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

by Victor Davis Hanson

The execution of the Athenian prisoners after Aegospotami—Philocles himself was executed on Lysander’s orders—may have ranked as the worst single-day execution of Greeks in the entire war. More were probably butchered than those cut down at Mytilene, Scione, and Melos and the dead exceeded the number of those murdered by the infamous Thirty Tyrants, who overthrew the democracy at war’s end. The toll from Aegospotami was not matched until Alexander the Great killed almost every Theban male when he razed Thebes in 335 or cut down most of the Greek mercenaries in the aftermath of Granicus, a year later. Lysander would have done better to spare the crew, sell them into slavery, and share the profits with his own oarsmen, a practice that was common by war’s end as well.

Perhaps the most common method of dispatching defeated seamen was to sail amid the wreckage and spear them like fish. The accepted idea was that the battle was not quite over, and thus men clinging to enemy wreckage were still fair game and could be killed without moral censure or fear of reprisals. After the battle off the Sybota Islands, the Corinthian ships rowed among the wreckage killing all the Corcyraean survivors they could find. So intent were they on finishing off the helpless enemy that they ignored towing back the damaged ships and finally even inadvertently began

murdering their own men in the water. At the second battle off Naupaktos a contingent of Athenian ships got cut off and was driven to shore. Once beached, all the crewmen who could not lumber out of their triremes were executed on their benches by boarders.

The Spartans were essentially wiped out at the sea battle of Arginusae. The Athenian fleet ceased to exist after Aegospotami. In the former case, the Athenians enjoyed immediate naval supremacy and the Spartans sought peace. In the latter, the Athenians lost the war in a single day as Lysander’s fleet made ready to sail into Athens.

Entire fleets that acknowledged their seamen to be inexperienced were often scared that a superior navy would make short work of them. It was precisely that fear that prompted Athens to keep a reserve fund of 1,000 talents and 100 of “the best” triremes to protect the Piraeus, as a last resort should the Peloponnesians ever achieve naval supremacy and thus cruise freely in the Aegean and then right into their home port. Even the Athenians accepted the fact that at sea anything could happen, that whole fleets with thousands could go down in a few hours.

Because there was no way to stop Pericles’ navy in the early years of the war, Corinthian ships were often terrified at the very approach of the Athenian triremes. Against Phormio in the Corinthian Gulf they became so confused by superior Athenian seamanship that they gave up defending themselves and tried to row away to safety. In response to the acknowledged asymmetry, the Syracusan Hermocrates conceded to his followers the superior proficiency of his Athenian enemies—“the skill of the enemy that you so especially dread”—but insisted that their own greater number of ships and courage could still trump such Athenian advantages if they confined the battle to favored locales. Phobos, or fear of “the dreadful Athenian presence,” is often alluded to as a prime factor in all sea battles with the Athenians before their catastrophe in Sicily, as if most other Greeks admitted that they had little chance of survival in a fair fight against such seamen.

When the war broke out the Athenians themselves proved arrogant, convinced after the fifty-year administration of a maritime empire that they were de facto invincible at sea, “lords of the sea,” as they were generally acknowledged. Like the nineteenth-century British navy, the Athenian fleet felt that its qualitative superiority meant that it could attack any enemy at any time—whatever the theater imbalance in numbers.

“When men have once experienced defeat, they are not willing to maintain the same ideas about facing the same dangers.” Ironically, that truism was never more valid than after the Athenian calamity in Sicily; the Athenians became as paralyzed with fear as the Spartans had been over a decade earlier after their own debacle on Pylos. Immediately the Athenians lost their confidence at sea. For the first time in two decades they systematically began to lose ships to the newly constructed Peloponnesian fleet. For two years, imperial seamen were fearful of battle altogether, until the victory at Cynossema in summer 411 restored some of their old swagger.

Barry Strauss once systematically counted only the precise fatality figures for Athenian infantrymen and their landless counterparts as recorded by contemporary sources—a fraction of the actual number, since most ancient Greek historians far more often use vague words like “many were lost” or omit casualties figures at specific battles altogether. He nevertheless observed that over twice as many Athenian thetes (who were mostly sailors) died than hoplites during the twenty-seven-year war, most of them in the brutal final decade of naval fighting. If the hoplites and cavalrymen had suffered inordinately in siege and amphibious operations during the first decade of the war, the greater losses after 413 were almost all among the rowers. When one speaks of the Peloponnesian War, the specters of Sicily, the plague, and the executions at Melos and Scione haunt our imaginations. Yet the real carnage came late in the war and at sea battles whose names are now mostly forgotten.

The most bizarre facet of ancient naval power was the general method of manning the triremes, a mixture of private and public finance and control that was common practice in most of the city-states. Each year at Athens, for example, four hundred of the wealthiest citizens were put on notice as being liable for obligation as trierarchs (trireme commanders), which entailed, among other responsibilities, active command of a warship at sea. Because the fleet during the war numbered about 300 ships—at one point in the war 250 triremes were at sea at the same time—three out of four annual designees were then further selected and proceeded to the dockyards at the Piraeus to take control of their allotted ships for one year.

The state usually supplied the hull, the fittings, and the crew, although in a few instances some rich men bought and outfitted their own warships altogether. But the trierarch was mostly responsible for much of the ship’s daily expenses—repairs, food, and water for the crew—and usually served as the de facto captain while on patrol. Although a few grandees sought to skimp on expenses, more often trierarchs spent far more than was required, in keen rivalry with one another to find the best rowers and helmsmen. Such, apparently, were the wages of military philanthropy.

Thucydides says that when the Athenians left for Sicily, they departed with the best crews, ships, rigging, and figureheads. In both fighting ability and appearance, the flotilla of 415 was far more impressive than any prior armada, even those past great expeditions to Epidaurus and Potidaea at the beginning of the war, which had nevertheless set out with “poor equipment.”

At first glance such private initiative seems out of character for an all-inclusive state government like that of imperial Athens. In fact, the trierarchy was a forced contribution on the part of the wealthy to the state, what the Greeks called a liturgy. Besides finding a way to tap the capital of the rich, the polis also wished for its most wealthy citizens to serve side by side with the poorest while at sea. Some hoplites and cavalrymen, owners of farms and conservative in their political thinking, might resent the rise of a naval state. Yet the richest of all in times of war found themselves being honored for serving at the cutting edge of Athenian power. The trireme, in other words, was an extension of the democratic Athenian state and served the larger civic interest of acculturating thousands as they worked together in cramped conditions and under dire circumstances.

Throughout classical literature the need for skilled rowers is a constant refrain. Three men from different elevations plying about the same length oars would have to maintain a synchronized sweep, always hitting the water, never striking a nearby oar, thus insuring what the Greeks called the “simultaneous hits of the oar” (kôpês xymbolê). Practice in rowing in unison was a constant requirement, and apparently a skill easily lost through inaction. It was not just that rowers had to have strength and learn to row in synchronization; they also had to get used to hitting rough seas with their oars, become accustomed to the crash and roar of battle, and expect to cruise for long hours in both heat and cold.

sea power was “a fulltime occupation,”

What was the goal of the classical Greeks, then, in adopting such an awkward method of naval construction and operation, a nautical science that seems to have reached its apex at Athens shortly before the war broke out? Clearly, the desire for speed and power relative to displacement was a central driving force: sea battles were to be decided not always by marines but by quick ships that could ram, withdraw, and nimbly maneuver to strike again. To achieve ramming power required speed, and speed in turn necessitated 170 actual rowers on a relatively light vessel—and that near-impossible calculus of weight, speed, and manpower explains the complex method of banking three oarsmen to allow so many men to fit in such a small space. Impressed philosophers often commented on this peculiar method of rowing, calling oared ships “mills,” a crowded factory that turned out as its product sheer muscular propulsion.

The Athenian object was, again, to maneuver into the line of exposed ship sides that could be rammed by columns of fast-moving triremes—a sort of “crossing the T” in the pre-dreadnought age. The Athenians believed that in the relatively open seas the greater maneuverability and speed of their own ships would eventually ensure that the usually more inept enemy would become confused and exposed to easy attack. In other words, under optimum conditions the contest would be a true naval battle rather than a land fight between hoplites and missile troops on pitching decks close to shore.29

Often crews resorted to grappling hooks. They were probably on board every trireme.

Trireme fighting became a real show. The skill of the pilots in maneuvering their triremes for hits, the cohesion of the crews in pouring on the speed in the last moments before the collision, and the explosive impact of 170 rowers smashing into their enemy counterparts—

Sometimes thousands of spectators lined the beaches to gaze at dozens of ships ramming, boarding, and showering each other with missiles.

Soldiers were eager to watch the deadly business, rooting their respective sides on, slogging into the surf to help out, and finishing off or aiding any crews that beached their vessels. Nowhere was the grisly fighting at sea more notorious than in the Great Harbor at Syracuse. There, in a succession of sea battles, thousands of Athenians fought the Sicilians in almost every imaginable manner—ramming, boarding, missile warfare, grappling, driving ships to shore, dropping stones from cranes, and employing underwater stakes.

there could be thousands of bodies and hundreds of wrecks in the waters, while the shores were quickly made a grisly scene of bloated bodies and debris.

fought in the “ancient fashion.” That is, javelin throwers and archers boarded ships and in a conflict “more like a land battle” showered the crews. The subtext of Thucydides’ description is how inferior both fleets were to the Athenian navy, which would never have allowed its ships to be grappled and boarded since their superior oarsmen could easily win a battle of maneuver and ramming.

The Spartan general Brasidas once summed up the respective naval strategies of the two fleets: Athenians relied on speed and maneuverability on the open seas to ram at will clumsier ships; in contrast, a Peloponnesian armada might win only when it fought near land in calm and confined waters, had the greater number of ships in a local theater, and if its better-trained marines on deck and hoplites on shore could turn a sea battle into a contest of infantry.

In the first major sea battle of the war off Naupaktos (430), Phormio with a mere 20 Athenian ships attacked and routed a larger Corinthian contingent of 47. Such superiority was to last nearly twenty years, until the disaster of Sicily weakened Athens, necessitating a crash program to rebuild ships and hire green crews. That unforeseen catastrophe prompted Sparta to renew her efforts to acquire a top-notch fleet, and thus set the stage for the last decade’s climactic deadly battles in the Aegean, which would end the war.

heavier rams might give them the best of the collision. So while the Athenians practiced long and hard in mastering the more difficult but survivable lateral hits, their enemies counted on superior naval construction to blast ships head-on. Thucydides seems to assume as much when he reminds us that “the Corinthians considered themselves as winners if they were not decisively beaten, and in contrast the Athenians accepted that they lost if they were not clearly victorious.”

Yet throughout the war it was the Peloponnesians, not the Athenian masters of the sea, who showed themselves most adept at adopting new tactics and modifying their ships to nullify traditional Athenian superior seamanship. The Athenian tragedy in the Great Harbor at Syracuse was the story of complacence and even arrogance. The scrappy Syracusans and their Peloponnesian allies fitted out new rams to hit their more nimble enemies head-on in confined waters, as well as driving stakes into the harbor bed, chaining off the harbor entrance, and deploying stone throwers from the decks. Only at the end of the war did the Athenian admiral Conon take special measures to prepare his ships in a manner unprecedented by past fleets, apparently to ensure that his triremes were as seaworthy and reinforced as the enemy’s.

suddenly, the unexpected Athenian catastrophe of 413 in Sicily—216 imperial triremes (perhaps at least 160 of them Athenian) and almost 45,000 men of the empire were lost or captured—gave new impetus to Sparta’s efforts to catch up and build a new Pan-Peloponnesian fleet fueled by Persian money. The vast armada of Athens had always been a fluke beyond what should have been the limited resources of any single city-state. Indeed, its creation in 482 was a result only of a rich strike in the silver mines of Laurium, and it was later sustained by the imperial tribute of hundreds of subject states. In contrast, without mines or tribute-paying subjects, Sparta’s old pipe dream at the beginning of the war of creating a vast armada of 500 ships could be realized only by an unholy alliance with the empire of Persia.

greater dilemma was that the human losses at Sicily, coupled with the thousands of dead from the plague, had wiped out an entire generation of experienced Athenian rowers, teachers, and students of the sea, all almost impossible to replace at once.

A third to half of the thousands of imperial rowers who were lost at Sicily were probably Athenian citizens and resident aliens. The death or capture of the remaining 20,000 foreigners and allied seamen not only drained the empire of manpower but also created waves of resentment against Athens among bereaved subjects. Long gone was the memory of the festive spectacle of cheering and merriment, and expectations of easy loot and glory on the cheap, when the grand flotilla had sailed from the Piraeus in 415. Sailing with the Athenians could quite literally get you and your sons killed. Something had also come over the Greeks after Sicily. Perhaps it was the length of the war; it was now almost twenty years since Sparta had invaded Athens, and both desperate sides were beginning to sense that the end could not be too far away. Or maybe the increasing savagery was attributable to the mounting losses and the barbarism unleashed at Scione, Torone, and Melos. In any case, in the Archidamian War one does not sense that Spartans and Athenians hated each other. But in the last phase of the conflict, there is a real feeling of growing fury on both sides, that trireme war in the eastern Aegean was perhaps more like the Japanese, rather than the

European, theater of World War II, when most soldiers gave no quarter and harbored a deep visceral and racial dislike of their enemies.

If an islander were to row in the future, it might be wiser to enlist for higher pay in the new and larger Peloponnesian fleet, which was likely to patrol in greater numbers in the eastern Aegean, which was now increasingly empty of the old Athenian triremes. As the war heightened in the eastern Aegean and the limits of Greek manpower became clear after some two decades of steady combat losses, the final sea fights became as much a bidding war for mercenary oarsmen as a test of seamanship. In othe...

Athens started the war with 5,000 talents in reserve. But after Sicily it now had less than 500 in its treasury, scarcely enough to build 100 triremes and keep them at sea for even four months.

Thucydides concluded that besides the absence of men to make up the losses and the few triremes left in the ship sheds, there was also “no money in the treasury.”

Athens and Sparta now no longer sought mere tactical advantage but were willing to risk their all to finish off the enemy.

To win, Sparta had to kill off, capture, or scatter a final cohort of at least another 50,000 or so Athenian and allied sailors and sink another 200 ships, which otherwise, over a decade, might replace the losses of Sicily. These last battles across the Aegean—they are often lumped together and called the Ionian War—were decided in the waters off western Asia Minor (Ionia) and in or near the Hellespont (the modern Dardanelles). If Boeotia, home of nine major hoplite battlefields by the fourth century, was once dubbed by the Theban general Epaminondas “the dancing floor of war,” one could call the Hellespont and the adjoining Propontis (the Sea of Marmara) “the seas of death.” In those environs alone 50,000 men were probably killed, missing, or captured in just three battles at Cynossema, Cyzicus, and Aegospotami, all within a sixty-mile radius. In addition, between 412 and 404 thousands more Athenians, Persians, and Peloponnesians died in ambushes, seaborne attacks, and random killing up and down the Ionian seaboard.

With the establishment of a permanent garrison at Decelea, the new Peloponnesian fleet was confident that it now had muscle enough to block grain ships from arriving at Attica. Thus, this time under a year-round combined land and sea assault, the city, it was thought, would shortly go bankrupt if not starve: keep Attic farmers away from their land, destroy ships that imported food, deny access to grain-growing areas abroad, assure subjects that they can revolt in safety and withhold tribute, and all the while sink Athenian triremes. Decelea was the antithesis of Archidamus’ earlier failed strategy, which had offered no permanent presence and no ancillary naval strategy.

Not long after the defeat in the Great Harbor of Syracuse, an emboldened and reconstituted Spartan armada engaged what was left of the Athenian fleet in a series of inconclusive sea battles in the Aegean, at Spiraeum (412), Syme (411), Chios (411), and Eretria (411). Whereas losses at these rather obscure sea battles on both sides were minimal, the succession of collisions

began to wear on a shaky Athens and had the practical effect of destroying another 30 or so Athenian triremes. More importantly, perhaps 5,000 seamen were killed, scattered, or captured. Despite spending its final 1,000-talent critical reserve on rebuilding the fleet, strategically Athens could no longer control even the seas off its own coast. It was also on the verge of losing much of Ionia and, with it, a tribute-rich empire. After the defeat at Eretria in nearby Euboea—the Athenians lost 22 ships and most of the crews were killed in battle or captured—a panic descended upon the city that was greater than the near riot that had broken out after the news of the Sicilian disaster reached the Piraeus, two years earlier.8 The final phases of the war next turned to the northern coast of the Hellespont. There, near the peninsula called the Thracian Chersonese, the Spartans now tightened the noose, hoping to cut off the sea-lanes between Propontis and Athens. In summer 411 at Cynossema, 76 Athenian ships, under the brilliant general Thrasybulus, beat back the larger Peloponnesian fleet of 86 triremes. Perhaps 32,000 seamen were involved. At least 36 ships were lost in fighting that ...

In contrast, to win the war on the seas the Athenians would have to inflict crushing losses on the Spartans while losing almost none of their now

precious triremes. Thucydides, for example, said of the Athenian victory at Cynossema (fought not far from Gallipoli) that it came “at just the right time,” inasmuch as small losses to the Peloponnesians in the prior two years and the great catastrophe on Sicily had made them “afraid of the Peloponnesian fleet.”10 To compound the Peloponnesian misery, not far away, at Abydos, a few weeks later the Spartans once again forced battle. There they were to lose another 30 ships, along with thousands of crewmen. Still, Alcibiades—in 411 he had returned to Athens in yet another incarnation, as chief Athenian admiral—summed up the Athenian dilemma best before the battle of Cyzicus. After explaining why his crews had “to fight at sea, fight on land, and fight against walled fortresses,” he finished with the admission of a bitter reality: “The reason is that there is no money among us, while the enemy has all they wish from the king of Persia.”

market, rightly figuring that higher pay in the Peloponnesian navy would cause desertion from the Athenian fleet, which now depended on mercenary rowers.12 About six months later, in March 410 and thirty-five miles distant from Cynossema, the Spartan fleet unabashedly forced battle again, near Cyzicus. In this third consecutive battle of the Ionian War, after Cynossema and Abydos, the Peloponnesians suffered yet another setback, despite their now accustomed numerical superiority. Inspired leadership by the veteran generals Thrasybulus and Alcibiades and remarkable seamanship by a new generation of Athenian oarsmen, who went to sea in a storm and performed flawlessly the difficult periplous, explain the remarkable victory. In fact, Cyzicus proved one of the greatest naval disasters for any Greek fleet during the entire war. Yet it was the beginning, not the end, of the bloodbath in the Aegean.

Another 60 ships, including 20 Syracusan triremes, were now lost, some of which their dejected crews burned after seeing the defeat of their allies. The casualties are not known, but they must have been high. Perhaps well over 10,000 seamen were captured, scattered, or killed, including the Spartan general Mindarus. The historian Xenophon, in one of the most famous passages in his Hellenic history, quotes a laconic letter sent back home to Sparta from the surviving vice admiral Hippocrates—intercepted by the victorious Athenians—that read: “The ships are gone. Mindarus is dead. The men are starving. We are at a loss what we should do.”13 What to do? In less than a year, Sparta had suffered staggering losses. Somewhere between 130 and 160 triremes were gone—almost the entire contribution two years earlier of its Peloponnesian and Syracusan allies.

generals like Thrasybulus, Theramenes, and Alcibiades had proved that they were far better tacticians than almost all the admirals that had accompanied the Spartans to the Aegean.

After Cyzicus, a dejected Sparta apparently remembered why it had not sought naval engagements against Athens some twenty years earlier. In frustration, Sparta quickly sent out peace feelers to Athens: “We want to have peace with you, men of Athens,” their ambassadors pleaded in offering a return to the prewar status quo. But the Athenian assembly, perhaps led by rabble-rousing demagogues like Cleophon, was now aroused, drunk on success and paranoid after the failed oligarchic coup of 411. For the first time in some three years, the Athenians had thoughts of reclaiming the entire Aegean. Maybe they really could destroy the Spartan fleet for good, and

drive the Persians out of Greek affairs. Unsure how to follow up their spectacular successes, the Athenians unwisely played defense for nearly four years, between 410 and 407, while the Spartans rebuilt their forces and found themselves a true military genius in Lysander, albeit ...

Unfortunately for the Athenians, few of the city’s politicians saw the true complexion of this new Ionian War, and ignored the advice of the three brilliant generals, Alcibiades, Thrasybulus, and Theramenes, who had brought them such stunning victories. The truth was that the war had now changed dramatically and could no longer be seen in terms of the old simple Spartan land/Athenian sea dichotomy of decades past. The newfound Spartan ability to tap into the imperial treasuries of Persia, through the direct succor of its western satrapies, ensured the enemies of Athens...

To nullify the Spartan advantage in numbers and its determination to prompt battle repeatedly, Athens had to rely on superior seamanship and command in every major battle, without any margin of error. It could not fight on the defensive, since it was trying to maintain an empire, which involved more than just keeping out the Spartan fleet. And an unforeseen result of the Athenian victory at Cyzicus was a reexamination of the Spartan command, leading to the appointment of a new admiral, Lysander, who, even more so than Brasidas, would prove to be the unqualified milita...

Most Spartan generals were fighters (with tough names like Thorax, “Breastplate,” and Leon, “Lion”), but rarely was one both heroic and full of strategic insight about how to defeat something as insidious as the Athenian empire. The presence of Lysander—a man cut from the same cloth as Brasidas and Gylippus (none of them were Spartan r...

Persian capital was felt almost immediately as the Spartan maverick systematically hunted down grain ships, stormed Athenian strongholds, and enslaved captured peoples. In the next major battle, at Notium (spring 406)—the Spartans had used the three-year hiatus in naval confrontation to rebuild their fleet—Alcibiades temporarily left comman...