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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The Peloponnesian War, a supposed fight between the Athenian fleet and the Spartan hoplites, began with the siege of Plataea and ended almost three decades later with the blockade of Athens. In fact, even the precursors to this war involved sieges. The Corcyraeans surrounded the northwestern Greek city of Epidamnus, and the Athenians struck at Potidaea, as such naval powers sought to guarantee that subservient and tributary port cities stayed in line.

  Attacking cities was not new in Greek warfare. It was as old as Troy and the mythical assault on Thebes by the seven Panhellenic heroes. Sieges were how the Athenian maritime empire was acquired and held at places as distant as Eion, Sestos, and Samos. Yet the growing frequency of such long-term, elaborate blockades was also a result of the rising wealth of fifth-century Greece, which could afford such costly investments.4

  Depending on how one defines a proper “siege”—whether a surrounded rural garrison is to be accorded the same status as an entire beleaguered municipality—there were probably at least twenty-one of them during the war, or almost one for every year of formal hostilities. Some were elaborate efforts against large cities like Potidaea, in northern Greece (431–429), or Syracuse (415–413), in Sicily, perhaps the largest state of the Greek-speaking world. Others involved smaller towns such as Plataea (431–427) and Melos (415). Sometimes sieges were little more than armies cutting off garrisons behind ad hoc fortifications, such as the Spartan attack on Oenoë (431) or the Theban assault on the sanctuary at Delium (424), both of which were full of soldiers rather than civilians.

  The ubiquity of sieges cannot be appreciated by their mere numbers, but perhaps is far better indicated by the aggregate years invested by the combatants in besieging strongholds. For example, four years were spent at Plataea, three at Syracuse, two at Potidaea, and two at Scione. Most likely some citystate was under assault somewhere during almost every month of the Peloponnesian War, from Sicily in the west to Asia Minor far to the east, from northward regions of Byzantium to the southern Aegean. While her enemies were busy in the on-again, off-again operations against nearby Plataea, Athens was conducting far more extensive sieges at Potidaea and then Mytilene. With many more sieges than hoplite battles—twenty-one sieges versus two major hoplite battles—the practice of Greek warfare had changed almost overnight.

  During some years of the war, numerous Greek cities and garrisons were under simultaneous assault. Between 424 and 423, the Athenians were blockading Megarian Nisaea, while up north they undertook a series of concurrent attacks on Torone, Mende, and Scione, even as the Boeotians were besieging the Athenian garrison at Delium and the Spartans stormed a fortress at Lecythus. In terms of overall battle casualties, while exact figures are few, during the war far more Greeks perished either at sea or attacking and defending cities than in infantry battle. Between 416 and 413, for example, the Athenians and their allies annihilated many of the male residents of Melos and Mycalessus, even as they lost nearly 45,000—many of them considered the best of the Athenian empire—in a vain effort to storm Syracuse. In fact, the greatest disasters in the history of the Athenian empire were due to the two colossal failures at Memphis, Egypt, before the war (454) and on Sicily, both failed sieges that may have together cost over 90,000 Athenian imperial soldiers. Add in the plague, and in a mere forty years the empire lost nearly 200,000 of its resident population as a direct result of warring apart from the traditional battlefield.

  Some general trends during the war emerged from all of these bitterly contested assaults. First, most sieges were conducted by the Athenians. Although there were a few cases beside Oenoë and Plataea where the Spartans and their allies attacked smaller city-states and garrisons (more often at near the end of the war at Lecythus, Iasos, Naupaktos, and Cedreae), they very rarely tried to take major cities through formal assault. Something on the scale of the Athenian blockade of the port cities of Potidaea, Mytilene, Melos, or Syracuse was beyond the Spartans’ expertise and resources, until they built a fleet with Persian money.5 Yet at the very outbreak of the war, despite being completely incapable of conducting a siege against the walls of Athens or even a small rural Attic garrison at Oenoë, the Spartans showed some imagination at Plataea in fabricating a mound and some primitive rams and engines, before achieving capitulation by eventually starving the defenders out. So there is a better reason to explain why siegecraft during the Peloponnesian War was mostly an Athenian enterprise, and it involves the asymmetrical nature of the struggle itself.

  For most of the war until its last decade, Sparta and its allies did not possess enough ships to patrol in force the Greek coast, much less the Aegean. Its ability to project power beyond the normal land routes was limited in comparison with that of Athens, which, in contrast, brought besiegers by sea to assault distant Potidaea, Mytilene, Minoa, Mende, Scione, Amphipolis, Melos, Syracuse, Chalcedon, and Byzantium, cities from Sicily to the Black Sea that were over a thousand miles apart.

  Athens had displayed expertise in fortification with its vast circuit of walls surrounding its own city. Sparta, in contrast, had no ramparts; its port at Gythium was some thirty miles distant. A people that knows how to build battlements at home can better build or storm them abroad. Much of the Athenians’ policy of walling besieged cities off from the sea was the reverse policy of their own construction of the Long Walls to the Piraeus, and so they were intimate with both the procedure and the psychological implications of having a fortified port.

  The siege of Plataea was singular not merely because of its length and bizarre tactics but because there was nothing quite like it again, given that there were very few well-fortified inland city-states in southern or central Greece that were not already allies of the Spartans and Thebans. The great prizes in the Greek world—Syracuse, Athens, Corinth, Corcyra, Argos, Byzantium, Samos, and Mytilene—were either on the coast or connected to it by long walls. No state could attempt their capture without a large fleet that ensured naval superiority.

  Unlike Sparta, in almost every case where siegecraft was called for, Athens assaulted its own rebellious tributary subject states, such as Potidaea and Mytilene. On rarer occasions, it sought to coerce neutrals, such as Melos or Syracuse, into the empire. Athens almost never conducted a large land invasion of Spartan, Corinthian, or Theban territory to carry on lengthy siege operations against an interior enemy city—impossible operations all, cases where its supply lines were untenable and its vast fleet of no use.

  As the Athenians put it to the Melians in their famous dialogue in the fifth book of Thucydides’ history, their chief worry was not really Sparta and its allies. Rather, the problem was Athens’ own “subject peoples who might perhaps attack and defeat those who rule them.” They further reminded the doomed Melians that it was precisely out of that fear of continuous revolts across the Aegean that they had sailed into Melos to set an example to any others entertaining such dangerous ideas of opposition to the “masters of the sea.” In that context, by needs they had mastered the arts of siegecraft and boasted, “Never on a single occasion have the Athenians ever withdrawn from a siege due to the fear of any enemies,” a brag that the ironic Thucydides was sure to emphasize on the eve of the disastrous failed siege in Sicily.6

  Sieges—whether Sparta’s successful attack on Plataea or Athens’ ruination of Melos—were often not explicable in a traditional strategic calculus of cost versus benefits. After all, what did the possession of Plataea do for the Spartan cause? How was Athens made more secure, wealthier, or stronger by taking Melos? The rent from the farms of the Athenian colonists who settled in the surrounding countryside after the city fell could hardly have paid the cost of the long siege. Nor would the sale of captives into slavery recover the expenses of the besiegers. Instead, the efforts to storm recalcitrant cities seemed to confer enormous psychological implications on the reputation and competence of the two powers. Letting Plataea defiantly stand apart from Thebes or Mytilene boast of its independence was seen as a contagion that could weaken the entire system of
alliances that had grown up after the Persian Wars.

  As the war continued, a popular Athenian strategy was to preempt problem subjects. After the costly fiasco at Potidaea—by the outbreak of the conflict the siege there was well on the way to costing the Athenian besiegers nearly 2,000 talents (something like $1 billion in contemporary American purchasing power)—the Athenian fleet learned to use the iron hand quickly lest it get bogged down in expensive sieges. The most efficacious way, in other words, to conduct a siege may have been to tear down the walls of a neutral or friendly city in advance, on mere rumors that insurrection was brewing. In the case of the Potidaeans, the Athenians had asked them to pull down their fortifications rather than doing it themselves—and as a result became mired in the most expensive siege in classical Greek history.

  In contrast, during the winter of 425 the Athenians made sure that they would have no more insurrections like that on Potidaea or Mytilene. Thus, the fleet sailed into nearby Chios and forced the islanders to dismantle their newly constructed walls on promises of no reprisals—a tough strategy that seemed to have precluded most trouble there for nearly two decades. The Thebans practiced the same preemption after the battle of Delium. Given the horrendous casualties taken by small Thespiae in the Boeotian victory over the Athenians, Thebans marched into the suspicious allied city and razed its fortifications merely on rumors of pro-Athenian sympathies. The last thing the Thebans needed was another expensive siege of a nearby neutral in the manner of recalcitrant Plataea, and so it was better to tear down the walls before the Thespians knew what hit them.7

  The Holocausts

  Assaulting cities is the oldest, and often the most brutal, expression of warfare. The earliest Western literature begins with the biblical siege of Jericho and the Achaeans’ attack on Troy. The most moving passages in Thucydides’ entire history of the war—the Plataeans’ pleas for mercy, the debate between Cleon and Diodotus over the fate of the Mytileneans, the Melian Dialogue, the butchery of the boys at Mycalessus, and the great siege at Syracuse—revolve around the assault on communities of men, women, and children when war came to the very doorstep of the Greek family. Indeed, Mycalessus proved horrific precisely because the Thracian mercenaries sought no real military objective other than the psychological terror of slaughtering children at school—the ancient version of the Chechnyan terrorist assault on the Russian school in Belsan during early September 2004, which shocked the modern world and confirmed Thucydides’ prognosis that his history really was a possession for all time, inasmuch as human nature, as he saw, has remained constant across time and space.

  There is something surrealistic about storming a city. Sieges are final, ultimate verdicts about not merely the fate of soldiers but of a very people. Nothing is more chilling, for example, than the final hours of Constantinople—10,000 people huddled under the dome of St. Sophia, praying in vain for the angel of deliverance on the early afternoon of May, 29, 1453, as the sultan’s shock troops burst in to end for good the thousand-year culture of Byzantium. In sieges, women and old men fight from the walls. Ad hoc genius is manifested in countermeasures—history’s array of missiles, flame, cranes, and flying roof tiles—as the fate of thousands sometimes depends solely on their own collective intelligence and resolve. In the age of bombers, whose aerial weapons can make walls superfluous, sieges might seem a thing of the past, until one recalls that Leningrad and Stalingrad were two of the greatest and most costly sieges of the ages.

  Sieges also reflect a breakdown in the ability of soldiers to conduct war or, rather, a failure of one side to offer resistance in the field and thereby to keep the killing far distant from civilians and their homes. True, there are so-called statutes of war; at least there were in the quieter times before the escalating violence of the Peloponnesian War. The “laws of the Greeks,” for example, assumed that upon the arrival of the enemy, besieged civilians in the ancient world would usually be offered free passage out of their city, with the acknowledgment that they must leave behind their property, their homes, and indeed their very existences. Upon their refusal to submit, all bets were off, as if it suddenly became a moral act to kill adult males and enslave their womenfolk because they either were not willing at the outset to give up or in the end could not protect all that they had held dear.

  What was the moral calculus in the mind of the defenders? They had only four options once the enemy ringed their city: surrender, resistance from the walls, counterattack with sorties, or escape. The Plataeans adopted all four strategies at different times as their strength waxed and waned. During the initial Theban attack, the Plataeans rushed out and killed the intruders. Then they refused terms for some four years. Half of the garrison broke out at night and escaped. The rest finally capitulated and were either executed or enslaved.

  What, then, was the degree of culpability of civilians inside the walls for their own fates? If they did not actively fight on the ramparts, were they therefore considered noncombatants, and thus to be spared after capitulation or simply executed by their peers as traitors as long as the walls held firm? Was there a moral difference between supplying food for the defenders and actually fighting from the parapets? Was it treason to offer no resistance, and did such noninvolvement mean anything anyway once enemy soldiers poured into the streets? Being besieged often had an ostensible effect of unifying the population for better or for worse; since the victor might well apply collective punishment to the defeated, most inside the walls grasped that he must be resisted at all costs. For all the bickering at Athens, both Pericles and his successors were able to keep the population together as they watched ravagers from the walls, battled plague, and put up with overcrowding.

  The ethical questions do not end there. Was a defending army morally culpable should it retreat back to its civilian base, as if deliberately to draw non-combatants into a war that it could not win on the field of battle? Or was it wise to shepherd soldiers inside ramparts rather than have them perish against overwhelming odds on the battlefield and so leave their cities defenseless, when instead they might otherwise have crafted a viable defense from the walls?

  The Greeks were aware of all these contradictions and ambiguities, and assumed that there was rarely political unity even before they arrived at a city, and even less once the enemy’s counterwalls rose and the pressure of hunger and disease raised tensions. Well before the Peloponnesian War armies had starved out towns and enslaved their citizens. Cities throughout the Greek world—Carystos (474), on the island of Euboea; Naxos (470), out in the Aegean; Mycenae (468), in the Argolid; the Aegean island of Thasos (465); the Boeotian town of Chaeronea (447); and Samos (440), off the coast of Ionia—that chose to resist the besiegers usually had their populations sold into slavery upon capitulation. On the very eve of the war the Corcyraeans had stormed Epidamnus, sold some of the population, and kept others as hostages—but had not executed the citizenry.8

  A Harvest of Slaves

  Lining up and murdering the surrendered adult Greek male population was still rare before the Peloponnesian War, and such slaughter became habitual only after the siege of Plataea. Then a discernible pattern emerged: free exit without one’s property was offered to the besieged before the fighting started. After that window of choice closed, it was assumed that all guarantees were off, and death and enslavement loomed respectively for captured men and women. The fate of the vanquished, in short, belonged entirely to the victors—or as the dry, empirical Aristotle put it, “The law is a sort of pact under which the things conquered in war are said to belong to their conquerors.” The playwright Euripides, who reflected contemporary events in the reworking of myths and produced his Hecuba in 425—two years after the brutal Athenian putdown of Mytilene—has Hecuba relate to the assembled Athenian audience the wretched fate of the defeated Trojan royal house: Hecuba enslaved, her daughter Polyxena sacrificed, Cassandra carried off as booty, Polydorus murdered, all following the death in battle of her sons Hector and Paris, and the execution of her hu
sband, Priam.

  “Look at me and examine carefully the evils I endure,” Hecuba laments of her city’s capture and her own enslavement. “I was once a ruler, but now am your slave. Once I had good sons, now I am old and childless. I am cityless, alone, the most wretched of mortals.” Those in the audience who heard that were thinking of the poor Greeks of their own times, not mythical Trojans.9

  Late in the war, as the tide of the conflict turned in their favor, Spartan generals sometimes announced that Peloponnesians did not believe in enslaving other Greeks. Yet such professed magnanimity was rarely intended to include Athenians. When Sparta sometimes released the vanquished allies of Athens, it was primarily for propaganda purposes and balanced against the singling out of Athenians for the special punishment of enslavement or death.10

  Because ancient slavery was not based on the pseudoscience of genetic inferiority, all Greeks, like the royal Trojans Hecuba, Cassandra, and Andromache of myth, were in theory a city’s fall away from servitude. The great supply of slave labor in the ancient Greek world was probably obtained through the storming of cities, a tactic that is eerily concomitant with the spread of chattel slavery itself in the seventh through fifth centuries.

  It is hard to tell whether the Peloponnesian War resulted in a net increase or decrease in the number of Hellenic slaves, with so many cities stormed set against the number of freed slaves enrolled in armies and navies. For example, in contrast to those who were enslaved at places like Mytilene and Melos were the helots that were freed by Brasidas, far more who fled to safe zones like Pylos, Decelea, and Chios, and thousands emancipated to fight at battles like Arginusae. In any case, W. K. Pritchett once tallied all the instances of enslavement after battles and sieges during the Peloponnesian War as recorded in our literary sources. His incomplete list of some thirty-one instances still revealed a tally of several thousand Greeks who were sold into slavery. The Peloponnesian War proved the great example of human reversal in the history of classical Greece, as hundreds of thousands of former slaves were freed even as thousands more citizens were reduced to chattel status, a fact that in part explains the social chaos of the following century, when mercenaries replaced militias and postbellum disputes over property and citizenship dominated court proceedings. Fourth-century Greece also witnessed a surge of democratic frenzy, especially at Thebes and in the Peloponnese. And at Athens especially greater subsidies were given the poorer to participate in voting—a liberalization also reflective of the vast changes in political and social life during the war, in which slaves had became free and the free slaves.11