not the gods, caused the disease. Human activity, not divine dispensation, was the culprit.

  Like his later famous descriptions of the civil war on Corcyra, the murder at Mycalessus of Boeotian schoolboys by Thracian mercenaries, and the final destruction of the Athenian army on Sicily, the Thucydidean discourse on the plague becomes a reminder of how close humans always are to savagery—and how precious is their salvation won through law, religion, science, and custom. This thin veneer of civilization is a universal constant, one immune to the arrogance of modernism that professes that technology has at last nullified the age-old pathologies of human nature. The historian’s skill at dissecting the etiology of the disease serves also as a reminder that his larger history is equally empirical and didactic, lacking the romance and folklore of Herodotus or the epic poets.

  The plague infected Athens with utter lawlessness, what Thucydides called anomia. Men, convinced that the end was near anyway, “showed a more careless daring.” When death hovered over all, most lost the old self-control and instead “turned themselves over to the pleasures of the moment.” They forgot fear of both law and the gods, Thucydides adds, because no one could determine whether righteous conduct provided a defense against the disease. But since a horrible death came indiscriminately and without warning, people lived for the day and thus often acted criminally in order to obtain some “pleasure” from life.19

  The plague reflected a theme found throughout the history: a horrific liberating effect is likewise brought on by the conundrum of wars, making men resort to things that they would otherwise never consider during their rational calculations in peace and tranquillity, when they have so much to lose. And because Athens was Greece’s intellectual center and entertained pretensions of singular humanity and a self-proclaimed elevated culture, the pandemonium that followed from the plague reminds us that civilization can be lost anywhere and at any time.

  Furthermore, because the outbreak occurred in the second year of the twenty-seven-year-long war, a threshold had been crossed: once the Athenians had been reduced to such straits, it was nearly impossible to recover their moral bearings in subsequent years. Criminality and savagery become accustomed, or rather institutionalized, behaviors, almost as if the Athenians, once freed from decades of civilizing influences, could not shake off the newfound habits of brutality. The death of Pericles during the epidemic is emblematic of the Athenian descent, the perishing of the last singular statesman who might have had the intellect and moral authority to steady the Athenians amid the savagery. To Thucydides, the wages of the plague are not just misery, death, and disability. They are the lawless precursors to more deliberate policies that follow in a variety of brutal Athenian actions taken against rebellious allies and neutral states.

  Thus, in a key passage Thucydides says the plague “first” introduced into the city a greater lawlessness. He suggests that many of the awful things that Athens did in the later years of the war were inculcated between 430 and 426, when the citizenry was in peril of being wiped out. If this analysis is true, then the disease also had a profound effect on the tactics and methods by which Athens conducted the Peloponnesian War—a fact perhaps lost on those military historians who underappreciate the cultural ripples of disease that were felt across the empire, from Mytilene to Melos.20

  The Most Deadly Enemy

  Nevertheless, Thucydides’ ultimate concerns remain military: the incredible losses to the plague almost immediately altered the tenuous balance of power and, with it, the entire course and strategy of the war. After another, though less virulent, return of the disease in 427–426, the historian flat out concludes, “Nothing did more damage to Athenian power than the plague”—a sweeping retrospective assessment that would seem to include battle defeats at Delium (424) and Mantinea, the disaster at Syracuse (413), the depredations from the permanent Spartan fort at Decelea (413–404), and a number of key Athenian setbacks at sea (411–404). While Thucydides states that there were two severe onsets of the disease, he also says, “At no time did it completely leave,” suggesting that for nearly four years Athenians were dying from the mysterious outbreak.21

  Still, one of the great mysteries of the war remains the precise effect of the plague on the war-making capability of Athens. Thucydides does not exaggerate the calamity that befell Athens, but it is not clear how the epidemic altered Athenian tactics, other than by diverting Spartan ravagers in 429 from the Attic hinterland to nearby Plataea and depleting Athenian manpower over the next few years. Yet if nothing else, the plague raises a number of what-ifs about what Athens might have done without the sudden loss of tens of thousands of its citizens.

  The historian follows his general summation of the epidemic’s ill effects with the explicit statement that 4,400 Athenian hoplite infantry “in the ranks” perished, and another “300 cavalrymen,” as well as “an indeterminable number” of the common people.22 What do these vast numbers tell us about the ultimate harm to the Athenians’ ability to wage war?

  At the outbreak of the fighting Athens probably had a male citizenry of somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000, about half of which in theory qualified for service as hoplite heavy infantrymen. These roughly 15,000 to 20,000 hoplites were augmented by noncitizen resident aliens;
they mostly served on garrison duty and could be pressed into the phalanx in emergencies. Thus the entire army was also broken down in terms of the frontline (13,000) and reserve (16,000) hoplites. If 4,400 hoplite fatalities “in the ranks” refers only to losses from the 13,000 citizens who were prepared to go into battle, then over a third of all such infantrymen were felled within four years—or a 34 percent loss among the best troops the city could muster. In relative terms, the plague turned out to be the Athenians’ ancient equivalent of a Somme or Stalingrad.

  In addition, the 300 lost horsemen meant that 30 percent of Athens’ precious 1,000–man cavalry was now also gone. There is no information on the effect of the disease upon horses stabled in the city or whether sorties could continue against Peloponnesian ravagers who had headed south, past the Athenian plain. The only defense against enemy patrols in Attica was the Athenian cavalry, which in a single year lost more horsemen than its aggregate casualties over three decades. Even nine years after the plague departed, the Athenians still found themselves critically short of cavalry in Sicily, at just the moment when mounted patrols were to become even more crucial back in Attica.

  Thucydides adds that the expeditionary force besieging the northern city of Potidaea likewise became infected. Even though the Athenians would eventually take the city, they lost 1,050 hoplites out of 4,000 in a mere 40 days (26 percent). The percentage of fatalities and the rapid six-week spread of the infection at Potidaea were eerily similar to the effects of the disease at Athens proper.

  Whatever the causative organism, the epidemic was an especially lethal one to have resulted in such high rates of mortality among healthy adult men. Infected Athenians probably died in greater proportions of the population than did residents of medieval London during the worst years of the Black Death. Sickness always has a certain affinity for war, a time when food is short, stress is widespread, and soldiers—like Hagnon’s Athenian besiegers at Potidaea (432–430)—are forced to bivouac in outdoors tents and barracks. Some of the great plagues of the ancient world—the Antonine epidemic that killed as many as one-third of the population in certain places in Greece, Italy, Asia Minor, and imperial Egypt, as well as others during the reigns of the emperors Decius (A.D. 249–251) and Gallus (A.D. 251–253)—started first in military camps and before they had finished nearly ruined Roman armies.