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

by Victor Davis Hanson

The scapegoating after Arginusae, along with the vote and revote concerning the fate of the prisoners on Mytilene and the postbellum trial of Socrates, is usually recalled as one of the worst moments in the history of Athenian democracy. One of the most eerie scenes in Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians is his account of the show trials: the inebriate demagogue sauntering into the assembly hall, decked out in his breastplate, ready to denigrate, browbeat, or accuse any who stood between him and butchering the very men who had given Athens its greatest victory. In any case, the people soon repented their stupid and immoral action. Callixeinos, the proposer of the illegal motion to try all the Arginusae generals on death charges en masse, “was hated by everyone and died of starvation.”16 Often the victors were more brutal than the chilly and choppy seas. Rowers, after all, like aircraft-carrier crews, were also premium military assets who took months to train and who, once lost, were not easily replaced. Although the rules of war in theory protected prisoners at sea, as the conflict wore on clemency was ignored and the more savage protocols of the siege and ambush took hold. Often it made better sense to row away and leave the wounded of the enemy to the seas. Only that way could the manpower pool of skilled oarsmen be permanently reduced, without incurring the odium of violating understood conventions that might prompt retaliation—the sea, not men, killing the defens...