Oddly, Syracuse fared little better. The two-year siege had cost the state almost as much money as it had Athens. Despite enemies on and south of the island, Syracuse was now itself obligated to the Spartans to send troops and ships from its exhausted citizenry eight hundred miles back to the other war in the Aegean. Within five years the Syracusans were faced with a massive Carthaginian invasion, inasmuch as the North Africans had watched the internecine Greek bloodletting with glee.
There was further irony still. The poor in the fleet and among the light-armed felt that they had played an underappreciated role in the victory, one every bit as important as that of the more recognized aristocratic horsemen. In response, in 409 they stripped the moderates of power and altered the conservative Syracusan democracy into something more resembling the radical government of their Athenian oppressors. Hermocrates himself, the astute statesman who had crafted the successful Syracuse defense, was exiled and later killed in domestic unrest.
Yet this more radical Syracusan democracy did not last even four years. In 406, in Syracuse’s moment of crisis against Carthage, only the tyrannical vision of the strongman Dionysius would unite Sicily, saving all but the western part of the island from Carthaginian subjugation. Again, the paradox was had the Athenians pulled off their hegemonic enterprise, Sicily would probably have been united earlier under the very democratic auspices it later welcomed. It would have remained mostly autonomous from Carthage—just as the Peloponnesians probably would have sued to continue the armistice of 421 in fear of this most recent display of Athenian power. The Punic invasion of Sicily following the defeat of Athens was one of the most savage encounters in Greek history, a sort of mini—Peloponnesian War in which at various times the Carthaginians ceremoniously in a few hours executed 3,000 Sicilians, razed Himera and Selinus, butchered tens of thousands of civilians, and then lost half their entire force to the plague.32
There was one final legacy from the Athenian invasion. Once the tyrant Dionysius consolidated his tyranny over the Syracusans, he mustered them en masse in 401 to guarantee that no foreign power would ever be able to wall the city off from Epipolae above—ex post facto perhaps proving that the Athenians had earlier had enough men but had lacked the audacity to do in two years what Dionysius did in less than a month. Some 60,000 Sicilians, along with 6,000 pairs of oxen, built almost four miles of stone fortifications in just twenty days, so traumatic were the lingering effects upon the Syracusans of the Athenian effort to destroy their city from its own heights.33
In theory, the Spartans were the main beneficiaries inasmuch as their small expeditionary contingent under Gylippus had energized a massive response against the Athenians that had caused more enemy losses than any single battle of the war. Yet for all the vaunted size and reputed wealth of the island, the exhausted Syracusans later contributed only 20 ships to the growing but distant Peloponnesian fleet in the Aegean—a commitment that nevertheless strained the fragile political equilibrium and led to the destruction of the oligarchic party, the very stalwarts Sparta had hoped to promote by its intervention. While it might be logical to assume that such a paltry Syracusan role in the renewed Peloponnesian War in hindsight makes the Athenian case for intervention weak, one must remember that Athens’ attack on Sicily took an enormous toll on the enemy, and better explains why Syracuse could contribute so little to finish the Athenians off.
Lessons of Sicily
What, then, is one to make of Sicily? The problem was not just the cost. The imperial Athenians had lost as many men and ships before the war, in Egypt—and later would suffer even more casualties in the Ionian War. If the plan to conquer Syracuse was mad, it was nevertheless not intrinsically unfeasible. The island was not easily defensible and was conquered often in history—the Romans in 211 B.C., the Muslims in A.D. 878, followed by a succession of Franks, Spanish, Normans, Italians, and the allies under George Patton and Bernard Montgomery in 1943. Even the nearly suicidal tripartite command structure, the ongoing witch hunt back home, the treachery of Alcibiades, the illness of Nicias, and the renewal of the war with Sparta did not inevitably doom the Athenian plan. The effort, after all, had been a close-run thing, perhaps just days away from success before the unexpected arrival of the Spartans and Corinthians.
As for an ultimate benefit-to-risk analysis, in hindsight the invasion of Sicily seems absurd. True, had the Athenians won they would have acquired enormous prestige, terrified the Spartans, and cut them off from Sicilian trade, and perhaps found some material rewards, additional grain, and more allies. But Sicily was far distant and pushed to the limits any idea of the “indirect approach” of defeating enemies without meeting them head-on in conventional battle. So while there was something to gain in Sicily for the Athenians if everything went right, there was also far more there to lose if anything went wrong in the larger war itself. That ambiguous assessment seems to be Thucydides’ own, when paradoxically he acknowledges that the Athenians might have prevailed, but the way the campaign unfolded nevertheless constituted its greatest mistake of the war.34
What went wrong?
At almost every key juncture the absence of sufficient cavalry ruined the Athenians. While the theater was a multifaceted campaign involving sieges, hoplite battle, agricultural ravaging, terror, and dramatic trireme battles, in the end it was the unheralded cavalry skirmishes that made much of the difference. In the first months of the campaign, the Athenians were stymied by Syracusan horsemen from doing any damage from their base at Catana. Only deception that for a few days fooled the enemy cavalry forces permitted them the safety of even approaching Syracuse; once they were there, an important hoplite victory brought little strategic success, given the presence of 1,200 riders who stopped the minor defeat from becoming a serious rout. These horsemen—we know neither names nor any other details about them—stunned the victors. Coupled with their earlier patrols, they demoralized the Athenians, in large part explaining the virtual cessation of hostilities during the winter of 415, when the Athenians sheepishly kept close to their quarters at Catana.
In contrast, once the Athenians gathered even a small force of 650 horsemen, the pulse of the campaign changed radically. Cavalry allowed the Athenians to ascend Epipolae and begin work on fencing in the city from above. The ensuing yearlong war on the heights was often determined by mounted troops, most notably when the Syracusans beat back Lamachus’ offensive and killed him in the confusion. Gylippus’ overland march from Himera—the real turning point in the war—was safeguarded by cavalry. Had the Athenians had a mounted force the size of the Syracusan cavalry, they might have turned it back and won the war outright with the completion of their fortifications. In any case, Gylippus’ only subsequent setback was due to his foolish decision to attack the Athenians without mounted escorts, a rash mistake that he regretted and did not repeat.
In the final year the Athenian loss of its fortified base at Plemmyrium, on the harbor south of the city, stemmed in large part from the constant raiding of hundreds of Syracusan horsemen, who rode down any Athenian who ventured out of the ramparts for water or firewood. This forfeiture of that naval base and its supplies did much to begin the ruin of the Athenian fleet. And Nicias had turned his attention to blockading the city by sea only because of the prominent role of enemy cavalry around the approaches to Epipolae, which ensured that he could never storm the counterwall that stymied the advance of his own fortifications. Demosthenes’ bold plan to take Epipolae at night was a failure. The deadly nocturnal pursuit of the Syracusan horse turned it into a bloodbath, destroying the morale of the army itself and putting an end to offensive operations by land.
A mere 1,200 Syracusans tipped the balance of the war, and ensured that 45,000 enemy invaders would lose. The experience of horse warfare on Sicily in and of itself did not immediately lead to the integration of cavalry and infantry mastered by Philip and Alexander. Yet despite the peculiar circumstances of Sicilian terrain and culture, the stunning defeat taught the Greeks that the days of
hoplite exclusivity were ended. Gone too was the parochial idea that aristocratic knights were to remain prancers on the flanks of the phalanx rather than packs of mounted killers who, if not met by like kind, could limit the operations of even the largest forces—and alter the very course of sieges and naval engagements.35
Alcibiades was thirty-five when the Athenians landed on Sicily. If any single person was responsible for the birth and death of the Sicilian idea, it was surely he. His oratory and demagoguery were instrumental in convincing the volatile mob to sail in the first place. Yet his hope that an entire island could be subdued through intrigue rather than blood and iron proved as catastrophic as the timidity and inaction of Nicias. Ploys and deception were certainly vintage Alcibiades, who earlier at Mantinea had lined up an alliance of democratic states to dethrone Sparta from the hegemony of the Peloponnese—only to fail to galvanize the Athenians themselves to send the necessary force to guarantee victory.
Personal excess, arrogance, licentiousness—call it all what you wish—gave ammunition to his enemies, who recalled him from Syracuse for both good and bad reasons, involving legitimate and trumped-up charges of impiety and indecency. Whether Alcibiades was always lying or disclosed accurate strategic information to the Spartans is not clear, but without his presence in the Peloponnese the Spartans might well have tarried in their aid. Remember, had either Gylippus or Gongylus arrived a few days later, Syracuse would have already been lost.
Despite Alcibiades’ courage at the siege of Potidaea, his service in Attica during the invasions and plague, his heroism at Delium, and his machinations that led to Mantinea and perhaps Melos, the war was turning away from the great personalities and now hinging more on manpower and matériel. Horses would have won Sicily for Athens—and now ships would decide the last phase of the war, a struggle that Alcibiades was to reenter but in a most unexpected and ultimately tragic way.
There is a final, sad epitaph to the Sicilian nightmare. In a fitting tribute to the cavalrymen who had won the war, the Syracusans branded the foreheads of the thousands of Athenian captives they took—by burning into the flesh of each the mark of a horse.
CHAPTER 8
SHIPS
THE WAR AT SEA (431–404)
The Gathering Storm
Sicily did not end but, rather, reignited the old struggle with Sparta. Suddenly the entire war was on again, and its focus abruptly shifted from the west to far eastward, in the coastal waters off Asia Minor. The Athenian disaster would be followed by a final naval Armageddon in the eastern Aegean as a triumphant Sparta won over enough allies and Persian money to make good on its boast some twenty years earlier of winning by creating a massive fleet. Still, in the immediate aftermath of Sicily, there was a general consensus that Athens was immediately doomed—without enough ships, citizen warriors, or capital to keep enemies out of the Piraeus.
If the Peloponnesians could not storm a weakened Athens or destroy its hoplites, then it would squeeze the city and hope to wreck its seapower through a showdown on the Aegean. King Agis at Decelea ordered his allies to raise funds immediately to construct a fresh armada of 100 triremes to coordinate a joint land and sea strategy for finishing off the wounded adversary. What had happened to the previous Peloponnesian fleet during the first two decades of the war is not clear; but even the new plan to launch 100 triremes was not all that ambitious—and yet was dependent on Persian subsidies that would involve years of concessions and negotiations.
During this uncertain period immediately after the disaster in Sicily, subject states of Athens, initially the powerful Euboeans, Lesbians, and Chians, began to conspire with Sparta about defecting from the empire, even as the Persian satrap Tissaphernes sent his envoys to Sparta to offer his support for Peloponnesian maritime supremacy. Athens’ allies sensed that the end was near, and were furious anyway that the imperial city had led so many of their sons to mass slaughter in Sicily. Meanwhile, across the border in Thebes, the Boeotians stepped up their plundering of Attic farms and made ready to take back the disputed borderlands of the Oropus, a move that would enhance the success of insurrection on the nearby island of Euboea. “Everyone,” Diodorus concluded, “assumed that the war had come to an end—since no one expected that the Athenians even for a moment could endure such severe setbacks.”1
At Athens itself, a special board of auditors (the probouloi) was appointed to craft ways to save the city and circumvent the assembly from proposing any further reckless adventures. The contingency fund of 1,000 talents, untouched since the outbreak of the war, was now tapped to begin reconstructing the fleet. This new idea that appointed senior Athenian statesmen—the aged playwright Sophocles was among them—would offer sober checks to the popular will foreshadowed widening splits among the citizenry and, indeed, the oligarchic revolution of 411 to come. Meanwhile, with the growing force of Peloponnesians at Decelea still kept out by the walls of Athens, with no hope of a final phalanx battle on the plains of Attica, and with the attention of all of Greece now turned to the flow of food and capital into the Piraeus, the outcome of this last chapter in the Peloponnesian conflict would hinge mostly on thousands of Greek seamen embarking on strange oared ships to kill one another far across the Aegean.
A Most Peculiar Ship
There has probably never been as bizarre yet successful a galley as the Greek trireme. Certainly no such oared vessel like it had been constructed and rowed on the Mediterranean before that time, nor has one since. If hoplite battle before the Peloponnesian War may have had a prior history of some two and a half centuries, trireme warfare was relatively new. Triremes themselves probably first appeared only in the middle and later part of the sixth century. Although the Phoenicians or Egyptians perhaps first mastered the art of building triremes, it was the growth of the Athenian empire in the mid-fifth century that saw the emergence of sophisticated naval tactics.
Lightness and balance, not seaworthiness and protection, seem to have been the chief aims in building good triremes. If middle-class landowners were almost invulnerable inside their traditional hoplite armor, the landless fought absolutely defenseless as they rowed nearly naked across the seas in these relatively novel ships. Although the trireme was not a particularly large platform, about 120 feet from bow to stern and 20 feet wide amidships, it could nevertheless carry 200 sailors, officers, and marines. The crew could row at nearly fifty strokes a minute to achieve short bursts of fighting speeds of almost ten knots as it delivered devastating force with its ram. A sail was used to rest the seamen while in transit when combat was unlikely.
So unique was the vessel’s tripartite system of oarage that until the last few decades scholars still could not even agree on how the trireme (from the Greek trieres, “three-fitted”) was powered. Because triremes were unusually buoyant and rarely equipped with ballast, they never really completely sank to the bottom—thus ensuring that there are presently few remains for underwater archaeologists to examine. What exactly is the significance of the “tri-” in the ship’s nomenclature? Did three men sit side by side on one bench, pulling jointly on a single oar? Or did three rowers pull three oars? Or, as is most likely, were there three banks of oarsmen, sitting at three levels, hitting the water from three different elevations and angles with their like-sized fourteen-foot oars?
Much of the puzzle that had evoked heated debate since the Renaissance was supposed to have been solved in 1987, when a joint British-Greek research team launched Olympias, a modern full-sized replica of a classical Athenian trireme. Despite problems in the performance of Olympias, even its limited sea trials confirmed that the often-conflicting ancient testimonia about triremes probably meant that there could be three levels of oarsmen, each rower with his standard-sized oar. But the simulations on Olympias also reminded us of just how miserable naval service was for thousands of seamen—despite not being shackled and chained like Roman galley slave rowers—and how tricky it was for rowers to synchronize their strokes with their light firwood oars. Indeed, so fa
r the modern craft has never quite achieved levels of performance commensurate with those of ancient ships as suggested by classical texts.
The most cramped and unpleasant positions in the 120-foot-long ship probably belonged to the 54 thalamites. These poor crewmen rowed from deep in the hold (thalamos), crammed in a scant eighteen inches above the water. Leather pads in their oar holes in theory kept the waves out. But seawater always splashed in anyway—the ship was honeycombed with over one hundred such holes—and bilge water also seeped through the planking near their feet. Sailors were probably soaked on and off throughout the entire voyage. As a rower pulled and leaned back and then pushed forward, his rear scooted to and fro along the bench, explaining why seamen considered seat cushions as important as good oars—and why rump blisters were a common complaint.
Because of the crossbeams and the other seamen rowing directly above their heads, the thalamites could see almost nothing. The sweat from the two superior banks of rowers—the posteriors of the seamen above were more or less in the thalamites’ faces—drenched them as well. The comic poet Aristophanes joked that the thalamites were often farted upon and even showered with excrement from the straining oarsmen above, a scatological reference that he may have derived from the common and collective real-life miseries of the veterans in the theater audience. Sweat, thirst, blisters, exhaustion, urine, and feces—all this was in addition to the billows of the sea and the iron of the enemy.2
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 32