Yet Thucydides does recognize that humans are also subject to other inexplicable emotions that make them do things that do not quite make sense, whether that means Spartans who “fear” Athenian success, the poor Plataeans who choose to resist the siege, the supposedly stern Spartans who panic after the fall of Sphacteria and cease all their invasions into Attica on news that a mere 120 of their elite might be executed, the Melians who in vain hold out for Spartan support, or the once haughty Athenians who sail to Syracuse and persist in folly with the same reliance on “hope” that they had earlier damned the naive Melians for entertaining. If moderns wonder why entire countries of several million people can be held hostage when masked criminals threaten to behead a single one of their citizens on global television, we could do worse than to remember why panicked and shocked Spartans simply abandoned their entire strategy of invading Attica.31
For a writer who is supposedly interested in power rather than tragedy, Thucydides misses no occasion to note how heartbreaking the losses of particular armies were. What seems to capture the historian’s attention is not, as is so often claimed, the role of force in interstate relations but the misery of war that is unleashed upon the thousands—the subject of this book—who must fight it.
Thucydides sometimes opines that a particular campaign was wise or foolish, but he nearly always adds enough detail and editorializing to convey to us that the soldiers who believed in the cause for which they were dying deserved commemoration in terms that matched their sacrifice. So one discovers that the Thespians who perish at Delium are not around the next year to save their city when their erstwhile allies, the Thebans, tear down the walls. The town of Mycalessus loses not merely its schoolboys but even its animals—and we, his readers, should know that and mull it over. The Athenians are not merely slaughtered at the Assinarus River but perish as they fight one another to drink the blood and mud of the river. Whereas historians search for messages about the “lessons” of Thucydides embedded within his text, the general reader has no problem in sensing immediately what his history is about precisely from those memorable passages that will never go away, reminding us of the passions and furor that are unleashed on otherwise normal men when they go to war.
The young men of Athens, on the eve of the initial Spartan invasion or during the debate about Sicily, are always eager for war, inasmuch as they have had no experience with it. In contrast, “the older men of the city,” the more experienced, who know something of plagues, assassinations, terror, and sinking triremes, always are reluctant to invade, and thus often strive to give the enemy some way out during tough negotiations that otherwise might leave war as the only alternative. Thucydidean war can have utility and solve problems, and it often follows a grim logic of sorts; but once it starts, it may well last twenty-seven years over the entire Greek world rather than an anticipated thirty days in Attica and kill thousands at its end who were not born in its beginning.
Such recognition is not necessarily cause for pacifism; rather, to Thucydides it calls for acceptance that thousands will end up rotten in little-known places like the Assinarus River and Aetolia, the logic that follows from decisions made far away in the hallowed assemblies of Sparta or Athens. A wild-eyed Sthenelaidas or sophistic Alcibiades might rouse his volatile assembly to war without good cause, while an Archidamus or Pericles might think that his own sobriety and reason will either preclude or mitigate the killing. But between emotion and logic resides the fate of thousands of the mostly unknown—Astymachus and Lacon executed at Plataea (427), the Tanagran Saugenês cut down at Delium (424), Scirphondas butchered at Mycalessus (413), and the Spartan Xenares falling at Heraclea (419)—who will surely then and now be asked to settle through violence what words alone cannot. Remember them, for the Peloponnesian War was theirs alone.32
APPENDIX I: GLOSSARY OF TERMS AND PLACES
ACROPOLIS · the fortified hill and center of a city-state; most often used in reference to Athens and the great temples built by Pericles.
ARGOS · the renowned large city-state in the northeastern Peloponnese that for most of the war was democratic, independent of Sparta, and often allied with Athens. The surrounding peninsula that extends from the northeastern coast of the Peloponnese into the Aegean is known as the Argolid.
ATTICA · the geographical area surrounding and controlled by Athens, a hinterland encompassing one thousand square miles.
BOEOTIA · a large agricultural region north of Attica in central Greece. Most of the cities of its nearly one-thousand-square-mile countryside were united politically into an oligarchic confederation headed by its largest city, Thebes. Throughout the fifth century Athens sought to weaken its neighboring rival by periodic occupation, fomenting democratic revolution, and encouraging Boeotian states like Plataea and Thespiae to remain autonomous.
CORINTH · a traditional maritime rival of Athens and stalwart ally of Sparta that drew its wealth and prestige from its control of the Isthmus, which governed Greek maritime traffic east and west and land travel north and south.
DECELEA · a small hillock in the Athenian plain about thirteen miles from the walls of Athens, fortified by the Spartans in 414–413 to serve as a permanent garrison of occupation in Attica and a clearinghouse for continuous plundering.
DEMOCRACY · “people power,” or government characterized by inclusion of the landless poor into the voting citizenry and rule by majority vote of the assembly. From 507 to 338, ancient democracy was often synonymous with Athens, the most powerful and influential of the democratic city-states.
DRACHMA · the most common unit of Greek money, often equivalent to the top daily wage of a well-paid worker. Six obols equaled one drachma. One hundred drachmas made a mina. A talent was equal to 6,000 drachmas or 60 minas. If current semiskilled adult labor is often compensated at about $10 (U.S.) per hour, we can envision a drachma having the approximate contemporary worth of about $80. Direct comparisons are impossible, but a talent in present-day American money might consequently be equivalent to something like $480,000—or about the cost of a large urban house in both Athens and America.
HELLESPONT · the modern Dardanelles, or the very narrow strait of water that connects the Aegean via the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea, and thus divides Europe from Asia. It was the scene of horrific Athenian-Spartan sea battles in the last four years of the war.
HELOTS · hereditary indentured and publicly owned rural serfs of Laconia and Messenia, who worked in forced servitude to supply food and provisions for their Spartan overseers.
HOPLITE · a heavily armed Greek infantryman deployed in the phalanx. Originally a voting, property-owning citizen of the polis who supplied his own armor, the hoplite was eventually defined as a soldier of any class who fought in close rank with body armor, shield, and spear. The name derives either from his large circular shield (hoplon) or his panoply in general (hopla).
IONIA · the Greek-speaking western seaboard of Asia Minor (modern western Turkey), whose northern inhabitants claimed common ancestry with Athens. Not to be confused with the Ionian Sea, which is an ancient name for the southern Adriatic, between Italy and western Greece.
ISTHMUS · the thin strip of land connecting the northern Greek mainland to the Peloponnese, and settled and governed by the Corinthians, who profited enormously by their control of north-south land traffic and east-west maritime trade between the Aegean and the Gulf of Corinth.
METICS · privileged resident aliens who might serve in the military even without full rights of citizenship. The term is used most frequently in reference to foreigners at Athens, where by the mid-fifth century some 20,000 metics resided.
OLIGARCHY · consensual government restricted to those who owned property or had ample capital, hence “rule of the few.” Oligarchs were championed by Sparta in its ideological war against democrats, the poorer and often landless supported by imperial Athens.
PELOPONNESE · the southern part of Greece, consisting of the large peninsula south of the Gulf of Corin
th. The majority of states in this area of some eighty-five hundred square miles were ethnically Doric and either allied to or subjugated by Sparta. The area gave its name to the war because of the Athenocentric nature of our sources: to Athenians their war was against Sparta and its allies—loosely defined as the Peloponnesians.
PELTASTS · light-armed troops, later often mercenary and foreign, equipped with a javelin and light crescent-shaped shield (peltê) and trained to fight as skirmishers on rough terrain.
PHALANX · a columnar formation of Greek heavily armed spearmen (hoplites). The mass was used to batter away at its like counterpart in open land battles.
PIRAEUS · the port and harbor of Athens, some five miles from the Acropolis and connected most prominently by the two parallel Long Walls, which established a safe corridor for the importation of maritime goods into the city.
POLIS (PL. POLEIS) · any self-governing city-state of ancient Greece; the term serves to describe both a political entity and the geographical area surrounding the municipal center.
SATRAPY · a Persian provincial state. The term refers most often to those districts in northern (Hellespontine) and central (Sardis) Asia Minor that for the latter part of the war were run by Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes, respectively.
SPARTA · an oligarchic city-state that led the Peloponnesian alliance. A variety of terms are used to loosely describe Sparta and its empire. Lacedaemon is both a political and a regional connotation denoting those surrounding city-states and towns in the southeastern Peloponnese that were directly governed by the Spartans. Spartans refer to residents of the city and its environs of various statuses. Some men were further distinguished as Spartiates; these full citizens constituted a small elite. Laconian is more an ethnic and geographic rubric employed to describe the land around and the people residing in and surrounding Sparta, while the far broader adjective Peloponnesian roughly includes all those city-states situated on the mainland south of Corinth, most of which were allied with Sparta. Doric is a broad ethnic and linguistic category of southern Greeks, mostly referring to the Peloponnese, Sicily, the southern Aegean, and southern Asia Minor.
THETES · the lowest census class at Athens, composed of the poorer citizens, who owned little or no land and usually either rowed in the fleet or fought as skirmishers outside the phalanx. By the outbreak of the war thetic adult males at Athens may have numbered over 20,000.
TRIREME · a swift war galley powered by three banks of oarsmen and armed with a bronze ram. Triremes usually carried about 170 rowers and another 30 assorted officers and could employ an auxiliary sail during transit and patrol.
APPENDIX II: KEY PEOPLE
ALCIBIADES · (450–404) the most controversial general at Athens; his tragic fate mirrored the decline of Athens itself. The architect of the ill-fated Sicilian expedition, he fled a sure Athenian death sentence only to urge the Spartans to build a fleet and fortify Decelea outside the walls of Athens. Later he sought to ingratiate himself with the Persians by harming the interests of both Athens and Sparta, and was variously championed and exiled by the Athenians for an assortment of purported crimes before being murdered in Phrygia shortly after the end of the war.
ARCHIDAMUS · (ruled 467–427) one of the two hereditary kings at Sparta at the outbreak of the war. He led the first invasion into Attica; thus the ten-year fighting from 431 to 421 later came to be known as the Archidamian War. Thucydides records a number of insightful speeches by Archidamus; yet his record in the field reveals Spartan conservatism rather than the élan of a later Brasidas or Lysander.
ARISTOPHANES · (ca. 450–386?) Athenian comic poet whose eleven surviving plays caricatured many of the prominent Athenians of the later fifth century and often provide valuable information about wartime life in imperial Athens during the Peloponnesian War.
BRASIDAS · (d. 422) perhaps the most gifted foot soldier that Sparta produced; his expeditionary forces of Spartiates, allies, freed serfs, and helots caused havoc for the Athenians in northeastern Greece. His sudden death at Amphipolis curtailed Spartan offensive efforts abroad for nearly a decade and helped lead to the stalemate of 421–415.
CLEON · (d. 422) the infamous Athenian demagogue who, Aristophanes and Thucydides felt, was emblematic of the dangerous rabble-rousers coming to the fore following the death of Pericles. He was a vigorous supporter of imperialism, won a stunning victory at Sphacteria over the Spartans, and opposed Nicias’ efforts at the armistice in 422 before dying in battle at Amphipolis.
CYRUS THE YOUNGER · (d. 401) second son of King Darius II and a claimant to the Persian throne. At the close of the Peloponnesian War, Cyrus exercised authority over much of Asia Minor, and his close association with and subsidies to Lysander explain the miraculous creation of the Spartan fleet that eventually won the war.
DEMOSTHENES · (d. 413) innovative Athenian general (not to be confused with the fourth-century orator of the same name) whose daring and unconventional tactics brought stunning success at Amphilochia, Pylos, and Sphacteria but contributed to disaster during the Aetolian, Delium, and Sicilian campaigns. He was unceremoniously executed by the Sicilians after the Athenian surrender in 413.
DIODORUS · a Sicilian historian of the Roman Age who wrote circa 60–30 B.C. His universal history in forty books is mostly a compilation from lost Greek historians (most notably Ephorus) but often offers detail about the fighting of the Peloponnesian War otherwise unknown from Thucydides.
GYLIPPUS · the gifted Spartan general whose sudden arrival at Syracuse in 414 with a Peloponnesian relief force turned the tide against the Athenian efforts to take the city.
LAMACHUS · d. 414) the epitome of tough, soldierly competence at Athens, he often led Athenian troops successfully in the field before dying heroically in the battle for Syracuse.
LYSANDER · (d. 395) the brutal Spartan admiral most responsible for the competence of the Spartan fleet during the Ionian War and the ultimate victory over the Athenians in a series of bloody sea battles in the Hellespont and off the coast of Asia Minor. He survived the war but was slain in a minor clash against the Boeotians nine years later at Haliartus.
MINDARUS · (d. 411) successful Spartan admiral who transferred his base of operations from Ionia to the Hellespont to garner more Persian subsidies and disrupt Athenian grain importation. His death in battle at Cyzicus was a setback for Spartan hopes of maritime supremacy.
NICIAS · (470–413) a sober, conservative Athenian statesman who opposed the radical democrats in the power struggle following Pericles’ death; the peace of 421–415 bears his name. His legendary caution led him to oppose the Sicilian expedition. Yet once he was chosen general, his initial demands for massive forces, coupled with his timidity in using them, turned a probable tactical defeat into an unnecessary strategic catastrophe.
PERICLES · (ca. 495–429) as an annually elected general and political leader, he led the Athenians for almost thirty years, and was most responsible for the decision to build the monuments on the Acropolis, expand the Athenian empire, and go to war with Sparta. He died from the plague in the second year of the war, with disastrous consequences for the empire he had helped create.
PHARNABAZUS · (d. 370) Persian satrap of the Dascylium area around the Hellespont who took a more actively pro-Spartan stance than his rival provincial governor Tissaphernes, to the south.
PLUTARCH · (ca. A.D. 50–120) Greek biographer of the Roman period whose Parallel Lives compares illustrious Greek statesmen and generals with their likely Roman counterparts. His Alcibiades, Lysander, Nicias, and Pericles are valuable ancillaries to Thucydides’ history.
THUCYDIDES · (460–395?) the great Athenian historian whose narrative covers the origins of the war, its outbreak, and each year’s events, from 431 until 411, where it abruptly breaks off. Thucydides himself was an elected Athenian general but was exiled in 424 for twenty years, ostensibly for allowing Brasidas to capture Amphipolis.
TISSAPHERNES · (d. 395) Persian satrap, or governor, at Sa
rdis of the central coastal provinces of Asia Minor who championed the policy of playing Sparta and Athens off against each other, while professing support for the creation of a Spartan grand fleet.
XENOPHON · (428–354) Greek historian, philosopher, and military writer whose Hellenic history continues the narrative of Thucydides from 411 to the end of the war in 404, and then continues Greek history until the second battle of Mantinea (362).
NOTES
References to Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War are cited by book and section number only. Other ancient historians, such as Diodorus, Herodotus, and Polybius, are referred to by name alone if they are authors of only one titled work.
Prologue
1. For the dramatic description of the end of war, see Xenophon’s account in Hellenica, 2.2.19–25. Thucydides (2.8.4; cf. 1.139.3) reminds us that the Spartans originally proclaimed that they were going to war to “liberate Greece,” a slogan that, despite consistent Spartan brutality, most Greeks apparently rallied to at the conflict’s end. Yet elsewhere Thucydides seems to suggest that many city-states were not very ideological at all. Most simply wished to be left alone (“either democracy or oligarchy was fine, provided that they were free”), and thus predicated their allegiance to the Spartans on the idea that they might win, and in victory prove less able to reinstitute a coercive empire; e.g., 3.82.2–3, 8.48.5.
2. 1.23.4; cf. 3.23.5. Before we fault Thucydides for associating natural phenomena in some loose way with the war, we should consider that even in our own time earthquakes and famine are often seen in close connection with ongoing conflict. In late December 2003, a massive earthquake at Bam in northern Iran was immediately discussed in the Western press in association with the ongoing war against terror—and the degree to which the disaster and the presence of Western aid teams would strengthen or weaken the theocracy and its alleged support for terrorist enclaves.
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 43