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

by Victor Davis Hanson

Yet by not coming out to fight, did Pericles guarantee the death and ruin of the civilians of Athens, both inside and outside the walls, in a vain hope of wearing down his adversaries in a new total war? It was Periclean strategy, after all, that defined the new war as battle not between hoplites or even sailors but rather soldiers against the property of everyday folks. This moral quandary also remains with us today, and it has been raised in connection with the controversial careers of William Tecumseh Sherman, Lord Kitchener, and Curtis LeMay, who all argued that battle is ultimately powered by civilians and thus only extinguished when they cannot or will not pledge their labor and capital to those on the battlefield.

Was it a more moral and effective strategy to burn the slave estates and ruin the property of the plantation class of Georgia, which had fueled secession, or to have Ulysses Grant kill thousands of largely young and non-slave-owning youth in northern Virginia in open battle? Far worse still, was Curtis LeMay a war criminal who burned down the cities of Japan, killing tens of thousands of civilians with his napalm-fed infernos? Or, in effect, did he shorten the war and punish those in Tokyo’s household factories whose labor produced the planes, shells, and guns without which the Japanese imperial army could never have murdered thousands of innocent Koreans, Chinese, and Filipinos and killed so many American servicemen? Hans Delbrück was not interested in such abstract moral questions. It was the efficacy of the respective strategies that mattered to him. Delbrück wrote in a defeated Germany not long after the horrors of the trenches of World War I and was searching for a less costly strategy of battle mixed with more comprehensive economic, cultural, and psychological tactics that might still achieve Germany’s strategic aims. He concluded that Pericles had hit upon a formula of s...

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...

The plague infected Athens with utter lawlessness, what Thucydides called anomia. Men, convinced that the end was near anyway, “showed a more careless daring.” When death hovered over all, most lost the old self-control and instead “turned themselves over to the pleasures of the moment.” They forgot fear of both law and the gods, Thucydides adds, because no one could determine whether righteous conduct provided a defense against the disease. But since a horrible death came indiscriminately and without warning, people lived for the day and thus often acted criminally in order to obtain some “pleasure” from life.

The Pylos campaign of 425 in some ways is analogous to the long-range patrols of Major General Orde Wingate, whose much-celebrated Chindits in 1943–44 conducted hair-raising raids deep behind Japanese lines in Burma to disrupt supplies and communications, but in the process suffered terrible losses without systematically thwarting the main enemy forces. The Athenian maverick general Demosthenes was an archetypical Wingate himself; in 425 he landed in the southwestern Peloponnese at the small harbor of Pylos. Almost immediately he constructed a small fortification to serve as a base to harass Spartans in Messenia and offer refuge for runaway helots.

Of all the characters in Thucydides’ history Brasidas is the most intriguing, an ancient romantic version of Fidel Castro or Che Guevara who combined ostensible idealism and brutal guerrilla warfare in such a dazzling fashion that most formerly enslaved soldiers forgot the nature of the harsh master they worked for. In the last analysis, Brasidas’ efforts counterbalanced Pylos and achieved a rough stalemate, as he proved that the Athenians had just as much to lose to their own rear as did the Spartans. His ragtag mercenaries and few hundred freed helots did more damage to Athens than had King Archidamus’ enormous grand army of 60,000, which eight years earlier had trudged into Attica, convinced by its sheer size that it might bring the empire to its knees.

Where was Alcibiades amid the raiding and terror of the Peloponnesian War? In fact, no mode of war better fit his skills as both an intriguer and a practitioner of diplomatic subversion. Wherever the arts of betrayal, plotting, and execution were needed, Alcibiades could be found. Apart from his presence at the major hoplite battles, naval engagements, and sieges of the war, a simple recitation of his career following the agricultural conflict in Attica and the plague at Athens reveals that throughout his late twenties and early thirties Alcibiades was knee-deep in the new terror. Indeed, he was now in his proper element.

The fort at Decelea irrevocably harmed Athens. The city itself soon suffered irreparable psychological damage as well from a rightist revolution in 411. At the end of the war the city was taken over by oligarchs who concluded the peace with Lysander. Ultimately, however, terror, revolution, and murder were no substitute for the climactic battles of thousands that were to decide entire theaters. Had the Spartans lost the battle of Mantinea, had the Thebans been defeated at Delium, or had the Athenians won Aegospotami—a mere three critical days among some twenty-seven years of conflict—the outcome of the war would have been forever changed, in ways impossible to envision being accomplished by all the daring and machinations of a Brasidas, Demosthenes, Cleon, or Alcibiades. Thus, Athens, of all city-states, finally resolved to organize allied armies to end its wars with Boeotia and Sparta through single days of battle—efforts that were as heroic as they were doomed.

The dialogue as reported by Thucydides that followed between the Athenian envoys and the Melian elite, a magisterial exploration of moral right versus realpolitik, is one of the most famous passages in all of Greek literature.

The word for siege or siegecraft in Greek was poliorkia (hence the term “poliorcetics,” or “fencing in the polis”). Although there was an advanced science of taking cities by 431 involving rams, mounds, and fire weapons, walls themselves remained mostly unassailable, as they grew taller and thicker well beyond the old dimensions of ten to twelve feet in height and three to six feet wide, common before the mid-fifth century. The spread of ashlar blocks and regular courses of limestone, replacing mud bricks, rubble, and irregularly shaped stones, throughout the war widened the advantages of defense over offense even further. So there is yet another paradox about the besieging of cities in the Peloponnesian War, one that tells us a great deal about the overall nature of Greek society and culture: almost every assaulted city-state eventually capitulated, and yet almost none of them fell through storming the walls. Instead, in a world where the art of defensive fortifications had far outstripped the science of offensive siegecraft, city-states like Plataea, Potidaea, Mytilene, Scione, and Melos were starved out only after months, or even years, of systematic circumvallation. The sieges were sometimes accelerated through treachery, mostly in the form of partisans opening the gates at night.

Why was this so? Rarely were the approaches to ancient cities on flat ground. Instead, most often the targeted gates were on inclines. It was nearly impossible for crews to push ponderous rams over uphill rocky ground while under assault from the walls. A better solution was to knock the parapets down. But catapults and other sorts of artillery were not invented until after the Peloponnesian War.

There was no general in the fifth century comparable to the infamous Demetrius Poliorketes, nicknamed “the Besieger,” who in his failed siege of Rhodes (304) employed catapults, moles, miners, and siege towers (including the 130-foot iron-plated helepolis, or “city taker”). True, in three instances relatively early in the war troops employed fire—at Plataea, Delium,

and Lecythus. But only at Delium did a strange hollowed-out beam, packed with incendiary pitch and its flame blown out by bellows, seem to work. That rare success was probably only because the target was a...

Most cities, especially if they had provisions and strong fortifications, refused terms before the siege began. But if an army timed its arrival precisely during the grain harvest or grape vintage, depriving the defenders of their annual food supply or potential export income, then sometimes a few communities gave in at the very outset.

Statistical study of some sixty-nine recorded Greek sieges in the entire fifth century reveals that only sixteen citadels were taken through a forced blockade, while eleven involved some treachery inside the walls. But before one deprecates the art of siegecraft, in the other forty-two cases the city and its attackers came to some agreement that entailed a capitulation with terms, usually involving the besieged agreeing to hand over indemnities or give up on condition of guarantees for lives and property. So arose this paradox that exemplified the entire experience of attacking cities during the Peloponnesian War: few were successfully stormed, yet most came to some agreement to capitulate under threat of force and the specter of starvation.

What is striking about the casus belli for the Sicilian expedition was that Syracuse, while Doric and Sicilian, was not oligarchic. Well before the war even broke out, an anonymous conservative observer remarked that anytime Athens did not support democracy abroad, it fared poorly, given its natural affinities for popular governments. The Syracusans may not have been as radically democratic as Athens, but their constitution was liberal in the ancient sense. A sovereign Syracusan popular assembly ensured free give-and-take between the poor and the well-off, meaning that the Sicilian expedition was at the outset a betrayal of professed Athenian values of promoting Panhellenic democratic culture. To the conservative Thucydides the anomaly was not merely that Athens had forsaken its ideological agenda of protecting democracies from reactionaries, but that for the first time in the Greek experience two large maritime democracies were at war. They would bring into the fray all the military assets that such imaginative and resourceful societies characteristically possessed. And these advantages—ships, money, manpower, and popular leadership—were many and not to be lightly dismissed.

instilled greater civic discipline

As Thucydides further put it: “Of all the cities that Athens had gone to war against, the Syracusans alone were the most similar to Athens, being democratic like themselves, and strong in ships, horses, and size.” He later concluded, “Because the Syracusans were most similar to the Athenians, they made war against them the most successfully.”

The Athenians experienced the false security of all departing armies that judge the extent of their own power by the impression they make upon themselves rather than solely on the enemy. What was stunning about the Athenian expeditionary force was its initial luck. The fleet enjoyed good weather in transit. It made the tricky voyage across hundreds of miles of sea without losses or delays, and thus there is scant detail in Thucydides’ narrative about what could have been an especially perilous trip.

first wave the Athenians had probably transported over 25,000 combatants across the open seas without any real losses and arrived in good shape to the utter astonishment and terror of their enemies. Yet almost immediately tragedy inexplicably began to unfold.

At the very heart of the disaster was the flawed nature of the tripartite command. It was not just that battle responsibility was divided among three generals, rather than the more normal two. The suspicious Athenians, after all, were notorious for sometimes having too many squabbling commanders in the field at once. The problem was that the three were temperamentally so different, and in addition brought considerable political baggage along on the voyage. The senior officer in charge, the naturally cautious Nicias, was in poor health and had been against the expedition from the beginning. Thus for the next two years he fought only haphazardly and always in fear of being charged back home with dereliction. Such was the peculiar nature of Athenian command that sometimes generals who did not approve of expeditions were put in charge of them, on the dubious logic that they would provide a critical accountability both in the field and, later, at home. Alcibiades was shortly recalled on allegations of sacrilege. On the eve of sailing, dozens of young right-wing firebrands, in a fit of drunkenness and politically inspired audacity, had been accused of public sacrilege that cast ill omens over the expedition’s impending departure. Perhaps their real intention was to spook the superstitious voting poor into rescinding the expedition altogether. Only that way might Athens ensure that an oligarchic Sparta remained neutral and its army thus kept away from the Attic heartland. While A...

right into the hands of the conspirators: the man most responsible for leading the democracy on a vast imperial adventure would be sabotaged by his erstwhile supporters from carrying out their own radical ideas.

Shortly after arriving in Sicily, Alcibiades received the summons to return home. Grasping that extradition was the equivalent of a death sentence, he evaded his jailers and sailed instead to the Peloponnese. There he soon ended up at Sparta, urging it to renew the war both through aid to Sicily and the garrisoning of Attica. Meanwhile, back on Sicily, the no-nonsense Lamachus apparently lacked the political stature or wealth to convince the other two to enact his prescient plans for immediate attack on Syracuse. Within the year he was killed in battle while besieging the city. His impotence and later death were tragic, since under his leadership Athens not only mi...

The Athenians almost immediately ignored the cardinal rule of any great invasion: the need for direct action. Upon arrival in enemy territory there is only a finite time for victory, as stalemate weighs in favor of the defenders. Yet the Athenians did not, as Lamachus advised, head straight for Syracuse upon discovery that most of the Sicilians were not so eager to be liberated, that Athens’ few allied states were neither wealthy nor resolute, and that the Syracusans themselves were not shocked and awed as they began to see an impressive fleet more hesitant and dilatory than resolute and aggressive. Nevertheless, the Athenians fought courageously for the next two years in almost every imaginable fashion, as befitting an ingenious democratic people. But never again after their arrival in late summer 415 would they regain what the American general George S. Patton once called the “unforgiving minute”—that brief window of opportunity when lightning action can stun the enemy, win an entire theater, and bring dramatic results without great carnage. The moment the surprised Syracusans discovered that they were not the immediate object of the Athenian armada, the emboldened citizenry r...

by now it was nearly autumn and the first four months of the campaign had accomplished almost nothing: Alcibiades had been recalled, escaped, and was advising the enemies of Athens; the slothful Nicias was in virtual command; and the Athenians had yet to attack an ever more confident Syracuse.

Men who knew war well at Athens mostly misjudged the type of forces necessary for victory on Sicily, a distant island whose wide plains and greenery were more like the landscape of Thessaly than that of Attica or the Peloponnese. Intelligence about the nature of Sicilian warfare, the reliability of allies, and the resources of the enemies was either flawed or nonexistent. In perfunctory fashion Nicias had warned the Athenians that they would require mounted troops, but as a traditional soldier he predictably still gave far more attention to the need for hoplites. Even Alcibiades, the experienced cavalryman, had assured the Athenians that they could easily defeat Syracuse precisely because Sicilian states were notoriously weak in infantry! Yet almost immediately upon arrival, the Athenians discovered

instead that their thousands of hoplites were mostly irrelevant for victory, and that they lacked the one resource—plentiful horsemen—that might have given them the protection needed for a successful siege. There was little excuse other than hoplite chauvinism to account for such strategic naïveté.

For an invader to have any chance of success against Syracuse, a city-state as large as Athens with hundreds of skilled horsemen, mounted supremacy was critical. Instead, Syracusans routinely rode up to the Athenian base at Catana and insulted the encamped Athenians, deliberately trying to provoke an invader who himself within a few weeks of arrival seemed more like the besieged than the real aggressors. To win this war, Athenian cavalrymen were needed in massive numbers to protect the stonemasons and skirmishers who alone could cut off Syracuse from its hinterlands by fortifications.

If the Syracusans were to emerge for a conventional hoplite battle, Athenian horsemen would be necessary to protect the flanks and conduct pursuit in the plains of Sicily. And when Athenians began to ravage the countryside and deny farmers access to their fields, cavalrymen were again essential. Lamachus, as an old veteran of fighting the Spartans in Attica who knew something about raiding and plundering, believed that upon arrival the Athenians should have immediately scoured the Syracusan countryside to find supplies from the unguarded farms and to shut off the city’s access to its vital hinterlands.

Something drastic had to be done to provide deterrence against what would prove the largest corps of enemy horsemen the Athenians had faced since the Persian invasion...

the one asset that the Athenians were woefully short of on Sicily. Either out of fear of the great seas between western Greece and southern Italy, or perhaps realizing the need to keep a cavalry patrol to guard the Attic countryside should the Spartans return in their absence, the Athenians had initially brought along only a single horse transport and 30 riders. Perhaps that was understandable for anyone who has made the voyage from western Greece to Sicily in moderately heavy seas: imagine an armada of 10 or so horse transports—300 ponies on converted triremes with decks a mere few feet above the water—riding the waves that often sicken contemporary tourists on ma...

In one of the most famous pronouncements about the confusing nature of Greek infantry battle, Thucydides concluded of the nocturnal Athenian calamity on Epipolae that “it was not easy to ascertain from either side what precisely had transpired; of course, things are clearer in the daytime, but even then those who are present hardly know everything that goes on—except what each person senses with difficulty in his own vicinity.”

Diodorus believed that 18,000 men were killed in just a few hours, a horrific figure that, if true, would represent the greatest single-day fatality rate in the history of classical Greek warfare and, indeed, rank with the Roman nightmares like Trasimene, Cannae, and Carrhae, or even modern bloodbaths like the first days of Antie-tam or the Somme.

In the most gripping passage in his entire history Thucydides records the last moments of the desperate Athenians struggling to stay alive in the muddy waters of the Assinarus River, as they were picked off by their enemies from the banks above. The force that had left in such celebration at Athens and arrived in equal pomp at Syracuse now met its destruction from drowning, enemy missiles, and one another:

Inasmuch as they were forced to move in a dense mass, they fell on and trampled one another. Some of them immediately were killed by being run through by their own spears and becoming bogged down amid their equipment. Others were swept away by the current. The Syracusans were standing on the opposite steep bank, and hit the Athenians from above with missiles. But they were busy drinking greedily and tangled up in the hollow bed of the river in great confusion. Then the Peloponnesians descended to the water and cut them down, especially those in the river itself. And the water immediately

became fouled, but nonetheless was drunk—mixed as it was with mud and dyed red with blood. Indeed, it wa...

This was the most remarkable occurrence of all those that transpired during the war—indeed as it seems to me of all the Greek events that we know of— one most illustrious for the conquerors and for the defeated most ruinous. As for those defeated utterly and in every respect and meeting with no small setback in any manner—but rather as it is said with an utter destruction—their land forces,

fleet, and everything else perished, and few from many came back home. Such were the events that happened in Sicily.

The Athenians had set sail for Sicily in spring 415.

Two years later, between 40,000 and 50,000 Athenians, allies, and slaves were dead, missing, or captured. Some 216 imperial triremes were lost. The Athenian treasury was broke. For the first time in the war, Athens could no longer afford to patrol the coast of the Peloponnese. Its old strategy of proactively hitting the enemy to the rear was now over with. Allies and tributary subjects were talking of revolt at precisely the time Athens needed their money, materials, and imperial crewmen to build an entirely new fleet. After expending well over 3,000 talents in a failed enterprise, Athens earned only a renewed war with an evergrowing Peloponnesian alliance. There was to be a permanent Spartan fort in sight of the walls of Athens, a newly envisioned alliance of Persia, Sparta, and Syracuse, and the specter of a Peloponnesian fleet far larger than its own now augmented with a few Syracusan triremes.

A mere 1,200 Syracusans tipped the balance of the war, and ensured that 45,000 enemy invaders would lose. The experience of horse warfare on Sicily in and of itself did not immediately lead to the integration of cavalry and infantry mastered by Philip and Alexander. Yet despite the peculiar circumstances of Sicilian terrain and culture, the stunning defeat taught the Greeks that the days of hoplite exclusivity were ended. Gone too was the parochial idea that aristocratic knights were to remain prancers on the flanks of the phalanx rather than packs of mounted killers who, if not met by like kind, could limit the operations of even the largest forces—and alter the very course of sieges and naval engagements.

Lightness and balance, not seaworthiness and protection, seem to have been the chief aims in building good triremes.

In engagements of 200 to 300 ships—and there were several such showdowns in the latter Peloponnesian War—40,000 to 60,000 men, the equivalent of a large Greek city, were at once hurling missiles, rowing, boarding, clinging to wreckage, and swimming to shore. So in minutes the seas were flooded with the flotsam and jetsam of broken triremes, bodies, and men splashing and clinging to debris. Because there were no uniforms or clear naval insignia—oarsmen probably wore little more than a loincloth during summer sailing—crews sometimes even attacked their own ships, killing friendly sailors in the heat and panic of battle. Often ships were grappled and snagged. Then the sea fight “of the old style” might better resemble a land battle, as both marines and rowers joined in the confused melee. The immediate goal was to kill more enemy sailors than you lost friendly seamen, and then to choose the more seaworthy of the two craft and try to disentangle and row away from the wreckage.

The key to understanding the Peloponnesian War is not just that Athens was a naval power and Sparta fought by land; rather, of the 1,500-some city-states Athens was by far the strongest seapower, while Spartan hoplites were the preeminent infantry in Greece.

options been so severely curtailed by the fragile nature of the craft involved. Often defeat at sea is attributed not to enemy action but to the simple confusion and misdirection of desperate rowers trying to keep their ships in proper attack formation against the variables of wind and current.

Modern simulations have suggested that even the presence of a single man moving about on the canopy deck of a trireme could adversely affect the rowing. And the accuracy of such missile troops was not very good anyway except at very close ranges, given that both platform and target were rolling on the waves. Part of the crew’s training, then, was not merely rowing but the ability to work without extraneous movement that could interrupt offensive operations of the ship, and even jeopardize the ship’s safety while in transit.

so similar in appearance were the respective fleets that both sides were often unsure whether sudden reinforcements were friendly or hostile.

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...

Yet sometimes captured crews were brought ashore and either cut down or maimed—often grotesquely, by cutting off the right hand or thumb to guarantee that they could never row again. It is unclear which side began to initiate such brutal practices. But in the later part of the Ionian War,

the Athenian general Philocles persuaded the Athenian assembly to go on record as allowing trireme captains to chop off the right hand of all prisoners taken at sea. Presumably his idea was that only such tough measures would stop the desertions of imperial seamen tempted to join the Spartans by promises of higher pay. Philocles himself was known to have ordered captured oarsmen thrown overboard on the high seas, which explains why the Spartans executed almost every At...