Walls themselves were felt to be antithetical to courage and thus in the abstract always distrusted by agrarian conservatives. Morally, it was believed that fighting properly belonged to soldiers; practically, it was expensive to surround entire municipalities with fortifications. Hoplite phalanxes strengthened civic ties through solidarity in the ranks; in contrast, sieges brought out personal differences and accentuated political strife. All the major philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon—reflect a widely held moral skepticism of fortifications. Walls, the Athenian Plato wrote in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, were bad in every way: they weakened the collective health of the populace; they created a complacent city that lost confidence in its own muscular courage to repel the enemy; and they accentuated strife among the citizenry between those who wished to defend their farms outside and those who saw no need to protect what they did not have. Sieges, then, were as odious as naval warfare—expensive, cowardly, and a diversion from the heroic code of landowners fighting on land over land.26
The Heritage of Siegecraft
The key components of successful siegecraft—movable towers, sophisticated rams, and catapults—appeared shortly after the end of the Peloponnesian War. The Greeks had learned that battle was now to be beyond the realm of hoplite warfare: the arrival of a crack army more often meant that an unsteady enemy retreated to its walls rather than trusted in open battle. Sieges usually eventually worked through starvation, but their start-up cost was prohibitive. Throughout the war, both sides had experimented with rams and fire guns, but only with mixed success.
Within just a few years of the war, bolder and more amoral men, like Dionysus of Syracuse and Philip of Macedon, unleashed a new siegecraft that was as ingenious as it was deadly, involving nontorsion and torsion catapults, siege towers to 120 feet in height, and mixed contingents of sappers, artillerymen, and rammers working simultaneously. Plataea lasted nearly four years after the first Theban attack. In contrast, the Macedonians could break through the walls of a city in a fraction of the time of the old laborious counterwalling, but they inherited a craft that was born on the heels of a twenty-seven-year war and the deaths of thousands. Had the Spartans had Philip’s torsion catapults, they could have battered down Plataea’s walls in a matter of days, 150-pound rocks crashing into the parapets in every direction, launched by artillery that were safely out of the range of arrows and missiles.
Epaminondas is remembered as the great victor over the Spartans at Leuctra, but his real legacy was the new science of fortification, which exploded in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War. In some sense, the triad of newly democratic and autonomous walled cities of Mantinea, Megalopolis, and Messene—perhaps all built along the similar blueprints of Theban engineers—reflected lessons learned in the later fifth century, when an infantry victory at Mantinea spelled the end of hopes of Peloponnesian autonomy. Had the helots, Mantineans, or Arcadians possessed their later enormous circuits in the 420s, Sparta would have been rendered impotent a half century earlier.
Finally, Alcibiades, as one might expect, was involved in all the most notorious sieges of the war. Even before the fighting started, he was among the Athenians besieging Potidaea. Later authors attribute the brutal Athenian policy of reducing Melos by siege to Alcibiades’ leadership. He was the architect of the failed Sicilian expedition. In his second incarnation, during the Ionian War, he successfully conducted the siege of both Chalcedon and Byzantium, and through treachery and negotiations achieved their surrenders.
So sieges framed Alcibiades’ war. Nineteen-year-old Alcibiades began the struggle trying to break through the elaborate walls of Potidaea with a great army; some twenty-seven years later, as a tired, exiled, and discredited man of forty-five, he was shot down trying to keep a few assassins from entering his fortified house in an obscure town in Phrygia.
The greatest siege of the war, however, was not on the Greek mainland but on far distant Sicily. The effort to storm or starve out Syracuse required more money and men than any operation the Athenians conducted during the entire war. It followed immediately upon the successful effort on Melos and brought to bear all the experience and expertise drawn from a string of successful operations at Potidaea, Mytilene, Scione, and Melos. Yet more Athenians were killed in the effort to take Syracuse than in all its previous sieges put together. After the disaster on Sicily, Athens rarely tried to take a fortified city again—laying to rest for good the old boast to the Melians that the Athenians had never once abandoned a siege.27
CHAPTER 7
HORSES
THE DISASTER AT SICILY (415–413)
The Big Idea
By 415 the war was still stalemated and now in its seventeenth year. During the shaky Peace of Nicias, Athens had lost a rare opportunity to galvanize a democratic revolt of Peloponnesian states against Sparta. The hoplite showdown at Mantinea was a catastrophic missed opportunity, in part as a result of Athens’ meager contribution to the allied army. After Alcibiades’ radical ideas were discredited with defeat of the coalition in 418, the temporizer Nicias—an expert at the half measure and the tactically successful but often strategically insignificant amphibious landing—was now once more ascendant.
Persia was not quite ready to antagonize Athens by committing money to subsidize the creation of a Peloponnesian fleet. Meanwhile, in the Greek Third World the successes of Pylos and other Athenian outposts around the Peloponnese were offset by the defections from the empire caused by Brasidas’ insurrectionary activity in the north around Amphipolis. Athens was still stuck with a two-front war against Thebes and Sparta after its failure at Delium, while the Spartan fleet had performed miserably and seen its efforts to subvert Corcyra fail after a bloody rampage of civil strife.
Many of the war’s leaders and their successors—Archidamus, Brasidas, Pericles, and Cleon—were now dead. Thousands had perished from the plague at Athens, while Sparta hemorrhaged from constant helot flight to Pylos, and yet neither side felt the war was really over. While Spartans contemplated ways of creating a fleet to destroy the Athenian empire, some Athenians were crafting an even wilder plan to gain advantage during these years of respite. What they came up with changed the entire course of the war, although in ways the Athenian assembly never imagined.
Great invasions of faraway places evoke our worst fears. Communications are difficult; by the time most Frenchmen heard Napoleon had taken Moscow, his retreating army was already near ruin in the snows of Russia. Given the great distance, the fragility of logistics, and the danger of extended transport, losses in transit can be as severe as battle casualties. Safety, especially in long-distance amphibious operations, lies in having a way to get back home. And a secure return most often resided, in the age before petroleum, in either ships or horses. After his fleet was sunk at Salamis, Xerxes understandably worried whether his pontoon bridges across the Hellespont were still intact. In contrast, a defiant Cortés burned his ships in the harbor of Veracruz to remind his men that military defeat meant not failure but their own destruction. In such great gambles, victory usually does not hinge merely on success in battle but demands the complete subjugation of the invaded, who in turn are fighting for their survival, not just against conquest.
It is only within this grand and risky context of seeking to conquer a city eight hundred miles away, one as great or greater than Athens itself in population, size, and wealth, that a full appreciation is possible of the disaster of the Sicilian expedition. The trauma to Athens arose not merely from its material and human losses that followed from the defeat; it suffered worse fatalities from the plague and would lose far more in the great sea battles of the Ionian theater to come. Rather, the debacle was spiritual as well, the sheer horror of within just two years tapping the empire to send over 40,000 men so far away either to conquer or to die trying.
Why, in the autumn of 416, well into the sixth year of an armistice with Sparta, did the Athenian assembly vote to attack Syracuse, the capital of Sicily? Classical s
cholars have collated the ostensible reasons given by Thucydides and other ancient sources. They are legion and remain baffling. First, the Athenians claimed that they were treaty-bound to honor the requests for help from the small Sicilian states of Segesta and Leontini, which were ostensibly threatened with absorption by a growing Syracusan (and Dorian) empire on the island. Both looked desperately for outside succor from an ethnically and politically akin benefactor to preserve their autonomy.
Yet in the realities of war not all promises are always kept, as the poor Melians had learned the year before, when they had put their hope in Spartan aid. The otherwise busy Athenians had reasons other than mere justice and promises to sail so far away.1 Instead, the common people at Athens smelled money in the proposition: profit through promises from the aggrieved states to cover their expenses and greater hopes of plunder once Syracuse itself was conquered. Some Athenian imperialists, Alcibiades most prominently, envisioned Sicily as a stepping-stone to even greater acquisitions in North Africa and Italy. They had already shrugged off the plague, and now saw the beginning of some sort of trans-Mediterranean empire stretching from Asia Minor to Gibraltar, which would have predated the Roman imperium by four centuries. In fact, after the Athenian defeat in Sicily, neutral states breathed a sigh of relief. Most had apparently been convinced that an Athenian victory might have meant that they were next on the long list of targets.2
Meanwhile, the debate over Sicily became the arena for the renewed rivalry between the pro-Spartan Nicias and the imperialist Alcibiades. After the earlier defeat of the pro-Athenian alliance at Mantinea, the elder Nicias’ policy of caution seemed to have eclipsed Alcibiades’ wilder schemes. In response, the Athenians, the imperialists argued, should see victory in Sicily as integral to the current bellum interruptum with Sparta, a way of preempting any Sicilian aid to Sparta at a time of general tension as both sides sought to gain advantage during a phony peace.
Controlling the grain supplies of Sicily—to the modern visitor, the farmland of the island is striking in its clear superiority and size to anything found in southern Greece—might end the Peloponnesian importation of foodstuffs. Contrast the parched Peloponnese or Attica with verdant Sicily, and the additional idea that Athenians were also interested in imported grain for themselves makes good sense. The population and military assets of the island also could come in handy when the war with the Peloponnesians resumed, as it inevitably would in even greater fashion. In any case, the earlier expedition against the island (427–424) had been aimed at denying grain imports to the Peloponnese.3
The renegade Alcibiades, who would betray the Athenian cause a few weeks after arriving in Sicily, was smart enough to understand that when he switched sides in 415 and made his way to Sparta, he had to make some dramatic connection between the survival of Syracuse and the self-interest of his new host city. The best way to enlist Peloponnesians to help defeat his former countrymen at Syracuse was to assure them that the Athenian invasion was really aimed at Sparta. “If this city shall be taken,” Alcibiades told the Spartan assembly, “then all of Sicily is theirs, and immediately Italy as well. And that danger that I just now spoke about from there would in no time fall upon you. Thus, let nobody think that you are deliberating only about Sicily, but also about the Peloponnese.”4
Athens had not been in an active battle with Sparta in six years. The city was starting to recover from the losses of the plague. It was now full of young firebrands who had only a dim childhood memory of either the funeral pyres in the city or Spartan hoplites trampling amid the vineyards of Attica. Athens also had just pulled off a successful siege of a Dorian protectorate of Sparta, the island of Melos, without reigniting the war with Sparta. Steady tribute, the absence of offensive operations for nearly five years, and a restoration of trade had all meant that Athens was almost as well off as during the years before the war. For all these reasons the citizens were once more ready to reassert themselves militarily.5
The campaign was both practicable and mad at the same time: doable in the sense that Athens’ military potential was so great that it had restored sufficient power despite plague and war, while unhinged in the sense that its own subjects, especially in the Thraceward region, were on the verge of revolt, even as Sparta was both unpredictable and unconquered. The pro-Athenian but weak Segesta and Leontini were dubious, if not duplicitous Sicilian allies. The sheer distance and impossibility of easy communications and supply made the operational aspects of the expedition daunting.
Nicias, in overly dramatic fashion, set out all these reasons why Athens should not go to Sicily and achieved the opposite result of inflaming the Athenian citizenry, not unlike the sexagenarian King Archidamus on the eve of the war almost two decades earlier, who had predicted a tough fight only to be disregarded by the Spartan assembly. In the last analysis, one does not defeat the proximate oligarchic enemy by sailing eight hundred miles distant to attack a democratic neutral.
What is striking about the casus belli for the Sicilian expedition was that Syracuse, while Doric and Sicilian, was not oligarchic. Well before the war even broke out, an anonymous conservative observer remarked that anytime Athens did not support democracy abroad, it fared poorly, given its natural affinities for popular governments. The Syracusans may not have been as radically democratic as Athens, but their constitution was liberal in the ancient sense. A sovereign Syracusan popular assembly ensured free give-and-take between the poor and the well-off, meaning that the Sicilian expedition was at the outset a betrayal of professed Athenian values of promoting Panhellenic democratic culture. To the conservative Thucydides the anomaly was not merely that Athens had forsaken its ideological agenda of protecting democracies from reactionaries, but that for the first time in the Greek experience two large maritime democracies were at war. They would bring into the fray all the military assets that such imaginative and resourceful societies characteristically possessed. And these advantages—ships, money, manpower, and popular leadership—were many and not to be lightly dismissed.
Democratic states involved the entire citizenry in their decision making. They did not stake their collective defense on farmland for the sake of a hoplite class. Because such governments empowered the poor, encouraged social mobility and immigration, experienced higher rates of population growth, instilled greater civic discipline (“as is the way of a democracy”), and created capital for both fleets and fortifications, they made war far more formidably than their oligarchic counterparts (dubbed by Thucydides as “slow” and “timid”).
As Thucydides further put it: “Of all the cities that Athens had gone to war against, the Syracusans alone were the most similar to Athens, being democratic like themselves, and strong in ships, horses, and size.” He later concluded, “Because the Syracusans were most similar to the Athenians, they made war against them the most successfully.” Despite the horrors of the plague and over a decade of war, there were thousands of young Athenian men who willingly took up the challenge of sailing dangerous seas to fight mostly unknown fellow Greeks, in a struggle to storm the largest city in the Greek-speaking world. While one may recoil at their madness, their sheer audacity is even more arresting.6
Because Thucydides devoted two entire books of his history to the campaign—25 percent of his entire narrative dealing with just three of the twenty years chronicled—there is a good record of the main events of the disaster. After two acrimonious assemblies, the Athenians voted to send a massive armada to Syracuse in June 415. A troika of generals would command: the reliable veteran Lamachus, the old conservative but timid Nicias, and the ever intriguing Alcibiades. Whereas the initial idea was to send out a moderately sized force of some 60 triremes, about the same number that had sailed years earlier in a fruitless attempt to intimidate Syracuse between 427 and 425, in a subsequent assembly inflated rhetoric and acrimony prompted a complete, and what would prove disastrous, reappraisal.
Unlike the earlier invasions of Sicily, now the Athenians in a moment of zeal ma
ndated an even larger force: 134 ships (100 of them Athenian), including over 90 triremes, and 5,100 Athenian and imperial hoplites. Arrangements were made for an assortment of 480 archers, 700 slingers, 30 horsemen and mounts, and 30 cargo ships.7
In material terms, what had been envisioned as another punitive raid was now redefined as an attempt at conquest and annexation. However overwhelming the ostentatious armada might have appeared on parade in the harbor of the Piraeus as it set sail, the fleet was perhaps rather small to subdue an entire island the size of Sicily, especially if it did not take immediate and decisive action on arrival and thus establish a deterrent presence. Scholars sometimes talk about the oppressive nature of the Athenian empire, but its aggregate force in 415 was somewhat pathetic—the allies of some 200 states contributing only 2,850 of the 5,100 hoplites. The Athenians experienced the false security of all departing armies that judge the extent of their own power by the impression they make upon themselves rather than solely on the enemy.
What was stunning about the Athenian expeditionary force was its initial luck. The fleet enjoyed good weather in transit. It made the tricky voyage across hundreds of miles of sea without losses or delays, and thus there is scant detail in Thucydides’ narrative about what could have been an especially perilous trip. Despite its extravagant and public send-off, the triremes arrived at Sicily to the almost complete surprise of the Syracusans. In contrast, during the next two years, the Peloponnesian reinforcements had far less luck in reaching Syracuse, and were often blown off course, shipwrecked, or delayed by stormy weather. In other words, in this first wave the Athenians had probably transported over 25,000 combatants across the open seas without any real losses and arrived in good shape to the utter astonishment and terror of their enemies. Yet almost immediately tragedy inexplicably began to unfold.
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 28