Two major powers had emerged in Greece: Sparta, a land power, militaristic and authoritarian; Athens, a sea power, comparatively democratic. Political rivalry resulted in wars that tarnished Athens’ image and culminated in her defeat.
■ Ancient Authorities
Ucydides, the Athenian historian on whom we chiefly rely for our knowledge of the long fifth-century war between Athens and Sparta, was particularly well qualified to write on this theme. He was fully contemporary with the events which he described and commanded both troops and ships in the course of the war. It should have been no disgrace to him that he was unable, in 424 BC, to prevent the Thracian city of Amphipolis from falling into Spartan hands; Brasidas, the Spartan general who opposed him, was a commander of rare military genius. However, Thucydides was blamed at Athens for his failure and spent the remainder of the war in exile. During this time, one assumes, he had abundant leisure to collect material for his history, but there are reasons for thinking that he did not actually write it until after his recall to Athens on amnesty terms at the end of the war. Remarks made in the course of his narrative prove that he was aware of the Athenian surrender in 404 BC. Yet his history ends with the events of 411 BC. He apparently died before he could finish. It should also be noted that Thucydides was politically well qualified as the historian in his own times. He was a relative of the pro-Spartan statesman Cimon and a warm admirer of the anti-Spartan Pericles. His political impartiality is thus not attributable to indifference, but to a two-sided commitment. He must have been a prey to divided loyalties.
Thucydides’ history was continued from the point where it left off by Xenophon in his Hellenica. Xenophon was himself a military commander of outstanding ability. Whether he really completed the story of the Peloponnesian War is perhaps a question of opinion, for he regarded the war as ending with the destruction of the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami in 405 BC. Certainly, this event deprived Athens of essential supplies and led to the surrender of the city in the following year. Other historians, however, of whose works only fragments survive, took a different view, and regarded the war as ending with the revival of Athens ten years later.
To Plutarch, who flourished in the late first and early second century AD, we are also indebted. His biographies of Cimon and Pericles are obviously relevant to the period which immediately preceded the Peloponnesian War and to its early phases. We have only a very imperfect account from Thucydides of the 50 or more years which elapsed between the defeat of the Persian invaders and the beginning of war between Athens and Sparta, so the evidence that a later writer has passed on to us must not be despised.
Xenophon apart, we are unable to compare Thucydides with those who followed him as historians. Of Theopompos, Ephorus and Cratippus we possess only scattered fragments and testimonies. A most impressive excerpt of Greek history, which seems to be a continuation of Thucydides, has been recovered from an Egyptian papyrus manuscript, but this fragment is only 900 lines long. Our loss is all the greater because the balance of advantage does not always and in every way lie with the contemporary historian. History calls for the study of events in relation to their causes and effects. This presupposes that a historian has lived long enough or late enough to be aware of those effects. Yet, when all has been said, we must congratulate ourselves on having inherited the history of an ancient war from the hand of one who took part in it.
■ Political Background
The conflict between Cimon and Pericles, to which we have alluded, was perhaps to some extent a clash of personalities. It can easily be interpreted as the struggle between a warm-hearted military extrovert and an intellectual – not to say highbrow – orator. But this conflict reflected wide differences of attitude which were evident not only in Athenian politics but in political activity throughout Greece. Were the Greeks to remain united under traditional Spartan leadership, or was it to be accepted that, as a result of the Persian Wars, Athens offered an alternative – if divisive – hegemony? The question was not purely strategic. Pericles himself, in the early years of the Peloponnesian War, eloquently drew attention to Athenian cultural supremacy. Indeed, Athenian supremacy in this field stood in no need of advertisement. But the polarity of attitudes which expressed itself in the Peloponnesian War was also characterized by acute ideological differences: the differences which existed between democratic and oligarchic structures of power.
In our own day, democracy is a word which means different things to different people. But the Greek meaning of the word corresponds to no modern usage. Athenian democracy meant the political supremacy of an Assembly open to all citizens. Citizenship was an exclusive privilege. It excluded women, it excluded slaves, and it excluded a numerous section of the community, drawn from other Greek states, which could not lay claim to citizen ancestry. There was no question of representative democracy. Magistrates were elected or appointed by lot, but the Assembly members met, deliberated and voted together, in the open air, simply by virtue of their status as citizens of Athens.
At Sparta, by contrast, power was nominally in the hands of two hereditary kings but rested in reality with five ephors (supervisors). They were elected annually by narrowly defined citizen assembly. There was also a gerousia (senate) of twenty-eight1 men over 60 years old, elected by the same assembly from among the most notable families of Sparta. The citizen assembly could approve or reject, by acclamation, the proposals made by the kings, ephors and senate. Otherwise, its members had not the right to speak; they only qualified for attendance at 30 years of age.
Compared with Sparta, Athens seems to merit the description of “democracy”. In the last resort, all government means control by a minority – for only a minority can produce that unity of directive which the word “government” implies, However, the governing minority may be comparatively large or comparatively small. At Athens it was large; at Sparta it was small. In this sense only is there any correspondence between the ancient and modern uses of the word democracy.
Nevertheless, there is one matter in which Sparta appears to have been more democratic than Athens. This concerns the status of women. At neither city did women possess the right to vote or take part in any political activity. At Athens they enjoyed very few civil and legal rights, although there was an important distinction between those who were the daughters of citizens and those who were not. Only the former could contract a legal marriage and produce children who were citizens. At Sparta, however, a woman of citizen family possessed one right which was not accorded to any woman in Athens: she might own property. The social consequences – and, in the long run, the political consequences – of this legal right were important. Writing of the Spartan constitution in the fourth century BC, Aristotle accused the Spartans of what we should describe as petticoat rule.
However that may be, the Spartans themselves certainly regarded the ideological aspect of the Peloponnesian War as cardinal. As soon as they had occupied Athens and made themselves masters of Greece, they established oligarchies in all the main cities and provided armed garrisons to ensure the continuance of oligarchic power. Admittedly, the situation did not last; in many instances – above all at Athens – democratic feeling was too strong to be overawed by the presence of a handful of troops. Sparta, in fact, with a declining citizen population, lacked the manpower to garrison Greece, and her reputation as a liberator suffered disastrously from the attempt to do so.
■ Athenian Sea Power
Spartan weakness at sea, as contrasted with Athenian strength, had been underlined by the events of the Persian Wars. The instrument by which the anti-Persian policy of Ciman was now translated into the anti-Spartan policy of Pericles was the alliance of Aegean maritime states known to modern historians as the Delian League. After the disgrace and recall of Pausanias, the Spartans and other Peloponnesian states at last recognized the reality of Athenian leadership at sea and were content to shed their own naval responsibilities.
The League, over which Athenian stewards presided, had its headquarters and treasury at Delos. Member states which could not so conveniently provide ships contributed money. The organization served its original purpose well, but even before peace was reached with Persia some members had vainly attempted secession and had been coerced. The Euboean city of Carystus was even forced to join.
In 447 BC, Athenian ambitions of expansion westward at last met with disaster on Boeotian battlefields. Athens had been involved in war against Corinth, Thebes and Sparta. It was obvious that the Delian League, invoked against Persia, would be used by Athens against other Greek states. At the same time, it must have been clear not only to Pericles but to any intelligent Athenian that the city’s independence was conditional on its domination of the Aegean. The situation has many parallels in history. The autonomy of one power can be secured only through the subjugation of others. Already, in 454 BC, the League treasury at Delos had been transferred to the custody of the city of Athens.
For many of the Greek city states at this period, the protection afforded by Athenian sea power had become simply a protection racket. Yet the Athenians could hardly have maintained their position of dominance had they been unable to rely on a nucleus of goodwill among the islands and coastal cities of the Aegean Sea. We have already drawn attention to the way in which ideological considerations often contributed to the creation and preservation of such goodwill. To these, there may also be added colonial and racial ties.
Apart from their sense of Greek nationality and – more importantly – local state citizenship, the Greeks were conscious of racial allegiance. Athenian support for the Ionian Greeks, and subsequent ability to rally their loyalty, owed something to the fact that the Athenians were themselves of Ionian stock. Like the Aeolians of the north-east Aegean, the Ionian Greeks had interbred in prehistoric times with the pre-Hellenic peoples of the Aegean lands. The Dorians, who emerged in Greece at a later date, were examples of comparatively pure Nordic stock. The temperamental differences which resulted are comparable with those which today distinguish Nordic from Mediterranean peoples. Both Sparta and Athens were, on different occasions, able to take advantage of racial sentiment, and the Greeks of the central Aegean were predominantly Ionian.
To these circumstances it may be added that Athens exerted power and influence through her many colonies in the Aegean and Black Sea regions. From as early as the eighth century, colonization had been a well-recognized procedure in Greece in relieving population pressures in a country that was by no means fertile. Fleets carrying settlers were sent overseas. The number of these settlers ranged from mere hundreds to a matter of thousands. It was important that they should find suitable territory where no organized political power yet existed. Colonies usually preserved traditional ties with their mother city and could themselves become the mothers of colonies. Ordinarily, colonial foundations of this kind were autonomous, but there was also a type of settlement known as a “cleruchy”, where the settlers preserved citizen rights in the founding city. It was common Athenian practice to found cleruchies in conquered territory.
■ Athenian Diplomacy and Naval Strategy
Athenian wealth, arising from the silver mines at Laurium in south-east Attica, would have been dissipated in communal handouts if Themistocles had not diverted it, during the period between the two Persian invasions, into naval armament. To win support for this measure, he found it more effective to incite jealousy against Athens’ seafaring neighbour, the island of Aegina, than to reawaken fears of Persia. But there can be no doubt that his policy saved Greece from Persian domination.
When the tide of invasion receded, Sparta, suspicious of growing Athenian power, attempted to dissuade the Athenians from rebuilding their ruined city walls. As a pretext, it was urged that the cities of northern Greece should dismantle their fortifications in order to deprive any future invader of a Greek base – such as Thebes had been for Mardonius. Themistocles ingeniously protracted negotiations on the matter while the Athenians hastily rebuilt their city wall, and Sparta was soon faced with a fait accompli. Such, at least, is the story told by Thucydides. Plutarch quotes Theopompus’ view that Themistocles bribed the Spartan ephors into acquiescence. Indeed, there is room for both stories: artful diplomacy may have been combined with bribery.
Themistocles was also responsible for the fortification of Piraeus, the main port of Athens. This represented a reversal of traditional Athenian policy, which had been concentrated on agricultural self-sufficiency. Later, Long Walls were built connecting the city with Piraeus and with the minor port of Phaleron. The double walls to Piraeus, which were about four miles (6.4km) long, provided a corridor about 200 yards (183m) wide, by which sea-borne supplies could reach the city in defiance of besieging armies.
It needed only one more step to complete the grand strategy which Themosticles had initiated: the establishment of a network of naval bases in the Aegean. Such a network was provided by the so-called Delian League. Its importance can be understood by reference to the structure of ancient ships. They were light and comparatively frail and were not made to endure rough weather for long. They hugged the coast and made for shelter at the first sign of a storm. It was not necessary to find an anchorage: a beach was good enough, for the same light construction that endangered these vessels in storms permitted them easily to be drawn up on shore. But beaches were inconveniently few on the rocky and inhospitable coastline of the eastern Mediterranean. Most good anchorages served as ports to city states, whose position they had perhaps originally determined. It was essential, both for war and for trade, to make use of such bases, and this end could best be guaranteed by political domination of the states concerned. The Athenian people well understood their needs, and they identified their needs with their rights.
The funds which accrued from the contributions to the League were no less vital to the maintenance of a powerful navy. Apart from the expense of building, maintaining and repairing ships, rowers had to be paid, and in a trireme these were numerous – upwards of 150 in a single vessel.2 Rowers were recruited from the lower citizen classes at Athens and were paid a daily wage. Those who pulled at the longer, upperbank oars sometimes earned more money than those rowing in the lower banks. The armed marines on each vessel were hoplites, drawn from the wealthier, arms-bearing classes. Even for hoplites, the state latterly provided a spear and shield, while requiring the individual to furnish the rest of his panoply.
■ The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War
Athenian westward ambitions, rather than possession of Aegean bases, provoked the Peloponnesian War. Such ambitions were bound to be entertained mainly at the expense of Corinth, a maritime city with an enviable position on the Isthmus, facilitating that westward economic expansion to which the Athenians so eagerly aspired. In 459 BC, the Athenians had intervened on behalf of the smaller and nearer Isthmus city of Megara against Corinth. In 435 BC, intervention was still the political weapon and Corinth still the enemy. The Corinthians were at the time involved in a quarrel with their own colony of Corcyra (Corfu). After a naval battle near Sybota, off the coast of Epirus, they would have overwhelmed the colonists if Athenian ships had not intervened to save Corcyra.
The next clash, at Potidaea, was also an involvement with Corinth. The Potidaeans were unwilling members of the Delian League and, encouraged by the Macedonian king, would have seceded from it. Potidaea, on the western coast of the Chalcidic peninsula, was a colony of Corinth and, faced with Athenian coercion, appealed to the mother city for help. Despite this, the Athenians besieged and eventually captured the city in 430 BC. Pericles’ attempt at this time to gain control of Megara by an economic blockade may be regarded as a retaliatory threat for what happened at Potidaea. No doubt, he would gladly have applied the same treatment to Corinth herself. But the larger city, unlike Megara, lay on the west of the Isthmus, with outlets to the Gulf of Corinth. The port of Megara was situated on the Saronic Gulf.
Other states saw themselves threatened by Athenian policy and actions, especially Thebes and the Boeotians, who would be encircled by a traditionally hostile power if Athens held the bases at which she aimed on the Gulf of Corinth. In the face of the general Athenian threat, Sparta, with its Peloponnesian satellites, was, with some difficulty, persuaded to support the struggle against Athens. Throughout the war, she remained the least bitter of Athens’ enemies and at the end of it was the most clement of the victors ranged against her.
The war had begun as a naval conflict with Corinth and continued in this way throughout its earlier phases. Corinthian ships were now supplemented by those if Peloponnesian allies, but Athens still controlled the seas. In 429 BC, the Athenian admiral Phormio, by brilliant ramming tactics, twice defeated the Corinthian and Peloponnesian fleets at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth.
However, as the war went on the Corinthians learned their lessons and designed war galleys of a new type. A high prow had given their boarding parties and missile throwers an advantage, but in ramming tactics the upper part of the prow never came into collision with the enemy. The lower war galley of the Athenian fleet made an impact both with water- line ram and prolonged prow. Taught by disasters, the Corinthians introduced lower, reinforced prows. This facilitated naval tactics of a new kind: head-on ramming. The Athenian galleys, lightly structured for manoeuvre and broadside ramming, were in their turn at a disadvantage.
■ Spartan Strategy
Spartan strategy in the early phases of the war seems to have been singularly ineffectual. The Spartans did not attempt to besiege Athens but contented themselves with a yearly invasion of Attica, ravaging as much Athenian farmland as they had time for and hoping thereby to provoke the Athenians into a pitched battle. This was the situation which had been foreseen by both Themistocles and Pericles. The Athenian rural population drove its flocks and herds to Euboea for safety and itself withdrew behind the city’s walls. The Long Walls to the coast safeguarded the access to seaborne supplies, and the Athenian navy, merchant fleet and chain of Aegean bases guaranteed the transport of corn from the other side of the Aegean, particularly the Black Sea area. Admittedly, as a result of unhealthy crowding within the walls, plague exterminated a large proportion of the population. But that was hardly due to strategic calculation on anybody’s part.
The Peloponnesian War afforded very few instances of classic hoplite engagements. Just as the Spartans knew better than to attempt a siege, so the Athenians were wise enough not to challenge Sparta to a pitched battle. There was one spectacular exception. In 418 BC, after a period of uneasy truce, an Athenian detachment, at the instance of Alcibiades, the city’s brilliant younger statesman and general, was sent out in support of Sparta’s rebellious satellite allies and a pitched battle resulted at Mantinea in the northern Peloponnese.
The Spartans proved that their flair for hoplite fighting had not suffered from lack of practice. On going into action, a hoplite battle-line often developed a dangerous left-to-right drift, as a result of which the left wing could easily become enveloped by the enemy’s right. This was because the man on the extreme right instinctively edged outwards for fear of exposing his unshielded right flank; the remainder closed up on him, as each man sought the protection of his neighbour’s shield arm. At Mantinea (418 BC), both armies tended to outflank the opposing left wings.
Fearing to be encircled, the Spartan king, Agis, attempted at the last moment to extend his left wing and to reinforce the attenuated line of battle with troops from the right. Two officers who were responsible for the reinforcing movement did not obey. In the resulting confusion, the line developed a flap through which the enemy poured. However, the troops on the right so quickly rolled up the forces opposed to them that they were able to turn round and overwhelm the enemy centre – until that moment victorious. The superiority of the Spartan hoplite, even when hindered by bungling generalship, was once more demonstrated in this action.
■ The Spartan Army
Concerning the battle of Mantinea, Thucydides points out that a Spartan king in the field could only rely upon an established chain of command through which his orders quickly reached all units. Subordinate to the king were the “polemarchs”, who transmitted his commands to the troops through the officers in charge of units. At Mantinea, the largest Spartan unit was the lochors: rather less in numerical strength than a modern battalion. It was divided into fourpentecostyes, each consisting of four enomotiai: companies and platoons respectively. The Spartan army on this occasion contained seven battalions.
The whole battle front measured 448 men from one wing to the other; behind these were supporting ranks, for the most part eight deep. The members of the king’s bodyguard were referred to as hippeis (knights), though by the time of the Peloponnesian War they served mostly on foot. At Mantinea, mounted troops were in fact deployed on either wing of the Spartan army to protect the flanks. But to judge from King Agis’ anxieties, either their quality or their quantity inspired little confidence.
Thucydides seems to approve the efficiency of the Spartan chain of command, remarking in effect that the Spartan army was really an officer corps in which every man felt responsible for seeing that orders were carried out. However, one is familiar with the situation in which there are “too many chiefs and too few Indians”. Organization of this kind does not always produce the best discipline. At the battle of Plataea, the refusal of a Spartan junior commander to obey Pausanias’ order to retreat created widespread and dangerous confusion. At Mantinea, the polemarchs on the right, disregarding the kings’ word of command, proceeded to win the battle in their own way. They were subsequently put on trial in Sparta and sentenced to banishment, for cowardice, so Thucydides says; one might have expected the charge to be disobedience.
Commands were, in any case, difficult to give to a hoplite army in action. Helmets – especially of the Corinthian type – must have seriously impaired their wearers’ hearing. But trumpets were used for signalling and the Spartan army marched to the sound of the flute – which apparently had a steadying effect. Hand signals were also given. It has been suggested that the supposedly ill-judged order at Amphipolis which exposed the Athenian column to an enemy sally on its unshielded side was an instance of signals being misunderstood. The use of signals was also sometimes employed in a tactical ruse. In an early battle with the Argives at Sepeia (494 BC), the Spartans sounded a signal which meant “fall out for dinner” and thus threw the enemy off guard before mounting an unexpected attack. Comparable tactics were used by the Spartan admiral Lysander against the Athenians at the crucial battle of Aegospotami. In this case, the signal for the surprise attack was a bronze shield flashed in the sunlight.
■ The Athenian Army
At Athens, ten generals (strategoi) were elected yearly by a show of hands in the Assembly. Unlike other officials, they could be re-elected and in this way, like Pericles who was re-elected repeatedly, they might exercise great personal influence and ensure an all-important continuity of policy. Their responsibilities were those of defence and security, which, as we know from modern politics, are often of cardinal importance. Fortifications and munitions, both military and naval armaments, recruitment of soldiers and seamen and the imposition of war taxes all fell within the scope of their administration.
As in Sparta, there was a military hierarchy to administer the armed forces. The infantry was commanded by ten taxiarchoi, with junior officers (lochagoi) in charge of companies. The cavalry were under the command of two senior officers (hipparchoi); subordinate to them were ten phylarchoi – literally “tribal leaders”. For recruitment, both of cavalry and infantry, was based on “tribes”, the ten local groupings of the civil population. We may compare our own county regiments.
Apart from administration, all the above-mentioned officers, including the elected generals, might be commanders in the field, taking responsibility for strategic and – up to a point – tactical decisions. But once a hoplite battle had been joined, the din and density of the fray was such as to leave little room for command or manoeuvre, while the light-armed troops, both at Sparta and at Athens, seems to have been subject to very little organization of any kind.
The advantage which the Spartan hoplite corps enjoyed over all other such forces in Greece lay in the fact that it was a professional army, devoting its whole time to military training and activities. This was the result of political and economic circumstances; the Spartan citizens regarded themselves as a small garrison dominating a population of potentially hostile serfs. They could also rely on this population, together with the community of free farmers who did not enjoy the franchise, to nourish and maintain them. The full citizen thus had the wherewithal to pay the necessary military mess fees.
The Athenian citizen, although his case was different, did not lack military training and experience. At the age of 18, Athenians of the well-to-do hoplite classes were called up for a two-year course of military training. This included instruction in the use of arms, tactics and fortifications. After that, they remained on the register as liable to military service until the age of 60, although those under the age of 20 or over 50 could be called on only for garrison duties, i.e., service in Attica. Speaking in 431 BC, Pericles claimed that Athens possessed 13,000 hoplites, with 16,000 more on garrison duty. This latter number included not only the older and younger citizens, but also those of the resident aliens who could afford heavy armour.
The Athenians used cavalry in the Peloponnesian War, but did not always put it to the best possible use. As at Sparta, membership of the order of cavalry had important social implications. But some of the wealthier citizens continued to serve as “knights” on the battlefield. During the earlier period of the war, when the Spartans were invading Attica yearly, Pericles sent out cavalry detachments to chase off enemy raiding parties. About this time, there was a cavalry skirmish between the Athenians and their Thessalian allies, on the one hand, and the Boeotian cavalry on the other. The Athenians held their own until hoplites came to the aid of the Boeotians. At Mantinea, the Athenian cavalry was able to extricate many of the Athenian fugitives from the battle, and at Delium in 424 BC, where good use of cavalry made the Thebans victorious, the Athenians at least had sufficient cavalry on their own side to protect some of their infantry in the retreat. Alcibiades, then a young officer, was himself mounted and was able to come to the aid of the philosopher Socrates, who was serving on foot.
The Athenians also underestimated the value of light-armed troops until quite late in the war. In this respect, they learned their lesson as a result of painful experience. They had themselves, in 429 BC, suffered disastrously at the hands of the Chalcidian cavalry and light troops, when the cities of that area revolted against the Athenian League. The Athenian hoplite campaigns in western Greece, among the peasant communities of Aetolia, had also run into serious trouble in 426 BC when beset by light-armed guerrilla fighters. Javelins, slings and sometimes bows, were the main weapons of the light-armed fighter, who avoided coming to grips with the hoplite. He carried a sword only for emergencies. Apart from guerrilla tactics, missiles were of obvious importance in a siege.
■ Sieges of the War
By the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, Greek siegecraft had, in contrast to earlier times and despite Spartan tardiness in this direction, become highly sophisticated. In the first years of the war, the Boeotian town of Plataea near the Attic frontier became an object of contention and was besieged by a combination of Boeotian and Peloponnesian forces. There remained in the town only a military garrison, the noncombatant population having taken refuge in Athens.
The besiegers built an earthen ramp reinforced with timber against the town wall, but the Plataeans raised the height of their own wall and sapped the ramp from beneath. The Peloponnesians plugged the gap made by the sappers with clay and wattle; to which the Plataeans replied by building new fortifications within the threatened sector of their walls. When battering-rams approached, their heads were lassoed or broken off by heavy beams dropped from above. At attempt was made to fire the town, but this was foiled by a drenching thunderstorm. A double crenellated and turreted circumvallation was then built with a view to starving the defenders. The outer wall was a precaution against any surprise by an Athenian relief force, but the Athenians feared to be involved in a pitched battle with Spartan hoplites and no relief was sent. At last, the Plataeans, having equipped themselves with scaling ladders, captured a section of the double wall and held it, while 200 of their number escaped to Athens, having first deliberately taken the wrong road to mislead their pursuers. In the following summer, a Spartan assault on the walls had some success, but the besiegers allowed starvation to do its work. The remaining 200 men of the garrison surrendered and after some specious legal proceedings were put to death.
At Plataea, a sledgehammer had been taken to crack a nut; other sieges were of greater military significance. In 425 BC, an Athenian fleet put a landing party ashore at Pylos in the western Peloponnese and, after some discussion, built a fort there. In this area, it might serve as a garrison to the Messenian population, already disaffected subjects of Sparta. The Spartans blockaded Pylos and occupied the island of Sphacteria, which stretched across the mouth of the adjacent bay. However, an Athenian fleet arrived and the Spartans in Sphacteria were themselves besieged. An Athenian hoplite force surprised and annihilated a Spartan outpost at the southern extremity of the island. Bowmen and slingers were then landed in overwhelming numbers. Woodland on the island had been destroyed by chance fire and the Spartan force, originally 420 strong, deprived of all cover and unable to come to grips with the enemy, was forced to surrender.
The most significant and the most sensational of all sieges during the war was that of Syracuse on the east coast of Sicily, which ended catastrophically for the Athenian besiegers and finally put an end to Athens’ dream of westward expansion. On landing, the Athenians soon established a base. They built a double wall across the plateau to the west of the city, to sever land communications with the rest of Sicily, while their fleet controlled the seas. As the besiegers extended their walls southwards, the Syracusans, starting from their own city walls, built counter-fortifications at right-angles across the intended course of the Athenian ramparts. The Athenians, however, overcame these obstacles.
In the north, the besiegers’ walls had been left: incomplete, and through this gap 3,000 Sicilians led by the Spartan general Gylippus brought relief to the city. Northward extension of the Athenian walls was soon blocked by a counterwall, which this time the Athenians were unable to surmount. The northern gap remained open and the defenders were able to pass through it. Under the leadership of Gylippus, the Syracusans soon assumed the offensive and the Athenians were besieged within their own double walls. At last, even their base was taken and they were hemmed in on the harbour beach. All escape by sea was eventually cut off by the victory of the Syracusan fleet in the harbour itself. New ships on the reinforced Corinthian model had been built and the tactics of head-on ramming were employed. The whole Athenian expeditionary force, together with the large reinforcements which had reached them, was utterly destroyed.
Victories of the besiegers over the besieged during the period which we are considering were often achieved by starvation. This had produced the final surrender of Plataea and Potidaea. The Athenians themselves, deprived of their fleet, were eventually overcome by hunger; before beginning his blockade of the city, the Spartan admiral Lysander had sent all Athenian captives taken elsewhere into Athens in order to swell the numbers of the starving.
■ The New Spartan Strategy
Peculiar circumstances had led the Spartans to send Gylippus with his small force of Peloponnesians to rally Sicilian resistance against Athens. Alcibiades had been recalled from the Syracusan expedition and threatened with prosecution by his jealous political enemies at Athens. He had saved himself by deserting to Sparta, offering advice in return for asylum: the Spartans had acted on his advice.
Apart from intervention in Sicilian affairs, Alcibiades had made other useful suggestions, recommending that as an alternative to their annual ineffective invasions of Attica the Spartan army should occupy a permanent base on Attic soil, which would constitute a continuous menace to the Athenians – not merely a seasonal inconvenience. On their next visit to Attica, in 413 BC, the Spartans accordingly occupied Decelea, a small township situated some 14 miles (23km) north of Athens.
The position was well chosen: it was, in fact, Alcibiades’ own choice. The raids made by the Pelopponnesians were now unremitting. In earlier days, the Athenian farmers had been able to occupy and enjoy their property outside the campaigning season but the situation had changed radically. Decelea also proved to be a point of refuge for runaway slaves, many of whom possessed valuable skills. The Athenians lost an estimated 20,000 slaves in this way. Their flocks and pack animals were also subject to depredation and the Athenian cavalry, most taxed in driving off enemy raids over rocky ground, found itself increasingly immobilized by lame horses. It should be remembered in this context that horseshoes were unknown to the ancient Greeks. In addition to these difficulties, supplies which had previously arrived overland from Euboea now had to be brought at great expense by the circuitous sea route. The city walls required to be guarded, both summer and winter, by Athenian troops, in daytime on a roster basis and at night by the whole garrison.
The Spartans retained their grip on Decelea throughout the years that followed and in 406 BC, King Agis, who was in command there, actually launched a night attack in the hope of rushing the city walls of Athens. He caught the outposts off their guard but the defenders on the walls were alerted just in time. Agis’ force on this occasion consisted of 14,000 hoplites and the same number of light-armed troops, with 1,200 cavalry. This marks a great departure from the earlier Spartan reliance on predominantly hoplite armies.
Although the Athenians were shaken by the event, the challenge of the Spartan attack was answered by the Athenian garrison army, which issued from the gates to give battle. However, it took up a position immediately beneath the walls, where it could be covered by missiles from above. Agis wisely judged that it would be inadvisable to fight under such conditions. He retired and the Athenians showed no inclination to follow him.
■ Spartan Naval Weakness and its Remedies
Sparta had never been an important naval power, but the Athenian disaster in Sicily presented her with the opportunity of becoming one. This opportunity was taken, thanks largely to the vigour and enterprise of the Spartan admiral Lysander. The Athenians were striving to repair their devastating naval losses at Syracuse, but in the meantime they had lost their grip on the eastern Aegean. The Persian satraps of Asia Minor, Tissaphernes in the south and Pharnabazus in the north, encouraged the Greek cities of the League to revolt against their old “protector”. This made the Persians the natural allies of Sparta – although their long-term objectives were, of course, different. A formal agreement was reached, the Persians promising to supply ships and pay rowers, the Spartans recognizing the Persian claims over the Greek Ionian cities. However, the agreement did not take effect as smoothly as the Spartans had hoped. Alcibiades, who had left Sparta hastily when the Spartan queen Timaea became pregnant by him, had now taken refuge in Asia Minor with Tissaphernes. Once more, he offered advice in return for hospitality. His advice to Tissaphernes was that the Persians should delay their help to Sparta and, by doing so, preserve a balance of power between the contending Greek states.
A balance of power in the eastern Aegean certainly resulted, as was illustrated by a series of naval engagements which took place between 411 and 405 BC. At Cynossema, a headland in the Hellespont, the Athenians were able to turn what initially looked like a defeat into a last-minute victory over the Spartan admiral Mindarus. In the following year, 410 BC, they gained a complete victory over the Spartan-led fleet, killing Mindarus and destroying his ships at Cyzicus, while the crews with difficulty escaped overland. Alcibiades, who had collaborated with the Athenian naval force in the Hellespont and had contributed largely to the result of Cyzicus, was welcomed back to Athens and soon given a command against Lysander. However, in 406 BC, while Alcibiades was temporarily absent on liaison duties, his deputy, acting against orders, provoked an unnecessary naval engagement at Notium, opposite Samos, and was defeated with heavy loss. As a consequence, Alcibiades fell from popularity and retired again to private life in a castle refuge near the Hellespont, put at his disposal by Pharnabazus.
In the same year, a victory was won by the Athenian navy at the Arginusae Islands near Lesbos. The Athenians were no longer confident of superiority in naval tactics and sailed defensively in double line, to guard themselves against that manoeuvre of diekplus of which they themselves had once been the most able exponents. In the event, they sank 75 of the enemy ships. The Spartan commander Callicratidas, who had succeeded Lysander, was lost overboard. But faced with the choice between rescuing their own wrecked survivors and exploiting their victory, the Athenians attempted both and achieved neither. Their loss of life was great and the commanders of the fleet were put to death for negligence when they returned to Athens.
The decisive action of Aegospotami which destroyed the Athenian fleet in 405 BC cannot be described as a naval battle. Lysander, who had now resumed command of the Spartan naval forces, launched a surprise attack from the opposite shore of the Hellespont and captured the Athenian ships and their crews on the beach. Only the Athenian admiral, Conon, escaped with a handful of ships.
The history of these closing years of the war is complicated by the fact that a virtual state of war existed between the Athenian fleet based on Samos and the arms-bearing oligarchy which had been established by a coup d’état in Athens in 411 BC. True, a compromise government soon followed, but political animosities remained intense. The social division in the Athenian forces was not between officers and other ranks, but between hoplites and rowers. Both the Spartans and the Persians should have been able to take advantage of the situation, but they themselves were divided by internal jealousies. The Spartan home government was, not without reason, suspicious of Lysander’s autocratic attitude and the Persian satraps were jealous of each other; ultimately, the ambitious young prince Cyrus was empowered by his royal father to supersede them both.
Alcibiades, in these final years of conflict, continued to act like a city state in his own right. Soon after the Athenian surrender, he was killed in a mysterious raid on his home in Phrygia. Lysander and Pharnabazus were possibly responsible. There were many persons both in and out of politics who must have been glad to get rid of Alcibiades, including his enemies in Athens. One story had it that he was killed by the brothers of a local lady whom he had seduced.
■ Atrocities and the Conventions of War
The Peloponnesian War was bitterly contested and marked by atrocities throughout. After subduing Mytilene, the people’s Assembly at Athens voted that all the adult male Mytileneans should be put to death and the women and children enslaved. The sentence was revoked by another vote on the following day and the order of reprieve reached Mytilene just in time. But later, when a similar sentence was passed on the islanders of Melos, no reprieve followed.
At the beginning of the war, the Plataeans summarily executed a party of armed Thebans who had infiltrated their town with a view to seizing control. This was done after the Theban supporting force had been induced to retire by a promise of clemency to the captured party. Later, when the Plataean garrison surrendered, the Thebans insisted, despite Spartan reluctance, that all of them should be put to death. The Spartan admiral Alcidas stupidly and cruelly slaughtered captured rowers who had been forced into Athenian service from the Aegean maritime cities. Nevertheless, of all the Greek states involved, the Spartans were on the whole the most restrained. It is true that at Plataea, and afterwards at Aegospotami, they yielded to the will of their allies, authorizing the massacre of prisoners, with some show of judicial procedure. But after the surrender of Athens, the Spartan government disregarded the wishes of Corinth and Thebes and refused to impose a sentence of massacre and slavery upon their conquered enemy.
Leaving aside the atrocities produced by civil strife at Corcyra, the Athenians generally behaved with greater brutality than other Greek states. They had been the heroes of the Persian Wars, but they were the villains of the Peloponnesian War. Particularly in the final stages, when they feared the growth of Spartan naval power, they reacted with ruthless savagery. The Assembly ordered that mercenary rowers captured in enemy service should have their right hands cut off. The Athenian commander Philocles, himself executed with the rest after Aegospotami, had directed that the crews of two captured triremes should be thrown over a cliff.
The massacre of prisoners was certainly not without precedent in Greece. The ever-pressing problem of food shortage alone would have made it impossible to guarantee quarter for all who surrendered. But it was common to ransom or exchange prisoners, or to negotiate their return as part of a peace settlement, as was done with the Athenian prisoners after the battle of Coronea in 446 BC.
Questions of humanity apart, Greek warfare in the classical period exhibited a singularly conventional appearance. Hoplite conflicts seemed almost “staged”; more like a medieval ordeal by battle than like battle itself. Fighting tended to recur in the same places, as if in traditional arenas. But this was the effect of Greek geography. In a mountainous country, difficult to negotiate even on foot, the armies of succeeding epochs inevitably tended to clash in the same plains and mountain passes: Thermopylae, Mantinea, Coronea, Chaeronea.
Once a battle had been won, the victors set up a trophy, a monument assembled from the captured arms and armour of the vanquished. The defeated army asked for a truce in which to recover its dead. These were the formal ways of claiming victory and acknowledging defeat. Truces, with safe conduct for pilgrims, were in force at all temples. Athletic contests were closely associated with religious cults – the Olympian games were in honour of Zeus and the Pythian games in honour of Apollo – and local truces permitted the celebration of the games even in wartime, although religious truces were sometimes broken and recriminations full of casuistry resulted. Heralds and ambassadors were sacrosant and inviolable, although incidents could occur in which their inviolability was not respected as it should have been according to the established conventions.
REFERENCES
1 The two kings, by their attendance, raised the membership to 30.
2 Fourth-century Athenian triremes each had 170 rowers.