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

by Victor Davis Hanson

This book does not answer that question through a strategic account of the conflict’s various campaigns. Much less is it a political study of the reasons that caused the Spartans to fight against Athens.

Fine narratives in English by George Grote, George Grundy, B. W. Henderson, Donald Kagan, John Lazenby, Anton Powell, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, and others cover those topics. So there is no need for another traditional history of the Peloponnesian War. Instead, how did the Athenians battle the Spartans on land, in the cities, at sea, and out in the Greek countryside? What was it like for those who killed and died in this horrific war, this nightmare about which there has been little written of how many Greeks fought, how many perished, or even how all of it was conducted? My aim, therefore, after a brief introduction to the general events of the Peloponnesian War, is to flesh out this three-decade fight of some twenty-four hundred years past as something very human and thus to allow the war to become more than a far-off struggle of a distant age.

The struggle much more resembles the seemingly endless killing in Northern Ireland, the French and American quagmires in Vietnam, the endless chaos of the Middle East, or the Balkan crises of the 1990s rather than the more conventional battles of World War II with clear-cut enemies, theaters, fronts, and outcomes.

A better name for our subject, perhaps, would be something like “the Great Ancient Greek Civil War.” Athens and Sparta

and their respective allies were, except for the final entrance of Persian financiers, all Greek speakers who worshipped the same gods and farmed and fought in the same manner. Although there was never a successful Panhellenic nation, Greeks of the city-states still felt themselves to be a single people. Their twenty-seven-year strife, in terms of the percentages of the population who fought and died, was one of the most horrific civil wars in early recorded history—conventional battles, terr...

Precisely because of this didactic nature of Thucydides’ lengthy narrative—predicated on the belief that human nature is unchanging across time and space and thus predictable—the conflict of Athens and Sparta is supposed to serve as a lesson for what can happen to any people in any war in any age. A central theme is the use and abuse of power, and how it lurks behind men’s professions of idealism and purported ideology. What men say, the speeches diplomats give, the reasons states go to war, all this “in word” (logos) is as likely to cloak rather than to elucidate what they will do “in deed” (ergon). Thucydides teaches us to embrace skepticism, expecting us to look to national self-interest, not publicized grievances, when wars of our own age inevitably break out.

Athens versus Sparta serves as a warning

of what can happen when the Western way of war is unleashed upon its own. In modern terms, the Peloponnesian War was more like World War I,

the issues that divided the two sides likewise more complex, the warring parties themselves not so easily identifiable as good or evil, and the shock of thousands killed similarly grotesquely nov...

Thucydides felt strongly that the Spartans had invaded the Athenian countryside in the spring of 431 because “they feared the Athenians lest they might grow still more powerful, seeing most of Greece was already subject to them.”

The Spartans, in other words, started the actual fighting with a preemptive strike into Attica. They, not the Athenians, were unhappy with the fifth-century status quo. At another point Thucydides concedes that such apprehensions of being slowly overwhelmed in peace “forced the Spartans into war.”

Although both sides claimed that they were coerced into the conflict, in Thucydides’ way of determinist thinking, if Sparta did not go to war over the pretexts of Corinthian and Megarian grievances against Athens, then the sheer dynamism of Pericles’ imperial culture—majestic buildings, drama, intellectual fervor, an immense fleet, radical democratic government, an expanding population, and a growing overseas empire—would eventually spread throughout its area of influence in southern Greece.*

“Athenianism” was the Western world’s first example of globalization. There was a special word of sorts for Athenian expansionism in the Greek language, attikizô, “to Atticize,” or to become like or join the Athenians.

In contrast, when Athens engaged instead in realpolitik—such as attacking the similar consensual government of Syracuse—without the necessary revolutionary fervor of democracy, it often failed.16 Spartans were oligarchic fundamentalists par excellence, hating “people power” and the danger it represented.

17 Although they had been the preeminent Greeks earlier in the sixth and fifth centuries, by the time of the Peloponnesian War the Spartans could sense their own influence waning, based as it was almost exclusively on hoplite infantry rather than the ships, population growth, and money of an ever grasping hyperdemocratic rival—one that in Pericles’ own words had ruled “over more Greeks than any other Greek state.”

To avoid war with Sparta, Athens was asked to cease its imperialist overstretch and essentially disband the empire: stop besieging cities like Potidaea and let nearby states like Aegina and Megara decide their own affairs. In short, “let the Greeks be independent.” To do all that, however, would mean that Athens could no longer be Periclean Athens; rather, it would revert back to its agrarian modesty of an earlier century, when it had no ships, no Long Walls, no tribute, no majestic temples, and no lavish dramatic festivals but was a benign commonwealth not much different from other large Greek city-states.

Enemies hated Athens as much for what it was as for what it did.

In turn, at Athens an entire generation had grown up in Periclean splendor. It, too, seemed deathly afraid of inevitable generational decline, a common apprehension among elites in Western societies that are free, affluent, and experiencing social and cultural change.

Many felt that if contemporary Athenians did not stand up to Spartan bullying, they would betray the legacy of those tougher “Marathon men”—men like Miltiades, Themistocles, and Aristides, who had fought at Marathon (490) and Salamis (480) and bequeathed a secure and prosperous empire.

the embodiment of the “old courage”

Yet while the Athenians could scarcely field an army of 10,000 preeminent hoplites of the caliber that had plowed through the Persians sixty years earlier on the beach at Marathon, their aggregate imperial military strength—ships, financial capital, manpower—was greater even than that of all their potential Greek enemies combined. Athens was stronger precisely because it had evolved beyond placing its national security in the sole hands of doughty hoplite farmers. These living anachronisms, after all, were a one-dimensional force, as irrelevant off a small flat battlefield as it was deadly on it. Nevertheless, that burden of past glory loomed over Alcibiades’ age group just as the accomplishments of the “greatest generation” of World War II do our own, especially when men like his guardian Pericles constantly harangued younger Athenians about their imperial burdens.

The conflict between the principal rivals officially started when the Spartans violated the sworn thirty-year peace treaty and invaded Attica in spring 431. They crossed the border a mere eighty days after their ally Thebes, without warning, had also sought preemptive action by attacking the neighboring Boeotian city of Plataea, a protectorate of Athens about fifty miles away.

Both sides claimed detailed grievances. Sparta’s ally Corinth, the rich Greek city on the Isthmus, felt that Athens earlier had belligerently intervened on the side of the rival island of Corcyra against it in a series of disputes. The small nearby state of Megara chafed under an Athenian trade embargo and asked for Spartan support. The nearby island of Aegina, which loomed on the horizon within easy sight from the Acropolis—Pericles once dubbed it “the eyesore of the Piraeus”—claimed that Athens interfered in its internal affairs and expected Sparta to preserve its sovereignty. Athenians, in turn, alleged that the Peloponnesians had encouraged their own tributary ally, the northern city of Potidaea, to revolt. The Boeotians residing to the immediate north of Athens wished to eliminate the outpost city of Plataea, which had brought the old fear of Athenian imperialism to their doorstep—and on and on.29 Of course, an Athenian embargo against Megara, past Athenian interference in the nearby island of Aegina, rivalry over the allegiance of a powerful Corcyra with “its very large fleet,” and disputed lands on the border of Megara or Boeotia were no small matters.30 But more frequently it was again the perception of grievance, involving matters of fear and honor, that propelled Sparta to act while it could, especially among generations in both Athens and Sparta that “were unfamiliar enough with war to welcome it”31 Athens apparently thought that over the long duration its cultu...

Thousands were to die on both sides because their leaders took them to war without a real plan of how to defeat the enemy on the battlefield and destroy its power.

The best cavalry in central Greece was Boeotian and on the Spartan side.

Even if Sparta and its allies could not win such a war against a maritime empire, at least they were confident that such “hard power” precluded an Athenian army occupying the Spartan acropolis.

Yet the strength of Sparta and its league was in some ways a chimera. At the war’s outbreak the allied Peloponnesian force could not be projected by sea. It was certainly not sustained through real economic power. Sparta started out with no capital, few ships, and almost no cavalry or light-armed troops. Under the regimented totalitarian system founded by the mythical ancestor Lycurgus, civic virtue, not economic efficiency or individualism, mattered.

For example, iron spits, not coinage, served as money precisely because in such a strange moral universe they could not be used with the ease of ordinary (and thus corrupting) currency. Third-party boatbuilders or rowers for hire did not flock to Sparta in hopes of being compensated with a hoard of metal barbecue skewers. The Spartans had been warned on the eve of the war by their allies that their ossified manner of envisioning war as hoplite battle was a formula for suicide. The harping Corinthians continually urged them to strike out to help friends around the Aegean to resist Athenian imperialism. Pericles was probably right when he claimed, “The Peloponnesians have no money, public or private.” There was certainly no imperial tribute pouring into the Spartan acropolis, and there were few Spartan colonies. Should Athens choose not to fight a pitched battle, Sparta possessed neither the capital n...

To maintain such an empire, in the fifth century Athens had fought three out of every four years, a remarkable record of constant mobilization, unrivaled even in modern times.

The population of Athens grew at over 2 percent per annum for most of the decades preceding the Peloponnesian War. And Athens, unlike Sparta, crafted a more inclusive society, whose critics complained that to the naked eye slaves, metics, and citizens were nearly indistinguishable in such a crass culture

in opposition to the more utopian efforts at Sparta to create a republic of virtue among a smaller and more static number of citizens.49 Athenian infantry, nearly 30,000 of both frontline and reserve garrison hoplites, was at its core probably as good a fighting army as any except for the Spartans and Boeotians. Yet like the Victorian British army, which was hardly designed to fight imperial German divisions in the trenches of Europe, the Athenian phalanx was never intended to face anything like Spartan hoplites, but was perfectly capable as a seaborne force for putting down recalcitrant tributary allies. In addition, there were reserves of imperial manpower far from Attica that were safe from Spartan ground intrusions—what King Archidamus worried about as the “plenty of the other land” out of his army’s reach.

This plan of exhaustion—the enemy would tire itself out without getting inside the Long Walls of Athens or disrupting its empire—counted on time and patience insidiously to do their work.52 If Athens’ immediate strategy did nothing to prevent a war, its ultimate logic might at least achieve a stalemate that, in turn, would be defined as victory: (1) evacuate the rural population and infantrymen inside the walls for a month or so during the annual Spartan invasions; (2) keep morale high, mitigate losses, and defend the countryside through cavalry patrols and rural garrisons; (3) launch naval patrols in the Aegean to guarantee that the subject states were timely in their dues and grain ships protected; (4) send out triremes with marines to harass and blockade the Peloponnesians far to the rear of their expeditionary army, while besieging rebellious subjects; (5) look to occasional opportunities in nearby Megara or Boeotia to pick off allies friendly to Sparta by either fomenting democratic revolution or even invading places where Spartans could not or would not easily deploy; (6) at all costs, avoid both expensive expeditions abroad and pitched battles against the Spartan phalanx.

So confident was Pericles of a draw that he apparently envisioned a war of no more than three or four seasons of campaigning. By then Sparta, frustrated in Attica and furious over attacks on its sacred coastal plains, would sue for peace. Perhaps another war of attrition—like the First Peloponnesian War, which had lasted fifteen years (461–446)—would lead to

another stalemate that, likewise, would allow another spurt of unimpeded growth of Athenian power.

How, then, should one tell such a complex story? The contemporary historian Thucydides, who sought to provide a military and political framework for the war, chose to narrate events in the annalistic tradition. He recorded the fighting year by year from 431 to 411. But at that point his incomplete history breaks off nearly in midsentence. The last seven and a half years are continued by his successor Xenophon, down to the end of the hostilities in 404–403.

Thucydides is a brilliant narrator. Yet, again, he is not easy to follow in Greek or English. Nor, speeches aside, is he always lively. His greatest moments are when he turns to graphic descriptions of representative horror: the ordeal at Corcyra, the blockade of Plataea, the battle of Mantinea, and the killing spree at Mycalessus.

Most of the really gifted modern narrative historians of the Peloponnesian War of the nineteenth century—Julius Beloch, Hermann Bengtson, Georg Busolt, George Grote, and Donald Kagan—have followed Thucydides’ notion of a war told by campaigning seasons. They relate events of the Peloponnesian War in roughly the same chr...

for traditional history, but it also presents problems because the Peloponnesian War was fought not merely between Athens and Sparta but rather by a host of other powers as well—Corinth, Thebes, Argos, Syracuse, and Persia—which sometimes conducted operations on...

But even within his rather neat annual presentation of the events, Thucydides himself sometimes swings widely back and forth from fighting on mainland Greece and in the Aegean to Sicily and Asia Minor, a sentence noting an Argive expedition here, suddenly a paragraph devoted to Sicilian civil strife there. He seldom makes tactical or strategic connections between nearly simultaneous operations. It is not because he is ignorant of the main plot of the war but, rather, because there often was none: Spartans, Athenians, Sicilians, Argives, Corinthians, and ot...

Local rival states, like Argos and Epidaurus, for example, might suddenly battle over disputed pastureland, yet often called such brief and confined struggles pa...

here is a brief synopsis of the war, one providing a generally accepted outline of events that gives the reader a political and strategic context to the sometimes-confusing experience of battle that follows.

Attica possessed more individual olive trees and grapevines than classical Greece did inhabitants. Anywhere from five to ten million olive trees and even more vines dotted the one-thousand-square-mile landscape. The city’s thousands of acres of Attic grain fields were augmented by far more farmland throughout the Aegean, southern Russia, and Asia Minor, whose harvests were only a few weeks’ sea transport away from Athens. What, then, were the Spartans thinking?

War is never merely a struggle over concrete things. Instead, as great generals from the Theban Epaminondas to Napoleon saw, it remains a contest of wills, of mentalities and perceptions that lie at the heart of all military exegeses, explaining, for example, why a Russian army that collapsed in 1917 on its frontier held out in its overrun interior during World War II, or how a completely outnumbered and poorly supplied Israeli army between 1947 and 1967 overwhelmed enemies that enjoyed superior weaponry and a tenfold advantage in military manpower.

The spartans learned that they needed to stay in Attica year-round in a fortified garrison—

the aim was to loot, keep farmers away from their fields, and create a clearinghouse for plunder and booty. Consequently, the Spartan garrison at the fort of Decelea, thirteen miles from the walls of Athens, fortified in 413, caused more material harm to Athens by disrupting commerce, interrupting communications with the supply depots on nearby Euboea, encouraging the flight of slaves, and keeping farmers from their fields, than all the futile earlier efforts at chopping and burning trees, vines, and grain during the Archidamian War.

The fortification of Decelea

proved one of the brilliant strategies of the entire conflict. It made the Spartans’ effort at rural plundering immune from the cycles of the agricultural year and offered a permanent

redoubt and refuge from counterattacks and cavalry patrols. With a year-round base, the invaders could arrive well before the harvest and stay after it was over, depending on constant plunder, theft, ...

But Decelea was a decade in the future, after the Spartans at last vacated Athens in 425. In some ways the idea was a fluke, growing only out of the reaction to the earlier flawed strategy of annual invasions, recent promises of Persian money, and the d...

For the German military historian Hans Delbrück, such total war evolved into a more complex strategy of attrition waged against the moral and economic capital of a state rather than the more straightforward idea of annihilation in which an army seeks to destroy through hammer blows its counterpart in the field. Why waste lives battering away at like forces when softer and more important resources could be targeted over a longer period and at much less cost? Could a Greek polis really win a war by ignoring the main infantry forces of its adversary in the field? Pericles thought so. The morality of waging exhaustive war was a new and unsettling enterprise for Athens and Sparta, as both sides lacked accessible hard targets and thus soon sought to prevail through ruining civilian resources and attacking third parties.