A War Like No Other Read online

  Besides these explicit figures of an aggregate 5,750 crack Athenian troops lost, one can extrapolate from the remarkably consistent percentages of fatalities (around 30 percent) to reach some type of figure for the reserve hoplites (about 4,800 dead of the 16,000?) and the “indeterminable number” of thetes, metics, women, children, and slaves. The latter combined group of Attic residents might have totaled at least 200,000. (In 1920, before the arrival of the great exodus from Asia Minor, the Greek census reported that Attica’s total population was 501,615, excluding the metropolitan and industrial heart of Athens and the Piraeus.)

  If the people of ancient Attica suffered deaths in numbers commensurate to the percentages of males in the cavalry and army—perhaps well over 10,000—then at least 60,000 additional civilians also perished. In terms of annual wages lost that would have been otherwise garnered by these stricken soldiers and laborers, the death of somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 adult males of all statuses meant an immediate shortfall of well over 1,000 talents to their families—or the yearly equivalent of the entire reserve fund that was set aside for the protection of the city from an Athenian fleet, a sum in contemporary American dollars approximating $500 million in lost economic activity. Athens’ financial troubles in the ensuing decades of the war were due not just to skyrocketing military expenditures and rebellious allies but also to the loss or disablement of thousands of workers in Attica at the very start of the war.

  The deaths of another 40,000 to 50,000 women, slaves, and children proved catastrophic. Aside from their essential role in the Athenian economy, even during wartime such “noncombatants” often played a pivotal role. At sieges, for example, women cooks were invaluable in keeping the defending garrison alive and healthy. The loss of such caregivers no doubt explains the high numbers of deaths of those who otherwise might have been fed and nursed through the illness. The Athenian phalanx could not march in full force into Megara or Boeotia without servile baggage carriers, while thousands of slaves were beginning to row in the Athenian imperial fleet, whose triremes required somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 sailors.

  The plague probably killed at least five times more frontline hoplites than were lost at the bloody battle of Delium. Its aggregate cost even exceeded the number of those who perished in the notorious catastrophe at Sicily. None of these fatality figures includes the thousands who were maimed and crippled by the disease—or, even more catastrophically, the effects on Athenian demography for years to come when so many of child-bearing age were swept away. Pausanias, for example, wrote that over thirty years later the postwar Athenians begged off from joining the Panhellenic expedition to Asia Minor on the pretext that they were still suffering from the vast manpower losses of the war and plague.23

  The sudden death of so many hoplites also had more immediate repercussions in the following years. Athens would field only 7,000 hoplites at the battle of Delium in 424. They sent fewer than 1,000 to the even more critical battle of Mantinea in 418—thousands fewer hoplites than the 10,000 Athenians who fought at Marathon in 490. Both defeats were close-run battles. Three or four thousand more Athenian infantrymen might have made the difference between victory and rout. Had the Athenian alliance won at either critical engagement, the entire war might have ended on terms favorable to Athens with the departure of Boeotia from the enemy alliance, and a new democratic Peloponnesian axis encircling an emasculated Spartan state.

  So the death of some 10,000 frontline and reserve hoplites, coupled with 300 horsemen, along with ongoing sieges and naval patrols, suggests that Athens was unable to commit to any serious land efforts for years. The disaster might also explain why there was no hoplite campaign such as even the halfhearted Athenian efforts at Delium or Mantinea initiated during the five years immediately after 429. Instead, the Athenians were paranoid about revolts among the subjects of the empire, in part due to losses from the plague and the impression that the city was too beleaguered to enforce its overseas rule.24

  Something had gone drastically wrong in just a few years. The army that had once put 16,000 hoplites in the field to ravage the Megarid at the beginning of the war, seven years later at Delium was less than half that size. For Athens to defeat either of the qualitatively better Theban or Peloponnesian armies, numerical superiority, not parity, was essential. If the thetic class who manned the fleet perished from disease at aggregate percentages commensurate to the hoplites and cavalrymen (i.e., about 30 percent), then of some 20,000 citizen rowers, perhaps 6,000 to 7,000 also died over the course of the epidemic—or enough sailors to man 30 to 35 triremes outright. That is more than the total of all the Athenian dead at the naval victory of Salamis fifty years earlier, an event that had kicked off the great Athenian half century.

  It was not until 415, nearly fifteen years after the initial outbreak, that the Athenian military was restored to even tolerable strength. For example, in a discussion of the preparations to invade Sicily in 416, Thucydides explains that the population was confident in their preparations since “the city had just recovered from the plague and the long war,” adding that financial capital had been restored during the Peace of Nicias “and a number of young men had grown up.”25

  Tally up all the cavalrymen, hoplites, and thetes who perished, add in the adult male metics, and assume that a like percentage of women and children, as well as slaves of all ages and both sexes, died: somewhere around 70,000 to 80,000 residents of Attica suddenly were gone. Most probably succumbed within a few months after the initial outbreak of 430. Thus a quarter to a third of the entire resident population vanished before the war really started in earnest. Yet because the plague was a natural, rather than human-induced catastrophe, the historian Thucydides devoted only a fraction of his attention to the epidemic in comparison to the later Sicilian fiasco, even though twice as many Athenians died in the streets of Athens as perished later in Sicily.

  Crisis in Confidence

  If modern scholars do not always factor the plague’s losses into discussions of the military history of the Archidamian War, the Athenians, at least, knew that their city had been irreparably damaged. They certainly saw their army and naval strength in terms of “before” and “after” the epidemic. Thucydides remarked that the invasion of the Megarid during the first autumn of the war was the greatest display of Athenian infantry strength in its history, inasmuch as it “had not yet been stricken with the plague.” Pericles concluded of the first year of outbreak that it had done more than any other calamity to ruin the spirit of Athens. He implies that his initial policy would have been far more successful had not the pestilence confounded his carefully wrought strategy. Even during the outbreak Athenians were concluding that there had never been anything quite like it, and that the disease had radically altered the course of the war.

  Similarly, the leaders of the revolt on Mytilene begged for Spartan help, with the argument that just two years after the outbreak “Athens had been ruined by the plague and the costs of the war.” For Thucydides, who survived the disease, the ripples of the plague were to be felt everywhere: decreased military capability, political unrest, imperial revolt, changed strategy, and, worst of all, death of the only Athenian leader who seemed to be able to keep the factious citizenry together during the dark hours of war.26

  Pericles, worn out by age and the loss of two of his sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, to the disease, himself at last crumbled. The disaster hit him hard. Pericles lost a sister as well as “the greatest number of his relatives and friends.” He died two and a half years into the war, after a drawn-out and debilitating bout with the illness, a detail omitted in Thucydides’ famous obituary of the great leader. His loss at the outset of the conflict—inasmuch as he had more or less guided Athens as its most important statesman for nearly thirty years—left the city leaderless. Athens was unsure whether Pericles’ strategic view was flawed and had led to the disaster of the plague or, in fact, was still viable and after the city’s recovery would eventually lead to victory.27 />
  If Thucydides acknowledged that the second generation of Spartan leaders, including Brasidas, Gylippus, and Lysander, were more skilled and audacious than old Archidamus, he seemed to think that Pericles’ successors, such as Cleon and Alcibiades, were only more reckless and amoral. Moderns sometimes bristle at the “great man” theory of history, the nineteenth-century notion that events can be shaped by the peculiar careers of individuals rather than long-term and more insidious demographic, social, and cultural processes. But few would argue with the idea that had Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, or Hitler succumbed to smallpox in early 1939, World War II might have had a far different course, if not outcome, altogether. Throughout the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath, the death of prominent individuals seems to have had a profound effect on the course of events: the speech of old Pagondas alone convincing the Boeotians to head for Delium; the end of both Brasidas and Cleon at Amphipolis leading to the Peace of Nicias; Lamachus’ unfortunate demise above Syracuse, which helped doom the expedition; the appearance of Lysander, which galvanized the Spartan fleet; and, in the immediate aftermath of the war, Cyrus the Younger’s death at Cunaxa, which left the victorious 10,000 in the position of the defeated, despite their having prevailed on the battlefield.28

  Thucydides recovered after his bout with the disease. But it is unclear whether the ordeal helped shape his largely pessimistic view of human events or left him with permanent physical handicaps that hampered his generalship and thus led to his exile. Surely his ideas about the importance of culture in harnessing nature had something to do with his brush with death amid a sea of stricken thousands who randomly perished about him. In some sense, his dark impressions of the war formed in the second year of the fighting, when the plague quite literally determined the tone and theme of its own subsequent chronicler.

  To make good the losses of the plague, Athens looked to a number of desperate measures, which had incalculable effects in eroding the cultural cohesion of the city. Later, popular myth circulated the idea that casual polygamy was de facto allowed for the first time. Luminaries like Socrates and Euripides, out of patriotic fervor, purportedly had additional children with second wives.29 Changes in nationality laws now allowed citizens’ rights to those born in Attica to one Athenian parent, whereas the previous law had required two. Pericles had once reminded the Athenians that, as in the past, their citizenship was a rare honor and a privilege. Yet in postplague Athens it was the quantity, not necessarily the pedigree, of people that now mattered if the city was to survive the war. With the death of his two legitimate sons, Pericles immediately sought legislation to extend citizenship to his surviving illegitimate son, Pericles the Younger.30

  An ancient community that professes faith in an adolescent science—like an enlightened fifth-century Athens—has real trouble in accounting for naturally occurring calamity when its own novel god Reason fails. Later stories told of visits to plague-ridden Athens by the legendary father of medicine, Hippocrates himself. Some ancient accounts reflect scientific theories that weather conditions were the causative agents, or perhaps polluted grain brought on by unseasonably moist conditions. Even though so-called miasmatic conjectures—the air of 430 was contaminated by mysterious gases, dead bodies, or stagnant water—were apparently common explanations for the outbreak, Thucydides did not think them worthy of discussion in any detail. But many others did. The historian Diodorus, for example, argued that the crowding had produced “polluted” air that sickened the citizenry.31

  Yet while “air” has little clinical connection with infectious disease, the ancients were not entirely wrong in their empirical suppositions. Many viruses and bacteria circulate through tiny airborne droplets expelled through coughing. In addition, stagnant water can explain outbreaks of ill health, inasmuch as pools are ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes that breed malaria (“bad air”).

  Still, if Hippocratic science could not adequately explain, much less ameliorate, the effects of the plague, if Greek cosmologists and natural philosophers offered not a clue about the true etiology of the epidemic, and if Socratic ethics failed to explain why for the good of the city one should be civic-minded amid such calamity, then even a sophisticated people like the classical Athenians—Pericles included—could turn to cult and superstition in preference to both science and traditional Olympian religion. What had Zeus, Apollo, or Athena done to stop the plague? No more than had Hippocrates and the doctors. Thus, in both Thucydides’ history and Aristophanes’ contemporary comedies, offbeat prophets and soothsayers fill the vacuum and find a renaissance during the plague years among a disillusioned populace.

  The biographer Plutarch thought the spiritual odyssey of Pericles himself offered an object lesson about the descent from science to false knowledge. Traditionalists had parodied the Athenian leader for much of his earlier career for being a rationalist, a student of the natural philosophers Anaxagoras and Protagoras. Silly stories circulated about him idling his time away in dialectics with Protagoras, attempting to discover whether a javelin or its thrower was morally responsible for the accidental death of its target. Yet in his last days, even Pericles, Athens’ wartime leader, was reduced to pathetic false notions, and so wore an amulet around his neck to save him from the enfeebling disease. Before this terrible war was over, the Athenians would see things even worse than their great rationalist general reduced to embracing superstition on his deathbed.32

  In the aftermath of the disease, the cult of Asclepius, along with that of Hygieia (“Health”), was introduced from Epidaurus in the Peloponnese to Athens sometime around 420, as if worshipping these newer gods of medical cures on a regular basis might save the city from further cycles of epidemics. The so-called Asclepieion (“House of Asclepius”) was constructed directly to the west of the great theater of Dionysus, beneath the Acropolis, a bitter reminder that in addition to public drama Athens now needed divine medical relief. Meanwhile, on the border between Boeotia and Attica at the Oropus, the legendary hero Amphiaraos soon also won his own cult sanctuary, in hopes that such a healing deity might provide prophylaxis from further infection.

  There was more worry that the gods were angry. Just four years after the outbreak, and shortly after a return of the disease in 426, the Athenians took the drastic step of purifying the island of Delos—the legendary center of the old Greek Delian League—in hopes of regaining the favor of Apollo, who traditionally warded off disease. Under the leadership of Nicias they removed all the graves from the island and set up annual games in the god’s honor.33

  More untraditional cults from the East—the Phrygian mountain goddess, Cybele, Sabazius, the Thracian Dionysus, and Asiatic Bacchus—would soon be imported by the beleaguered Athenians, hedging their bets in case the traditional Olympians, like Apollo, Athena, and Zeus, could bring no relief in the future. Yet for all the rise in supernatural explanations and their collective hysteria, even in their worse moments the Athenians never resorted to human sacrifice to mollify the gods or engaged in witch trials or ritual scapegoating in hopes of alleviating their misery. Nevertheless, just as Athens was reeling from outside enemies, inside the walls of the city began the greatest spiritual transformation and period of religious uncertainty in the history of the city. All subsequent campaigning at Mytilene, Melos, Scione, and Sicily must be seen in light of the cultural chaos unleashed on the democracy at home.

  The Survivors

  Difficult times call for different men. Pericles was dead. Yet his orphaned young ward Alcibiades was emerging to prove indestructible—and, later, shameless. He had survived four years of exposure to the plague, both in the hot zones at Athens and earlier, when the disease had killed every fourth soldier at Potidaea. Through the first five years of the war at home and abroad, the veteran cavalryman had kept intact his hard-won honor. With the death of the old guard to disease, Alcibiades, in his mere twenties, was on the verge of emerging as one of the new leaders of an Athens now so chronically short of healthy men. Plutarch relates how a
mid the misery of plague-ridden Athens, the resolute and robust Alcibiades visited the dejected Pericles and persuaded him to ignore his recent censure and resume public life. In normal reckoning, age and sobriety might ensure accession to political leadership; in these dark years of plague, however, youth, robust health, and even recklessness were the better criteria for the times.34

  War had earlier killed Alcibiades’ father and now made him a hero at Potidaea and a respected stalwart among the Athenian cavalry who kept the Spartans away from the precincts near the city. It had taught him that no one was immune from fate, as he watched his patron die of disease, and the city of Sophocles and the Parthenon descend into the miasma of death. Time now waited for no one in Athens, and it was far better to seize the day than to die ignominiously alone, crusted with disease.

  When the plague quieted in 426, Alcibiades was only twenty-four. Yet in the five-year-long war he had seen cannibalism, disease, and slaughter at Potidaea, women and children dying in the streets at Athens, and the estates of his wealthy friends abandoned and sometimes torched in the once beautiful Attic countryside, where his own family had owned for generations at least two large farms of about eighty acres.35 The lessons the young man took away from all of this were Thucydidean: war really was “a tough schoolmaster,” and only a few astute, callous men could see it through. Alcibiades almost alone of his generation would; but he also would take his city down with him. Thucydides points out that those who survived the plague wrongly believed that they would never again be susceptible to other illnesses. It is likely that Alcibiades likewise felt that his survival and that of his mentor, Socrates, were somehow part of his unusual luck and proof of an exceptional destiny to come.36