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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  An Athenian Specialty

  Besides Plataea, there were a variety of other sieges in the Peloponnesian War that ended not merely in defeat but in the complete annihilation of the inhabitants. In 423 the Athenians conducted a series of attacks against three towns in northern Greece—Mende, Torone, and Scione. All had revolted from their empire. Those insurrections were particularly galling to the Athenians since an armistice calling for a temporary cessation of military operations was claimed to be in effect. But all three towns, located on key peninsulas of the Chalcidice not far from the ill-fated Potidaea, were buoyed by the success of the Spartan insurrectionist Brasidas—the so-called liberator of Hellas—and sensed a weakening in the old Athenian resolve.

  Brasidas was operating far from home in hopes of bringing key cities of the Athenians’ northern empire over to the Spartans before the deadline of a general armistice took hold. In response, the Athenians eventually reduced all three and showed little mercy to the inhabitants. In the first instance, they were let into Mende by treachery, killed a number of the citizens, surrounded the rightist insurrectionists on the acropolis, and then allowed their allied democratic Mendeans to finish off the trapped revolutionaries.

  Not long after, the Athenians returned in earnest to deal with the remaining two recalcitrant Chalcidian cities. They attacked Torone by land and sea, and entered the city following a retreating Spartan sortie that led them through the partially dismantled walls. All the women and children of Torone were enslaved; 700 of the males found still alive in the city were sent to Athens as hostages. At the formal acceptance of the later Peace of Nicias they were all returned.

  Scione, however, was altogether a different story. The besieged city was to suffer a fate similar to Plataea’s. In summer 421, the blockaded citizens finally gave up after a brutal two-year circumvallation. This time the Athenians accorded the victims the same treatment that the Spartans had dealt the Plataeans: executing all the adult males, selling the women and children into slavery, and turning over the abandoned land and city proper to those surviving Plataeans who had lost their capital when the Spartans began the siege of 429.

  Scione, like Plataea, had ceased to exist as a city. The city had temporarily joined the Spartans, and so in the Athenians’ logic it would now properly go as spoils to the Plataeans, whom the Spartans had likewise brutally expelled. Apparently, Scione was deliberately singled out to be a “paradigm” (paradeigma), inasmuch as the “Athenians wished to strike fear into those whom they suspected of planning revolts” and thus used the Scionaeans as an example to other Greeks of what could happen if a state left, or abetted those who attempted to leave, the Athenian empire.

  The Athenians’ vicious policy contained a certain predictable logic in this new no-holds-barred fighting of the Peloponnesian War. Many of those citizens not involved in planning the revolt who surrendered relatively soon, like those trapped in Torone or at Mytilene earlier, were allowed to live. Cities, however, like Scione that collectively chose to hold out to the bitter end would be accorded the same treatment that the Spartans had established at the war’s beginning—a supposed sign of Athenian toughness that nevertheless made little impression on tiny Melos, which paid no heed to the fate of Scione and less than six years later met the same fate.

  In the Athenian mind, the Spartans had initiated the cycle of executing surrendering citizens at the very outset of the war, and had continued that policy throughout the first decade of the fighting. In winter 424, for example, at the small outpost at Lecythus, Brasidas, who had none of the aristocratic restraint of Archidamus, had executed all the Athenian defenders who could not escape. The Spartans would go on to repeat such slaughter at Hysiae in 417 by killing all the free males of the doomed town.12

  By the end of the first decade of the war the die was cast. With the reluctance of most belligerents to commit to hoplite battles, any Greek city might instead be besieged in a wider canvas of plundering, assassination, and general terror. The defenders had only one initial opportunity for surrender. Failing that, they could be executed when the city fell—a more likely certainty as the Peloponnesian War wore on. When the Athenians, desperate to end their expensive blockade of Potidaea, offered free passage out of the city to the captured populace, the assembly back home, reeling from the plague and the treacherous attack on friendly Plataea, was furious that harsher terms were not exacted. Even news that Potidaea was to be ethnically cleansed and handed over to Athenian settlers did not assuage the democracy, which probably indicted the generals for insubordination. Such “lenient” terms were never again offered to any defeated people by the Athenian assembly during the long course of the war to follow. So the engine of Athenian severity—whether on Mytilene or Melos—was driven not by rogue generals but, rather, by a majority vote of Athenian citizens themselves.13

  Still, it was one thing to target insurrectionists such as those responsible for the revolts in Mytilene or Mende, quite another to kill every citizen who chose to resist and then obliterate all traces of an entire people’s existence through razing their walls and resettlement with foreign interlopers. At Plataea and Lecythus the Spartans not only executed the garrison but demolished the city itself and consecrated the ground to the gods, a slightly less utilitarian policy than that of the Athenians, who preferred to erase captured cities but give the ground over to their own settlers.

  About six months after the Spartans had marched into Argos to raze the democratic faction’s incipient long walls and had stormed nearby Hysiae and butchered all the inhabitants, an Athenian fleet with 38 ships, equipped with a force of hoplites and archers numbering almost 3,500, sailed into the harbor of the tiny Aegean island of Melos. Even in summer 416, some fifteen years after the war began, the Melians remained an autonomous and quasi-neutral Dorian island city-state that for a decade and a half had astutely avoided taking sides in the fighting, although perhaps they were subjected to occasional Athenian exactions. The Athenians had earlier failed to take the island during the Archidamian War. Through a false reading of recent history, the Melians apparently thought they were more or less safe.

  Yet to the Athenians there was a growing feeling that leniency toward neutrals was not appreciated but, rather, seen as evidence of their own weakness to be exploited. In their minds there was a certain logic that had led them to Melos: while the Spartans had butchered neutral Plataeans and assorted Greeks at Hysiae, the Athenians’ own past generosity had led only to further rebellion. Allowing the captured Potidaeans to leave with their lives and money perhaps explained in part the revolt at Mytilene (427), a duplicitous subject state that opportunistically reckoned that Athens was weakened by the plague and would at least give moderate terms for the captured if its own rebellion failed.

  The New Barbarism

  The Athenians were now determined that the next siege would lead to the death of every captured male, not the sparing of either all or some, as had happened respectively in Potidaea and Mytilene. It may have been in the long term a counterproductive strategy, since many sieges depended on developing treachery from within, an impulse harder to encourage if the besieged thought they were all going to die indiscriminately. Scione had not convinced cities that opposition to the Athenians was synonymous with obliteration. Yet upon landing at Melos, the Athenian generals Cleomedes and Tisias immediately sent envoys to demand that the Melians either join the Athenian empire or perish, willing to do to them what their Spartan friends had done to the poor garrison at Hysiae. The Melians refused to let the Athenians address the popular assembly, lest the Melian poor find the offers of inclusion under the auspices of a democratic Athenian empire seductive to their own landless citizens. The dialogue as reported by Thucydides that followed between the Athenian envoys and the Melian elite, a magisterial exploration of moral right versus realpolitik, is one of the most famous passages in all of Greek literature. The once-underdog and idealist Athenians, who over sixty years earlier had saved the Greeks from the Persian horde, had forgo
tten their own past of fighting for ideals of independence and freedom against impossible odds.

  Now as would-be conquerors like Xerxes before, the Athenians lectured the Melians about why they must accept the reality of power, give up hope (“danger’s comforter”), relinquish their freedom, and thus submit, reminding them on the eve of their own greatest defeat of the war at Syracuse that “the Athenians never once yet have withdrawn from a siege.” In Thucydides’ hands, Melos comes after the Spartans had butchered the besieged at Hysiae, and yet right before the Athenian disaster to come at Syracuse, as the tragedy of the Peloponnesian War saw an endless cycle of violence and counterviolence, of bold conquerors unknowingly lecturing about their own fate shortly to come.

  When the Athenian envoys were ready to depart after the fruitless conversation, they scoffed at the naïveté of the idealist Melians, who looked to hope rather than the formidable Athenian fleet in their harbor:

  Well, you alone, as it seems to us, judging from these resolutions, regard what is future as more certain than what is before your eyes, and what is out of sight, in your eagerness, as already coming to pass; and as you have staked most on, and trusted most in, the Spartans, your fortune, and your hopes, so will you most completely be deceived.

  In their customary manner—by 416 the Athenians had starved out at least six other city-states since the war had started—the besiegers walled off Melos, left a garrison, and sailed home. Although the Melians were able to mount some successful sorties to bring in more food and pick off some of the occupying garrison, for the most part they were completely locked inside their city. About six months after the beginning of the siege, the Athenians sent back additional troops to tighten up the blockade and ensure the promised capitulation through starvation. Thucydides notes that some Melians may have allowed the Athenians inside through treachery, suggesting a democratic cabal that was never given an opportunity to argue for inclusion in the Athenian empire and sought to save their own lives by stealthy assistance. But in any case the city-state itself was doomed once it was walled off from its port and cut off from its agricultural land.

  No mercy was offered. The Spartans no more came to help kindred Melos than had the Athenians earlier rushed out in force to protect Plataea. Instead, both powers concentrated their efforts on the weak and neutral defender rather than the strong and bellicose attacker. Upon surrender, most adult Melian males still alive were executed. The women and children were sold as slaves. Thucydides does not provide exact numbers of those killed or enslaved on Melos, but the total must have been in the several hundreds. The land itself was divided up among 500 Athenian colonists. Melos, like Scione, no longer existed. Ancient and modern critics deplored the slaughter and paid no attention to the fact that the Athenian generals were not allowed to present their offers directly to the Melian people, or that Melos was probably not as neutral as its oligarchic officials professed. Thus even the great defender of Athens, George Grote, once lamented, “Taking the proceedings of the Athenians towards Melos from the beginning to the end, they form one of the grossest and most inexcusable pieces of cruelty combined with injustice which Grecian history presents to us.”14

  One holocaust was one thing; a series of them finally made a profound impression on the Greeks. Again, after the killing of over 1,000 ringleaders of the Mytilene revolt, Euripides in his nearly contemporary Hecuba makes the heroine Hecuba curse the “murder vote” of the Achaean assembly that has brought an unwarranted death sentence to her daughter Polyxena. The tragedian offers a thinly veiled allusion to Cleon, “the honey-tongued,” and the demagogues who swayed the mercurial contemporary Athenian assembly through a “clever trick” (sophisma) first to kill all, then, after reconsidering, to kill some of the Mytilene hostages: “A cursed race all you who seek honor through demagoguery. May not you be known to me, you who think nothing of harming your friends—if only you might say something pleasing to the mob.”

  But in Euripides’ mind, what happened at Melos over a decade later was far worse. In his Trojan Women, performed during the spring after the Melian siege, he chronicled the horror that arises when the walls of a city fall and the attackers give no quarter. As he once more reworked the myth of Troy’s fall into contemporary butchery, Euripides also predicted the Athenians’ own disaster to come in Sicily even as they began to make preparations to sail: “Foolish is he who levels cities, temples, tombs, and the sanctuaries of the dead; as he sows destruction, so later he himself perishes.”

  Four years later, in his Phoenician Women, Euripides presented a lengthy description—“corpses heaped on top of corpses”—of the terror of being besieged by an unforgiving enemy. No doubt his long account of “a wretched city that has become utterly ruined” was in part a reaction to the Athenian string of slaughtering at Mytilene, Melos, and Mycalessus and its own disaster on Sicily. In his Hecuba, Andromache, and Trojan Women, Euripides chose to portray conquering Greeks as brutal and rapacious, and their Trojan victims as sensitive explicators of what servitude was like for the weak and vulnerable when their city fell.15

  When the Spartans were on their way to sail into the Piraeus after their naval victory at Aegospotami (405), to end the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians themselves were gripped with the terror of nemesis. As the historian Xenophon put it, the Athenians had butchered so many innocent civilian Greeks at places like Scione, Torone, and Melos that they surely expected that the Spartans would do to them what they had done to other helpless and trapped garrisons. Had the Athenians won, the Spartans would have been equally afraid, remembering their own massacre of the free males of Lecythus and Hysiae, or Lysander’s enslavement of the entire community of Cedreae in southern Asia Minor.16

  From Siege to Slaughter

  Less than three years after the slaughter of the Melians, in summer 413 the Athenians unleashed some Thracian mercenaries under the leadership of the Athenian general Diitrephes. These light-armed skirmishers had arrived too late to join the relief armada that had set out for Sicily under Demosthenes. To recover some of their investment, the Athenians sought to use the Thracians along the nearby Boeotian coast to plunder and ravage. For a money-strapped Athens it was inconceivable to allow 1,300 mercenaries paid at a drachma a day—an aggregate outlay of 40,000 drachmas per month, or about the capital to maintain at least six triremes—to remain idle. Moreover, Delium had proved that it was impossible to defeat the Boeotians in pitched battle, and perhaps the only way to pay them back for their plundering of Attica and recent help to Syracuse was to conduct raids of terror.

  Diitrephes went ashore near the small Boeotian town of Mycalessus, which, unfortunately, as an inland member of the Boeotian Confederacy never expected a sudden attack from seaborne outsiders. Its gates were open and much of its walls were in disrepair. Thucydides makes it a point to comment on the lack of good ramparts. In part he wants to explain the anomaly of an attacking force entering a city in the interior of well-guarded Boeotia so easily. Thus, the rapidly moving Thracians almost immediately broke through the dilapidated circuit. After looting the temples and shrines they began to cut down anything that moved:

  They butchered the inhabitants, sparing neither youth nor age but killing all they fell in with, one after the other, children and women, and even beasts of burden, and whatever other living creatures they saw; the Thracian people, like the bloodiest of the barbarians, being ever most murderous when it has nothing to fear. Everywhere confusion reigned and death in all its shapes; and in particular they attacked a boys’ school, the largest that there was in the place, into which the children had just gone, and massacred them all.17

  Athenian ships and an Athenian general, it should be remembered, had ferried the Thracians to Mycalessus. The Athenian assembly had paid the Thracians as hired terrorists to do as much damage as possible. The Athenians were nearly as guilty of the mini-holocaust as if they had accompanied the Thracians into the doomed schoolhouse. If the war had started off with the barbarous notion that besieged citizens
received only one chance to surrender and walk out alive before the walls of circumvallation ringed their city, by its third decade Greeks sometimes went beyond even these tough protocols, assuming they could burst into a city without warning, loot, and kill at random horses, oxen, dogs, and anything else that breathed.

  What was life like trapped inside the usually small circuits of blockaded city-states? In the case of Athens in 430, plague quickly broke out and the population was reduced to stealing funeral biers. At Potidaea the next year the poor city folk eventually ate the dead before surrendering their exhausted city-state. Cannibalism perhaps cannot be ruled out in any of the other sieges as well. Fighting among the garrison troops was common, both over food and the decision to endure or submit. Thucydides took a keen interest in the utter depravity of such mass killing. He records at length the debate over the fate of the captured at Plataea, and the preliminary discussion to the Melian siege. The flavor of these conversations resembles the show trials of the Stalinist era, as the powerful besiegers offer pretexts of inquiry and law as explanation for preset decisions to execute the innocent and weak.18