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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  7. 4.96.3–6. Accidental killing would occur again during the Athenian night attack on the heights above Syracuse (7.44.1), but unfamiliarity with the rough terrain and darkness explains most of the confusion. Here we are reminded how dust, the density of formations, and the heavy infantry helmet could impair vision—or was it also in part not the senses per se but the sheer panic and fright of such close fighting that instead account for the irrational behavior? For the passages in ancient literature attesting to the common disorientation inherent in ancient hoplite battles, see Hanson, Western Way of War, 185–93.

  8. See Thucydides 7.44.1, remarking on the disastrous night attack above Syracuse.

  9. 1.15.2. Plato, Republic, 2.373E. On the historical importance of hoplite ideology, and scholarly controversy as to its origins and in Greek culture and society, see the review of the arguments in Hanson, “Hoplite Battle,” 230–32; cf. 213–15, 221. Occasional exceptions and alternatives to hoplite battle, which were usually lamented as such by the Greeks, are more likely to prove rather than refute the idea that the preferred and idealized way of settling disputes until the fifth century remained decisive fighting between phalanxes.

  10. Aristotle, Politics, 4.1297b16; Herodotus, 9.7.2; cf. 1.82; Strabo, 10.1.12; Polybius, 13.3–6; Demosthenes, Third Philippic, 48–50. The changing attitudes toward hoplite warfare from the sixth to fourth centuries are reviewed, with discussion of ancient passages, in Hanson, Other Greeks, 321–49.

  11. 1.106.2, 4.133.1–2, 4.40.2. “Best” and the “flower” are often the terms used by Thucydides to suggest that a dead hoplite, especially if killed by a semibarbarian, light-armed skirmisher, or someone poorer, was a far more grievous loss than a sailor, javelin thrower, or archer. For hoplite chauvinism, see Aristophanes, Peace, 1208–64, 1214–17, 1260–63, and Euripides, Phoenician Women, 1095–96.

  12. 5.75.3. Thucydides implies not so much that the victory at Mantinea proved that the Spartans were always invincible in war or that their trust in the supremacy in hoplite battle was sound. Rather, he means that through the trauma they inflicted on other Greeks in such a visible way at Mantinea, they made the rest of Greece realize that their own previous setbacks were due to bad luck rather than a fatal lapse in the old Spartan courage—and that such popular conceptions were vital in winning a war in which hundreds of Greek city-states had no real discernible ideology other than ensuring that they ended up on the winning side.

  13. “A thing of fear”: Pindar, fragment 120.5; cf. Thucydides 5.70. Lazenby, Spartan Army, 42–44, 125–34, is exhaustive in his collation of ancient sources to support his reconstruction of the battle, one prompted by his own undeniable admiration for the men of the Spartan phalanx. For a philological discussion of Thucydides’ battle description of Mantinea, see Gomme et al., Commentary, 5.89–130. There are imaginative illustrations of Spartan hoplites in Sekunda and Hook, Spartan Army, 33–44. See also Thucydides 6.16.6; cf. 5.74.1.

  14. 4.126. In general, the Greeks had a variety of strange ideas about what constituted a “civilized” society and what in turn relegated a people to the loose category of “barbarians.” Among the diverse criteria were things such as speaking fluent Greek; living in centralized autonomous city-states; farming trees, vines, and grain rather than herding; eating familiar Mediterranean foods (i.e., neither feasting on exotic animals nor drinking milk); and fighting as hoplites in the disciplined ranks of the phalanx.

  15. For various passages illustrating the nature of Greek generalship, see 4.44.2, 4.101.2, 5.60.6, 5.74.3, 7.5.2–3, and 7.8.2. Cf. also Hanson, Western Way of War, 107–16. Hamel has a valuable discussion of the short leash given to Athenian commanders by a mercurial Athenian assembly: Athenian Generals, 44–74; on fatalities, see 204–09.

  16. 4.93.4; 5.7l3. Most scholars see real tactical innovations in hoplite battle emerging only with the career of Epaminondas at Leuctra. For a different view that Greeks as early as the Peloponnesian War massed in depth beyond eight shields, sometimes used cavalry and reserves with hoplites, and in various contexts put their best troops on the left, see in general the summation of arguments in Hanson, “Epaminondas,” 205–07.

  17. Lysias, 14.7, 14.10–15; cf. Plato, Republic, 8.556D. Perhaps we see the social divide best in the careers of the aristocratic and mounted estate-owning Alcibiades and his poorer stone-mason mentor, Socrates, who fought on foot at two battles and a siege. For a long list of ancient passages that privilege hoplite over cavalry service, see Spence, Cavalry, 168–72.

  18. 4.96.3–6; 7.44.7–8. It was worse than that: not only did some armies lack distinctive letters or insignia on their shields, but inasmuch as most phalanxes used about the same type of equipment, it was nearly impossible, even without the normal dust, to distinguish friend from foe by appearance.

  19. 5.11, 5.74, 6.71.1; cf. 4.97.1, 4.134.2. Lest we think hoplite battle is a sidelight of Greek culture and marginal to the more heralded legacy of Hellenic civilization, we should remember that our modern “trophy” is simply a transliteration of tropê (“a turning”)—the ceremonial spot where the enemy phalanx gave way and victory was thus assured.

  20. 5.73.4. Perhaps the Spartan disdain for pursuit reflects not merely the practical difficulties of running in full armor after the defeated or the heralded Spartan restraint regarding killing in less than a fair fight but, rather, inborn Laconian arrogance: why chase the defeated when one can easily defeat them on any occasion should they foolishly attempt to hazard their luck again? In contrast, the Boeotians, for example, at Delium chased the Athenians for miles to the Oropus and over Mount Parnes—a retreat that quickly turned into a mythic collective nightmare for the next few decades.

  21. The aftershocks of Delium are discussed in Hanson, Ripples, 199–212. For a Greek, at least before the later years of the Peloponnesian War, a man delighted or ruined his family not so much by dying as by doing so either heroically or shamefully. For the ridicule of Cleonymus at Delium, see Aristophanes, Peace, 446, 672, 1295; and cf. Birds, 289, 1475. For the noble aspidephoros: Birds, 1095–96.

  22. Strauss offers conjectures about the total number of Athenian hoplite and thetic dead in the war (Athens After, 80–81). We have few reliable figures for how many Spartans died during the war but must keep in mind Thucydides’ warning about Mantinea, that when dealing with Spartan disclosures about casualties “it is difficult to know the truth” (5.74.3; cf. 5.68.2). For the percentages of those killed in hoplite battle, see the study by Krentz, “Casualties.”

  23. 6.17.5–6. Alcibiades also claimed that states had trouble getting hoplites—implying that they wanted such assets but found the old agrarian classes who made up the ranks of the phalanx too few and far between in a new-style war that ranged from Sicily to Asia Minor. I am not so sure he is correct; in the war’s aftermath there were plenty of hoplite mercenaries to join the Ten Thousand in Asia Minor, most from Arcadia and Achaea, areas mostly untouched by the war, while hardly any came from Attica, which had been ravaged extensively; cf. Garlan, War, 102–03.

  24. See Plato, Laws, 4.707C—E. For “moronic,” cf. 5.41.2. George S. Patton was said to have wished to fight Rommel tank to tank, his Sherman against the panzer leader’s Panther. And in the heated rhetoric leading up to the Iraq War of spring 2003, Saddam Hussein was reported to have challenged George W. Bush to a personal duel to decide the fate of his Baathist regime.

  25. 1.141.5. Whereas the Athenian land army would have met defeat in any battle with the Spartan phalanx, it is still not clear whether such a significant home force of 30,000 infantrymen was all that outnumbered or outmanned by the Peloponnesian forces during the later annual invasions.

  26. 4.34.1. We receive some of the idea of the psychological element central to hoplite battle when Thucydides here remarks that the Athenians “were suffering greatly” from the very thought of fighting Spartans.

  27. Eighty-three battles: Paul, “Two Battles,” 308. There is a plethora of evidence in Thucydides on the pivotal role of skirmi
shers and light-armed troops and the vulnerability of hoplites to such forces. In general, see the surprising variety of scenarios where light-armed troops were used effectively: 2.29.5, 2.31.2–3, 2.79.4, 2.100, 3.1.2, 3.98, 3.107–08, 4.34.1–2, 4.44.1, 4.123.4, 5.10.9, 6.21, 6.70.2–3, 7.4.6, 7.6.2–3, 7.81–82.

  28. 4.40.2, 4.73.2–4. It is not clear whether by the time of the outbreak of the war the soldiers of the phalanx were still largely farmers, who as in the past had earned such prestigious hoplite service by owning enough land (about ten acres) to meet the requisite census rubric, or those who now had enough money to buy the arms and armor, or the poorer who were simply drafted and armed by the state.

  29. Untraditional battle: 5.56.4–5; Aristophanes, Clouds, 987–90; cf. Plato, Laws, 4.706A—B. Symmetrical warfare—fighting in similar fashions and landscapes between two evenly matched powers—can, of course, lead to atrocious casualties if both sides follow the deadly protocols of Western warfare. Wars from the Roman Civil Wars to Verdun prove that well enough.

  30. 4.42–44. Indeed, a symptom of the malaise of Greek society during the Peloponnesian War was the steady erosion in the treatment of the dead, brought about by the sheer frequency of killing and dying, and the growing hatred between Greeks, as we see from the rotting bodies at plague-ridden Athens, the exposure of corpses after Delium, the abandonment of those wounded and the remains of the killed amid the waves after Arginusae, and the apparently common practice of throwing captured crews overboard on the high seas. See, for example, Pritchett, Greek State, 4.235–41.

  31. See 4.134 and 3.91. Thucydides’ genius was that he saw that all of the Greeks’ secondary fighting for some three decades was in some way caught up with the Spartan-Athenian death struggle, tangential though these border skirmishes might have been to the larger outcome of that war.

  32. 5.10–12. On the rare parataxis of the Peloponnesian War, see Pritchett, Greek State, 4.45–51.

  33. 4.55.4, 4.56.1. We are not sure whether Thucydides made these characteristically sweeping appraisals as events transpired or inserted such summations in his final draft after the war was completed and with the benefit of hindsight. That ambiguity may explain his peculiar redundancy in announcing a series of critical turning points—the plague, Mantinea, Sphacteria, Sicily—that all supposedly changed the course of the war, but then failing to distinguish which of these, in fact, were the more important of the landmark events.

  34. On Agis’ army, see 5.60.3. For Thucydides’ various pronouncements about the importance of Argos’ new independent stance and the ultimate significance of Mantinea, see 5.29.1–3, 5.66.2–3; cf. 1.141.2.

  35. See, for example, 5.71–72; Xenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, 11; Herodotus 9.53–55; Plutarch, Moralia, 241F.

  36. For inscriptions that may record the dead from the 418 battle, see the arguments in Pritchett, Topography, 2.50–52; cf. also his War, 4.143–44; his identification of the Mantinean dead of 418 with the inscription remains tentative.

  37. Again, see 5.68.2; cf. 5.74.2. Mantinea was Thucydides’ model battle, and from it we are to surmise what the fighting was probably like earlier at Delium and Solygia, or later at Syracuse as well. For an analysis of the fighting, see J. Lazenby, Spartan Army, 125–34, and Peloponnesian War, 121–29. Lazenby’s careful reconstruction is augmented by Kagan, Peace, 107–35; Grote, Greece, 7.75–93; and Gomme, Commentary, 3.89–127.

  38. Diodorus 12.79.6. There is some disagreement over this notion of “collusion.” Kagan, Peace, 131–33, has a brief discussion of Spartan motivations. For the larger question of to what degree armies predicated their tactics on the precise nature of the enemy across the battle line, see Hanson, “Hoplite Obliteration,” 206–07, for instances in Greek history where hoplite armies seem to be especially cognizant of the quality of troops directly opposite them on the battlefield—and sometimes made critical political decisions in response.

  39. On the Thespians’ postbellum fate, cf. 4.133 and Hanson, “Hoplite Obliteration,” 208–14.

  40. 6.69–71. The nature of the Syracusan campaign reflects the logistical problems with hoplite warfare once it was asked to transcend the three-day-march radius of normal operations. To transport an army of some 5,100 hoplites—about the number in the first armada sent to Sicily—not only were a large number of ships needed but accommodations had to be made for some two hundred tons of bronze, iron, and wooden panoplies along with personal servants to carry such appurtenances. Thus, even if the hoplites could double as rowers—and more often they did not, but rather were auxiliary marines in numbers ranging from 10 to 30 per ship—a fleet of perhaps some 60 ships was needed to transport soldiers, servants, and equipment.

  Chapter 6

  1. The siege is infamous largely because of Thucydides’ long description of the lengthy ordeal (2.3–4, 2.71–78, 3.20–24, 3.52–53, 3.68). Certainly, there were other, much larger states that were sacked or captured during the war—Potidaea, Mytilene, Melos—about whose death throes we learn little. Plataea’s proximity to Athens and the assault’s role in starting the conflagration gave it an importance not commensurate with its small size or strategic worth. In addition, because it was the first siege of the war, and a complex one at that, Thucydides uses it as a template of sorts that allows abbreviated mention of later assaults in his history. In general, cf. Hornblower, Commentary, 1.236–42; Kern, Siege Warfare, 97–108.

  2. See Pritchett, Greek State, 5.218–19, for a list of such mini-holocausts, which suggests the greater frequency of sieges that explains the rise of mass killing.

  3. 3.68.4. But nothing was quite “the end” when it was a matter of the internecine fighting of the Greek city-states. Plataea was resettled after the war—and renewed its time-honored hatred of the Thebans.

  4. Thucydides (1.11)believed that the earlier Greeks simply lacked the capital to carry on sieges of any magnitude. In addition, before the rise of maritime powers like Corinth, Athens, and Syracuse, most city-states were agrarian in nature, their citizens farmers who could ill afford months away from their crops to invade or besiege a foreign city.

  5. 1.102.2. See Herodotus 9.70.2 and 9.102.2–4, for the idea that the Athenians’ reputation for skill in taking fortifications predated the Persian War. Athenian democrats saw no problem in helping Spartans put down restive helots—an enslaved people whose liberation would have to wait for the great emancipator Epaminondas and his famous invasion of 369.

  6. 5.91.1–2, 5.111.1–2. The key qualifier here was “due to the fear.” In fact, the Athenians abandoned a disastrous siege in Egypt in 454, and a few months after this exchange with the Melians would suffer mayhem in Sicily—but only after sustaining horrendous losses before quitting.

  7. 4.51; cf. 4.133. Walls seem to have induced a fear at Athens as much as the chimera of weapons of mass destruction did to the American government after September II.

  8. 1.29.5; 1.98.4. For a narrative of these brutal sieges, see Meiggs, Athenian Empire, 68–174. We sometimes forget that while Aeschylus and Sophocles presented their tragedies and Pericles began to envision a majestic Acropolis, the Athenian empire grew through the bloody subjugation of autonomous states that by their dogged resistance apparently wanted little part of such a renaissance. For most Greek communities local autonomy could be a more powerful desire than even enforced democracy.

  9. Aristotle, Politics, 1255A; cf. Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 7.5.73, and Euripides, Hecuba, 808–12. We do not know how most were reduced to slave status in the Greek world, but other than being born to servile parents or falling victim to kidnapping, the aftermath of sieges seems to have been the most common avenue of enslavement.

  10. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.12–15. Within a decade after Athens’ defeat, the Athenians began to grow more hostile to Thebes than to Sparta. Athenians and Spartans later served side by side as mercenaries in the march with Cyrus the Younger (401), and joined to fight Epaminondas at the second battle of Mantinea (362).

  11. On enslavement, se
e Pritchett, Greek State, 5.227–30. Most often we are told that “all” or “not a few” were enslaved, rather than given specific figures.

  12. 4.115.1–3, 4.116.1–2; cf. 5.83.2. Brasidas is clearly one of Thucydides’ favorites, given the former’s brilliant strategy to hit the Athenian empire far to the north, and to do so largely with land forces acting independently, far from home, and without supply lines, in a manner reminiscent of the 1864–65 long marches of William Tecumseh Sherman through Georgia and the Carolinas, where he likewise lived off the land and sought to bring the war home behind traditional lines.

  13. On the fate of the generals, see Hamel, Athenian Generals, 43–44. Usually, the assembly exercised almost complete control of the conduct of armies in the field, any independent-thinking generals knowing quite well that at the end of the campaign they would have to face a moody Athenian citizenry that through a simple majority vote might well exile, fine, or execute any commanders whom they felt to have been nonaggressive.

  14. 5.111.1, 5.113.1; cf. Grote, Greece, 7.114. In one of the great ironies in Thucydides’ history, the Athenians are made to mock the Melians’ solace in “hope” (“hope—danger’s comforter,” 5.103.1)—that perhaps succor might still come yet from Sparta. Yet less than three years later Nicias would offer an almost identical Melian argument to his own trapped and about to be extinguished army of some 40,000, reminding them not to quit but to remember that “it is necessary to have hope.” Cf. 7.77.I.

  15. Euripides, Hecuba, 132–33, 454–57; Trojan Women, 95–98; Phoenician Women, 1195, 884; cf. 882. To the degree that we can detect a consistent ideology about the war, it is more likely that Euripides objected to the needless slaughter of civilians and neutrals, which, in his view, could only weaken the Athenian effort to win Hellenic “hearts and minds.”