So a single bold win at Delium, as was the case after the Athenian triumph at the battle of Oinophyta in 457, might lead to the democratization of Boeotia and the cessation of its open support for Sparta and its near-constant raiding across the border. Brasidas and the Spartans who were operating to the north would be cut off, with hostile territory barring their return to the Peloponnese. In short, the Athenians thought that they might have a chance of knocking out Boeotia in a single blow in a manner they believed impossible with Sparta, whose territory was too distant and invincible by land and its army far too formidable. On the other side, the older Boeotians, like the tough Theban general Pagondas himself, remembered that for a decade before the war (457–447) Athens had turned Boeotia into a friendly democratic federation and once more had similar dangerous ideas. At any rate Alcibiades, whose father, Cleinias, had died during the Athenian defeat at Boeotian Coronea (447), realized that regime change in Boeotia was not an impossible proposition.
The Athenians, encouraged by the recent amazing success at Pylos and Sphacteria, had sought to subvert the government of Boeotia in ways that might have avoided a single pitched battle like Delium. The Athenian general Demosthenes had sailed from home three months earlier, intending to raise democratic insurrection through the southern Boeotian countryside by an unexpected amphibious landing. Then, aided by partisans, he was to march east toward Delium at about the same time that Hippocrates and his Athenian hoplites marched northward to the border. The outnumbered Boeotian army would thus scatter beneath the hammer and anvil. Then the surrounding countryside would rise up in open revolt, in an operation that would take the logic of the Pylos campaign to an even more audacious level. After all, two years earlier, in the summer of 426 Nicias had landed 2,000 Athenian hoplites at the Oropus, met up with an even larger army marching from Athens under the commanders Hipponicus and Eurymedon, and together they had won a skirmish against the Tanagrans and a few Thebans in a small prequel to Delium. Apparently, their subsequent braggadocio had convinced the Athenian board of generals that another, but much larger, combined land-and-sea armada could repeat the petite victory in Boeotia on a massive scale.3
Or so it was thought. But triumph was possible only if the superior infantry forces of the Boeotians would face two simultaneously advancing Athenian armies and an aroused countryside eager for more egalitarian government. Unfortunately, Demosthenes’ naval assault to the west at the Boeotian town of Siphae was timed too early. Once his insurrectionary plans were betrayed by local oligarchs to the Boeotian authorities, he was of little value in drawing off opposition from the Athenian land troops marching up from the south. Diodorus says that Demosthenes, hardly eager to face an aroused assembly back home, then sailed away “without accomplishing anything.”4
But it was even worse than that. Demosthenes’ failure had ensured that a ragtag Athenian army of reservists by themselves would meet in open battle what may have been the finest infantry force in Greece. After the battle of Plataea (479), all Greeks talked of the “Dorian spear” of the Spartans. But throughout the latter fifth and fourth centuries, it was the Theban farmers who proved “mightier in war”—fighting a series of ferocious battles at Delium, Nemea, Coronea, Haliartus, Tegyra, Leuctra, and Mantinea, where they either crushed their opponents or died trying. In 424, Thebes was relatively unscathed. Its meager contribution heretofore in the war was parasitic and opportunistic: attacking a neutral Plataea, raiding across the Attic border, and joining in the invasion of Attica when the Peloponnesians first arrived in the thousands. In contrast, in the first seven years of the war an exhausted Athens had lost thousands to the plague, emptied its treasury in the nearly constant deployment of over 200 ships, and had its sacred soil violated on five occasions.
Throughout the later fifth century there had rarely been pitched hoplite battles, mostly because of two rarely remarked on reasons: first, the Spartan reputation won fifty years earlier at Plataea against the Persians suggested that it was national suicide to engage such an army; second, the only other formidable land power, the Boeotians, were similarly oligarchic and friendly to Sparta. But at the close of the Peloponnesian War, when the Spartan empire quickly imploded and Boeotia turned more liberal and finally democratic, their shared hoplite monopoly ceased. Old ethnic and new political differences arose; and they subsequently fought each other with a vengeance on at least a half dozen occasions. Hoplite battle, then, returned to its preclassical frequency, albeit settling theater disputes rather than local wars over borders. A mere three years later (421) the Athenians accepted a peace offering from Sparta, on the ostensible grounds that they had been beaten at two battles, at Delium and Amphipolis, and had thus lost “the confidence in their strength.”5
The Promised Showdown
The long-hoped-for battle was at last fought in late 424. The Athenian phalanx crossed its border to end the northern front against the Boeotian confederation on a late November afternoon, precisely on the assurance that the Spartans were far away and the majority of poorer Boeotians themselves might welcome rather than oppose the invaders on the promise of democratic liberation from landed oligarchy.*
Between 40,000 and 50,000 warriors met at Delium. Besides the 7,000 hoplites in each army, thousands more without armor were present on the Athenian side, outnumbering even the 10,000 or more light-armed troops of the Boeotians. The formal engagement broke out when thousands of demoralized Athenians were caught unawares walking back home after the failed invasion of the general Hippocrates. Most of their Boeotian pursuers were also squabbling among themselves, with no real desire to risk pitched battle with an enemy already in retreat. But then a Boeotian veteran general in his sixties, Pagondas, persuaded his reluctant generals to press home the attack and strike first. They must attack, the old man shouted to his Boeotians, even should the retreating enemy escape into Attica.
Pagondas’ pursuing army pulled up out of sight on a knoll across from the Athenians’ right on the poorly demarcated Athenian-Boeotian border. Suddenly, without much warning, his spirited hoplites charged downhill. The Athenian general Hippocrates was haranguing his own troops and was caught in midsentence. The lateness of the hour, the rolling terrain, the autumn dust, and the surprise approach of the Boeotians made Delium a different kind of hoplite battle, in which from the very beginning nothing was quite what it first seemed.
Pagondas had arranged the phalanx by confederate villages, his Thebans on the honored right wing of the allied Boeotian line. The hilly terrain probably explains why until the last minute the Athenians had little idea that the enemy was so near, much less had occupied a superior position. Caught unawares, the Athenians had few choices. This time they were not burning up the fields of nearby Megara without enemies but were pitted against the fiercest hoplites in Greece, who sixty years later would tear apart the Spartan phalanx not far away at the battle of Leuctra (371). The alternatives for the surprised Athenians were to trot uphill into the Theban mass, to retreat, or to stay put and be bowled over. Two large gullies on each side of the battlefield cut off any real chance of an outflanking movement. In fact, the two armies scarcely fit into the plain of little more than eight hundred yards or so. The ravines on each side of the killing ground may explain why Pagondas could pull some of his men off the line and safely stack them twenty-five shields deep on the right flank, three times the normal eight-man depth of a phalanx.
For better or worse, Hippocrates and his elite Athenian right chose to charge bravely ahead uphill. The Athenians may have thought that the hills and ravines offered some advantages in limiting the use of the enemy’s horsemen. They probably could not see just how deep the Theban right wing had stacked and so had no idea of the peril to come on their left from the greater enemy weight. The battle that decided the entire northern front of the conflict appears to have lasted not more than a few minutes—giving some credence to the two-century-old agrarian idea that brief hoplite collisions could settle entire theater wars. At first, despite the uphill
run, the Athenian right wing broke through Pagondas’ weak confederates. From the very beginning it was a classic instance of each army seeking to win the battle on its strong right wing before its own weak left lost it.6
The allied villagers of Thespiae took the brunt of the Athenian right’s uphill assault. Thucydides called the gruesome fighting there “hand-to-hand,” which probably assumes spear jousting, pushing, swordplay, and finally brawling with shields, broken spear shafts, and even bare hands. Soon all 500 Thespians were at the point of obliteration. The allied contingents of another 2,000 hoplites on their immediate right had wisely, but less courageously, fled from the charging Athenians.
The collapse of most of the Boeotian left wing doomed the Thespians. They now would be cut off, detached from the main phalanx, encircled, and then butchered. The degree to which they slowed the Athenian juggernaut was their chief legacy of sacrifice, allowing their right wing under Pagondas time to finish off its own opponents without worry of being swarmed from the rear. Near the trapped Thespians, the other Boeotian allies of the left and center did not all escape. Some in vain tried to flee outright. Others fought. The more resolute hung on until their own right, across the way, scattered the Athenians and came up in support. Nearly all the 500 Boeotian dead infantrymen of the battle were either the surrounded Thespians or their disoriented and stampeding neighbors. The historian Diodorus says at this point the Athenian right wing “slew great numbers” of the enemy. Precisely what “great” means is unclear. But the cursory remark suggests that the fighting was ferocious if hundreds of soldiers protected by massive shields, breastplates, helmets, and greaves were nevertheless stabbed and hacked apart.
Killing a man in full bronze armor—breastplate, helmet, and greaves—was not an easy task, especially when all hoplites’ first concerns were to keep close to one another and to have their wooden shields locked in a near wall of defense. The playwright Sophocles once characterized Greek hoplite battle as the “storm of the spear.” That image suggests that heavily clad lumbering hoplites were jabbed repeatedly from all directions by a whirlwind of spear tips and hacked by swords in the limbs, groin, and neck—a very different type of warfare than that fought by unarmored men who might kill one another with a blow or two. In any case, compared to the lethality of the mace or the Roman sword, the spear did not easily penetrate armor, and was usually effective in killing a hoplite outright only when wielded with a downward stroke against the neck or groin, relatively small targets.
Too busy hammering the enemy Thespians to keep their bearings, the victorious Athenians on the right, at the cutting edge of the phalanx, soon began to circle completely around in the wrong direction. Then the confused Athenians stumbled head-on against their own troops shuffling up from the rear. There the general Hippocrates, a nephew of the dead Pericles, probably along with the philosopher Socrates, Alcibiades, and many of the elite of Athenian society, including Plato’s own stepfather, Pyrilampes, and Laches of a later eponymous Platonic dialogue, suddenly found themselves spearing other Athenians. Before these crazed hoplites could be pulled apart, dozens must have been impaled by their own brothers, fathers, or friends.
Thucydides drily notes of this chaos, “Some of the Athenians becoming confused because of the encirclement mistook and killed one another.”7 How such a self-inflicted calamity was possible in hand-to-hand fighting is difficult to imagine. Yet there are other instances in Greek literature of hoplites who became disoriented and attacked the wrong soldiers. Friendly-fire casualties in war are not just a phenomenon of the modern age of high-tech weapons and bombing from great altitudes but a result of the fear, panic, and confusion endemic to the fog of war of all ages. In the ancient world even sailors often grew confused and killed friends in ships of the same fleet. Triremes, like hoplite arms, were weapons uniformly adopted by friends and enemies alike, partly a reflection of a Panhellenic acceptance of the protocols of battle, partly testimony to the excellent form and function of such appurtenances themselves.
Next, something even more inexplicable transpired at Delium: at the climax of the battle, this victorious Athenian right wing abruptly disintegrated when it wrongly identified a few squadrons of Boeotian horsemen approaching over the hill as a fresh army. Men in bronze with spears and shields, arrayed in column, were usually able to withstand such wealthy aristocrats perched on stir-rupless small horses. But to the victorious and exhausted Athenians under Hippocrates, apparently the idea that cavalry would play a decisive role in phalanx battle was entirely unexpected. Even more unanticipated was the notion that such fresh troops on the horizon were still uncommitted and appeared seemingly out of nowhere. At last elated with the sense that the battle on their wing was won, the mercurial Athenians suddenly imagined that an entirely new army was upon them, replete with horsemen, and thus despaired. Again, rumor and panic were the prime forces in battle when thousands yelled, charged, and collided without clear sight and with impaired hearing. “Nobody,” Thucydides once wrote of battle, “knows much of anything that goes on except right around himself.”8
What was happening far to the right with Pagondas and his selected phalanx of Thebans? “Gradually at first,” Thucydides says, they “pushed” the Athenian left downhill, and cleared the battlefield through the advantage of favorable terrain and greater depth. Diodorus adds that their success was due to the superior physical strength of individual Theban hoplites—as if the agrarian lifestyle across the border had created stronger men than most found at more sophisticated Athens. But the momentum was just as likely due to numbers rather than bulging muscles—the force of 25 shields concentrated against 8, and the fact that the most experienced Boeotians were pitted against the less reliable of the Athenians. Greater mass (what the Greek historians called baros or plêthos) frequently decided battles in any case. The poor Athenian left disintegrated. Soon the entire army was “in panic”—the once victorious and savage right wing now running away from a mythical new army, the left wearied, beaten down, and fragmented by the pressure of the accumulated shields of Pagondas’ mass bearing down from higher ground.
Warring Against the Dead
All Athenians now fled to nearby Mount Parnes, the fortified sanctuary at Delium proper and the safety of Athenian ships, or for the woods in the Oropus along the border in Attica—the ancient equivalent of the disastrous Battle of First Bull Run, where thousands of the panicky defeated headed for the refuge of their own capital. In moments the ordered columns of a neat phalanx were shredded. Shields, helmets, greaves, and breastplates littered the hills; each man calibrated his survival on how quickly he could toss away his heavy equipment and outrun the victors. This was how the Peloponnesian War was supposed to be fought, brutally, quickly, and decisively. But for those unfortunate enough to be caught up in the whirl of spears, nothing quite matched the bloodletting of thousands crammed into a few thousand square yards of a killing field.
Some opportunistic Locrian horsemen, the perennial mounted scavengers of the classical battlefield, arrived for the spoils and joined the Boeotian predators in the open-ended killing spree that went on until darkness. Delium was the first battle in or on the border of Attica since Marathon (490), and it would prove as embarrassing as that earlier victory, paraded as the exemplar of native Attic courage and skill, had been glorious. The retreat was seared into the popular collective memory, the stuff of both Athenian contemporary history and later Platonic dialogues. The question “What did you do at Delium?” seems to have haunted men like the runaways Cleonymus, Laches, and Pyrilampes, and emboldened stalwarts such as Alcibiades and Socrates.
Soon the Boeotians learned that at least a few of the terrified Athenian fugitives had retreated to their seashore garrison at Delium. These holdouts not only continued in defeat to occupy Theban ground but were also ensconced on a Boeotian precinct sacred to Apollo. Why would the Athenians not give up and retreat in shame as the “rules” of hoplite battle usually dictated to the defeated? No doubt the five Peloponnesian
invasions of Attica, the 80,000 Athenians lost to the plague, the nearly constant deployment of 60,000 imperial oarsmen and endemic terrorism across Greece had long ago destroyed any notion that the Peloponnesian War would follow the niceties of agrarian warfare, where one side admitted defeat when its manhood was routed in open and decisive fashion.
The Boeotians themselves decided to hold the decomposing Athenian dead “hostage” until the sanctuary at Delium was clear of its garrison. The Athenian sacrilege of occupying a holy place in Boeotia was now to be answered with the greater crime of holding on to the enemy dead, and then letting them rot. After seventeen days in the open autumn air, most of the corpses were probably a putrid mess. The outrage for a people just recovering from the horrors of unburied corpses from the great pestilence probably prompted the playwright Euripides to produce his tragedy Suppliant Women the next year. He revived the myth of the “Seven Against Thebes,” who in legendary times had attacked Thebes, been killed, and then been left to decay. The play was to convey to an audience of veterans recent moral outrage in denying soldiers a proper burial. The barbarity of the Thebans, so the Athenians in the theater were reminded, remained constant over the centuries. Euripides soon found a new direction in his wartime tragedies—perhaps starting with the horrific bloodletting in his Medea (431)—that for nearly three decades would serve as moral commentary on the ongoing and increasingly barbaric war.
After almost three weeks, the Boeotians brought in more reinforcements from their allies and formally besieged the trapped Athenian refugees in Delium. They even crafted an enormous flamethrower of sorts, a hollowed-out beam through which they blasted a pressurized concoction of sulfur, coal, and pitch to send a jellied flame into the Athenian breastworks. Quickly the garrison went up in flames, men and all. The few terrified troops who survived the flames and the noxious fumes boarded ships to evacuate the sanctuary, leaving behind the cinders of 200 of their trapped fellow Athenians.
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 18