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

by Victor Davis Hanson

What, then, had the blinkered Spartans accomplished in Attica during the initial phase of the war? Nothing and everything. Although they had been at war with Athens for nearly seven years, their army had spent an aggregate of less than five months in Attica, and the Spartans’ chief strategy of annual agricultural devastation had achieved none of its objectives. It was not cheap to send thousands of farmers into distant Attica. If the Peloponnesians paid their army at the going rate for military service—150 aggregate days for about 30,000 men at a drachma per day per soldier—the total cost of Archidamus’ five invasions was about 750 talents (about $360 million in modern purchasing power), more even than the yearly tribute income of the Athenian empire, or about the cost to put 250 ships at sea for three months. The outlay was bearable for a rich state like Athens. (It spent almost 4,500 talents on sieges and seaborne operations in the first seven years of the war alone!) Yet for the rural Peloponnesians, who had little capital at the outbreak of the war and were used to brief campaigns settled by hoplite collisions, going into Attica for the first years of the war was an exorbitantly high price to pay. When the Corinthians clamored for the Spartans to start the war, the chief method that they outlined to pay for military expenses was to tap the rich reserves at the Panhellenic sanctuaries of Olympia and Delphi. How else, after all, could a state that used iron spits for mon...