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

by Victor Davis Hanson

Instead, the Athenians rashly fought Lysander off Ephesus, and right away lost 22 irreplaceable ships.

A few months later at Mytilene, the Athenians under Conon lost another 30 ships to a Spartan fleet that once more had grown to somewhere between 140 and 170 ships. In response, the Athenians began a desperate search for even more manpower, putting old and young, slave and free, poor and wealthy on triremes in hopes of manning enough ships to thwart the Spartan juggernaut. By late spring of the same year, the death struggle continued as the fleets once more sailed to engage each other off the Ionian coast. In the previous five years, at the smaller battles of Spiraeum, Syme, Chios, Eretria, and Abydos and the three great fights at Cynossema, Cyzicus, and Notium, at least 84 Athenian triremes had been lost, along with perhaps as many as 16,000 seamen. Sparta, in turn, had suffered nearly double those casualties—160 ships sunk or captured and, with them, perhaps as many as 30,000 sailors.

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Arginusae proved to be the most violent sea battle of the Peloponnesian War. The engagement marked perhaps the largest collection of warships in one encounter since Salamis, as over 270 triremes and 50,000 rowers collided. Diodorus thought it was the greatest naval battle of Greek against Greek in history, as Athenian triremes rowed in large part by slaves gave the democracy its greatest victory since Salamis.

the Athenians destroyed some 77 Spartan and allied triremes at a loss of only 26 of their own, an astounding 3-to-1 kill ratio. Sixty-four percent of the Peloponnesian fleet was destroyed in a few hours, well over twice the grievous loss rate earlier at Abydos, Cynossema, and Cyzicus, which had reached an unsustainable average of 28 percent. With this loss of over two-thirds of their forces at Arginusae, Sparta and her allies in the space of a mere five years had now suffered 250 ships sunk that were manned by 50,000 rowers and marines, in a rarely recognized disaster that dwarfed that of the Athenians in Sicily in 413.

The paradox of Arginusae was not that the Athenians had nearly annihilated the Spartan fleet but that they had lost some 26 triremes with most of their crews in the process.

In the uproar that followed, 6 of the 10 generals were executed for dereliction of duty (among them Pericles’ last surviving son). The rest, who were the most talented officers in Athens, fled into exile in fear of a similar death sentence.

Thus, they rejected peace feelers and yet failed to follow up the victory with another direct attack on the Spartan fleet, in essence squandering hard-won momentum as relish to destroying its own top command.

A city that often blamed itself more in victory than defeat was showing manifestations of a terminal illness, conducting postbellum hearings to assess blame in the midst of a war for its survival. In the real monster battles of the Ionian War, like Cynossema, Cyzicus, and Arginusae, Athens had won every time. But it now somehow felt more demoralized than Sparta, which had suffered twice its losses, as each sailor was seen to be irreplaceable and thus every elected general was held responsible for any loss. The war, as Archidamus had once warned, would ultimately hinge on money; but even he

had had no idea that a quarter century later his own Spartans, not imperial Athens, would have the greater reserves of money and manpower and, in Lysander, a commander far more audacious and versatile than any of the most experienced Athenian admirals.

The result was an abject slaughter. The Spartan fleet destroyed, disabled, or captured 170 of 180 triremes, dispersed thousands of the oarsmen, and then executed 3,000 to 4,000 of the captured Athenian crews, sparing only the allies and slaves. The butchering of the victors in a few minutes exceeded the toll of all those who had perished during the two great hoplite battles of the war, at Delium and Mantinea. This most decisive naval defeat in the history of any Greek city-state was not even really fought at sea, and in some sense was not a battle between triremes at all. Rather, Lysander’s triremes surprised thousands as they ate, slept, and lounged on the beach. And nearly all the Athenian ships that managed to leave shore were sunk in the shallow surf.

over. Aegospotami ranks with the destruction of Xerxes’ triremes at Salamis (480), the obliteration of the Ottoman fleet off Lepanto (1571), the ruin of the Spanish Armada during the battle and retreat of 1588, and the French disaster off Trafalgar (1805) as one of the most decisive naval engagements in European history. Unlike earlier naval catastrophes, Aegospotami is one of the few battles in history in which such a grievous setback led not only to withdrawal and retrenchment but to the veritable collapse of an entire imperial state.

literature is the historian Xenophon’s eyewitness report on the calamity at Athens when the news of the disaster at Aegospotami first reached the Piraeus:

It was at night that the Paralos arrived at Athens with an account of the disaster and wailing ran from the Piraeus through the Long Walls into the city proper as one man passed news to another. And during the night no one slept, not only in grief about those who were lost, but far more still for themselves, wondering whether they would suffer the exact things they had done to the Melians, the colonists of the Lacedaemonians, after reducing them through a siege, and also to the Histiaeans, and the Scioneans, and the Toroneans and the Aeginetans, and many other Greek peoples.

After the October 405 defeat at Aegospotami, Athens did not surrender for about six months, until March 404—blockaded by Lysander’s fleet of some 150 triremes, while its wall was approached by two Spartan kings, Agis from Decelea and Pausanias, with a huge force marching up from the Peloponnese. Yet the city’s fortifications were still impregnable, given the rudimentary nature of Greek siegecraft. So instead the Spartans waited for famine and political dissension to take effect.

only be leveled but that all the Athenians be enslaved and the site devoted to pastureland. In the end it was enough that imperial Athens and all that it stood for was to be no more—as the city agreed to tear down its Long Walls, dismantle the fortifications at the Piraeus, free its tribute-paying subject states, maintain a navy no greater than 12 ships, allow the return of the right-wing exiles, establish an oligarchy, and enter into a military alliance with Sparta.25

Aegospotami marks the official end of direct Athenian-Spartan hostilities, yet the war was not formally concluded until a besieged Athens gave up the democracy in spring 404.

In place of an enlightened democratic hegemony, an incompetent Spartan protectorate clumsily tried to impose on Athens’ former subjects oligarchies that left the most vulnerable states in Asia Minor open to either direct or insidious Persian suzerainty. In peace, the conquering Lysander quickly proved to be a different sort of statesman from Pericles, an oligarchic rather than a democratic imperialist whose brutality was not mitigated by any sense of majesty.

After a brief civil war and the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants, by late 403 democratic government was firmly once more in con...

The Peloponnesian War taught Westerners that the logic of military efficacy should trump tribalism, tradition, and arbitrary constructs of wealth and power. Plato, who wrote in the aftermath of the three-decade disaster, saw this more clearly than any other Greek thinker—and resented it bitterly.

War, then and now, is a destroyer of protocol, privilege, and tradition, and that is not altogether always a bad thing.

In Book 1 of Thucydides’ history Pericles outlines the limitations of the Peloponnesian adversaries. They had no capital. Unlike the Spartiates, most of the allies in the Peloponnesian coalition were agrarians who needed to farm at precisely the time it was best to fight. In contrast, Athens was a sophisticated polis with vast sums of coinage in both circulation and as specie on reserve. Pericles’ adversary, King Archidamus of Sparta, agreed, and so warned his rural Peloponnesians that they were not equipped to fight a long, multifaceted war with even a seasonal militia. This new conflict, he warned, was quite different: “War is not so much a matter of men as of monetary expense.” He proved absolutely right.

The great irony of the war was that the very requisites for victory—an enormous fleet, money for rowers’ pay, and officers deployed overseas for long periods of imperial service—were inimical to the historic assumptions of rural and isolated Sparta, which heretofore had had no monetary economy. Persia finally filled the void, gave Spartan generals untold amounts of gold, and made up losses in men and matériel almost immediately. As long as Greeks were killing Greeks, the satraps of the Persian Empire were happy to subsidize the carnage.

Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Peace, and Lysistrata, as well as Euripides’ Andromache, Helen, Hecuba, and Trojan Women, while they betray no love for the Spartans, seem to offer a new wrinkle in Greek attitudes toward war: such conflicts themselves are awful human experiences that transcend the reasons for hostilities. The farmers and women of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Peace, and Lysistrata, like the captured and suffering civilians of Euripides’ Hecuba, Trojan Women, and Andromache, reveal that everyday Greeks found shared experiences across the battle line. Thus the playwrights offer the idea that there is something wrong with war per se—not just with the Spartans.

Fourth-century Greeks, however, realized that the Peloponnesian War had been something uniquely awful in the Hellenic experience. It destroyed the idealism and spirit of Panhellenic unity that was so critical in the defense of Greece against the Persian invader. The war left in its wake the more self-interested idea that Greeks, if they were going to kill so savagely, should at least kill Persians, the mantra that Philip and Alexander would soon so brilliantly manipulate. In any case, to win the war the Spartans had used Persia to destroy Athens—a strategy brilliant in the short term but calamitous in the conflict’s aftermath, when Spartan hoplites were stationed in Asia Minor to check the Persian resurgence in Ionia that they had ensured by earlier bringing the satraps into the war effort.

Why Did Athens Lose?

In his narrative there emerge four reasons why Sparta triumphed; none of them can be attributable to the oligarchy’s strategic insight or imaginative tactics. The plague was nature’s bane. Sicily was Athens’ own strategic mistake and was compounded by tactical blunders. The creation of a fort at Decelea and the use of Persian capital to build a fleet are attributed by

Thucydides and Xenophon to the advice and machinations of Alcibiades, an Athenian. So naturally observers look to what Athens did wrong rather than to what Sparta did right to explain how such a dynamic imperial city was not merely beaten but nearly ruined.

Yet Athens no more lost its war with Sparta than Nazi Germany did its offensive wars with France or Poland. By 425, in the seventh year of the conflict, almost all of Athens’ limited objectives had been achieved in line with Pericles’ original goal of a temporary stalemate—or perhaps more charitably seen as not losing in a war of exhaustion.

the reasons for Athens’ later and utter defeat after the failed peace were probably twofold. First, even before the Sicilian expedition Athens had not simply fought Sparta but for a decade of the Archidamian War was holding off Sparta, its entire Peloponnesian alliance, and Corinth and Thebes. These two latter states proved their vehemence by not even becoming signatories of the shaky peace achieved in 421. In the trireme

fighting in the Corinthian Gulf, at Solygia, and at Delium both allies had frequently fought Athens mostly on their own, without help from Sparta. The powers formally allied with Sparta for most of the conflict were not weak. Peloponnesian states like Elis, Tegea, and at times even a reconstituted Mantinea and Argos provided hoplites for a Spartan-led enterprise or later occupation at Decelea. The Boeotian army was as formidable as the Spartan. Its bitter hostility ensured a two-front war, a permanent condition after the failed Athenian effort at Delium. Corinth controlled much of the lateral sea traffic in and out of the Gulf, and all routes to and from the Peloponnese by land. The continual Athenian failure to take over the Megarid only ensured the Peloponnesians perpetual access to Attica anytime they thought they could devise some better strategy than the earlier failed annual invasions, such as the final occupation of Decelea.

Once more, by 421 the Athenians had not won; but they had proved that even after suffering horrendous losses to the plague they could find innovative new methods of not losing the war. Yet the city-state’s most creative thinkers, from Alcibiades to Demosthenes, gauged stalemate a disappointment rather than a windfall. Thus they began to devise further probing operations in the Peloponnese that might weaken Sparta without taking on her formidable hoplites. The result was a doubly disastrous policy, a renewed war with the Peloponnesians and misplaced faith in expanding the theater of conflict in lieu of confronting and defeating the Spartan army outright as a way of freeing the helots and dismantling Spartan apartheid.

Second, despite taking on all at once the three largest of the city-states, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes; losing well over a quarter of its population to the plague; and not destroying the hoplite or naval resources of any of its three adversaries, in 415 Athens invaded Syracuse. Immediately it found itself at war with a larger city than its own and almost as democratic. Not only had Athens diverted its precious resources to a far distant campaign at a time when Spartans were soon to be thirteen miles from its walls, but in attacking democratic Syracuse it also weakened its propaganda that its war was in large part ideological, taken up on behalf of democratic peoples and their resistance to foreign-imposed oligarchies.

Sicily drew blood, and the hemorrhaging attracted a whole host of new enemies. Perhaps worst of all, after Sicily Athens was in a war against itself, as the revolution of 411 and the ultimately failed oligarchic putsch proved. By 412 Persia was soon to be a de facto belligerent. Without Persia’s vast capital for crews and triremes, Sparta could never have prosecuted the Ionian War, which eventually forced Athens to capitulate. In that narrow strategic regard, Athens really was like the Germany of World War II, which fought the ol...

That the Athenian assembly exiled, executed, or fined almost every notable general it ordered on campaign did not make commanders more accountable as much as timid and prone to second-guessing. Thus, after any setback, whether in the Delium campaign or at Arginusae, they would most likely not come back to Athens, in fear of a trial. So the city did not often learn from its mistakes but almost always scared generals into being too cautious or reckless, their decisions based on anticipating what the voters back home might approve on any particular day.

But his history is more than a narrative of now obscure battles and massacres. Instead, as he predicted, it serves as a timeless guide to the tragic nature of war itself, inasmuch as human character is unchanging and thus its conduct in calamitous times is always predictable. If the Peloponnesian War still teaches us something about men at war, it is the lesson that interim armistices may quiet down the fighting but cannot with any degree of consistency end the conflict unless they address why one party chose to go to war in the first place.

Both states initially went to war unsure of how to defeat the other. Yet after nearly twenty years of futile killing, the war was resolved in about seven years when Sparta realized how Athens could be vanquished (keep its people inside the walls, its tribute and food outside, and sink its fleet). The disturbing message here is that discussions follow the sway of the battlefield, and diplomatic solutions work best when they accurately reflect military weakness or strength.

It is common to label this appreciation for power and its role in state affairs “realism” or “neorealism.” But Thucydides—and this is why he is truly a great historian—is too discerning a critic to reduce strife down simply to perceptions about power and its manifestations. War itself is not a mere science but a more fickle sort of thing, often subject to fate or chance, being an entirely human enterprise.

The Peloponnesian War, then, is not a mere primer for international relations studies, and the historian does not believe that “might makes right....

For a writer who is supposedly interested in power rather than tragedy, Thucydides misses no occasion to note how heartbreaking the losses of particular armies were. What seems to capture the historian’s attention is not, as is so often claimed, the role of force in interstate relations but the misery of war that is unleashed upon the thousands—the subject of this book—who must fight it.

Thucydides sometimes opines that a particular campaign was wise or foolish, but he nearly always adds enough detail and editorializing to convey to us that the soldiers who believed in the cause for which they were dying deserved commemoration in terms that matched their sacrifice. So one discovers that the Thespians who perish at Delium are not around the next year to save their city when their erstwhile allies, the Thebans, tear down the walls. The town of Mycalessus loses not merely its schoolboys but even its animals—and we, his readers, should know that and mull it over. The Athenians are not merely slaughtered at the Assinarus River but perish as they fight one another to drink the blood and mud of the river. Whereas historians search for messages about the “lessons” of Thucydides embedded within his text, the general reader has no problem in sensing immediately what his history is about precisely from those memorable passages that will never go away, reminding us of the passions and furor that are unleashed on otherwise normal men when they go to war.

The young men of Athens, on the eve of the initial Spartan invasion or during the debate about Sicily, are always eager for war, inasmuch as they have had no experience with it. In contrast, “the older men of the city,” the more experienced, who know something of plagues, assassinations, terror, and sinking triremes, always are reluctant to invade, and thus often strive to give the ...

Thucydidean war can have utility and solve problems, and it often follows a grim ...

starts, it may well last twenty-seven years over the entire Greek world rather than an anticipated thirty days in Attica and kill thousands at it...

Isocrates, On the Peace, 4, 88, mourned the loss of prominent Athenians over the three-decade course of the war, aristocrats who would have done far better to use their talents against the common Hellenic enemy, imperial Persia. Isocrates’ argument is similar to that of those who now regret the First World War, which is seen as a tragic European suicide that wrecked the imperial mission of a civilizing Britain. See, in general, N. Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York, 2000), 457–62.

Kagan, Origins of War,

Herman, Idea of Decline,

Plato, Protagoras, 359E. There is little of pacifism in any of Plato’s dialogues, which instead assume that war is a tragic but nonetheless natural event. His criticism of wars per se is pragmatic rather than what we would recognize as moral, and instead arises over particular modes of fighting that involved Greeks being killed by Greeks, or good hoplites brought down by their social inferiors in less than heroic skirmishes and at sea.

Pericles is often and accurately compared to Churchill in that by the end of their long careers, both old aristocratic imperialists had seen too much to have any illusions that the appeasement of a garrison state and its antidemocratic coalition would bring peace.

An entire subfield of Greek history exists to ascertain why the Peloponnesian War erupted when it did, and which side was at fault for finally breaking the peace. The arguments damning Athens are found in E. Badian, Plataea, 125–62. For the Athenian position, see the famous apology of G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, summarized briefly in Origins, 290–92. Kagan, Outbreak, 345–74, is fair and comprehensive in reviewing a century of scholarly controversy. Nevertheless, he has doubts about Thucydides’ rather deterministic views that the war was inevitable, given Spartan fear of an ever more powerful Athens.