A War Like No Other Read online

  What transpired in these brief incursions? The fighting primarily involved low-level killing and plundering. The aim was to hurt the enemy and yet find some way in the process to pay the cost of deploying such a large fleet and forces of marines on a round-trip cruise of some eight hundred miles. For example, along the coast of the Peloponnese and the southwestern mainland, hostages were taken at Thronion, Prasiae pillaged, the Amphilochian Argives enslaved, Ambracia plundered, and Cytherans held for ransom. Sometimes permanent bases were established at places like Cythera or Naupaktos, where the Athenian fleet could regularly find supplies for subsequent expeditions as well as provide a base for local resistance. The more frequently the Peloponnesians entered Attica in the first seven years of the war, the more likely the Athenians were to raid the farms and towns of their allies to the rear—likewise achieving very little material advantage, but in the process by trial and error fashioning the foundations of a radical new strategy that would soon become devastating to the Spartan cause.

  Some 30,000 Athenians and their allies combined to cruise the coast. Rarely did ravagers meet resistance, such as the Spartan Brasidas’ heroic defense of the poorly defended hamlet of Methone on the southwestern Messenian coast. Instead, as the fleet made its way slowly around Laconia and up the northwestern coast of the Peloponnese, they found less conflict the farther they sailed on past Sparta, stopping for two days of ravaging in the rich countryside of Elis. Before the Eleans could muster an army, the Athenians were back at sea and heading for the critical mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, where they captured the Corinthian port at Sollium.

  Meanwhile, as they traveled even farther northward, past the Corinthian Gulf, storming enemy allied cities in Acarnania, yet another fleet of 30 more Athenian ships raided Locris and Phocis, off the northeast coast of the mainland. While these twin armadas of Athenians and their allies—now totaling 36,000 combatants!—hit Spartan interests, yet still another Athenian maritime force set out from the Piraeus, and promptly attacked the nearby island of Aegina. Perhaps the rage over the Spartan ravaging explains why the Athenians felt no hesitation in expelling thousands of Aeginetan men, women, and children, and then cleansed the island of all its inhabitants within a few days.

  The original fleet of 100 Athenian ships had broken off operations, left the Corcyraeans in turmoil, and set sail for home, but not before stopping in the Megarid to join a land force of 10,000 Athenian hoplites who were raiding that hated Peloponnesian corridor of access to Attica. At the same time, 3,000 hoplites were still busy besieging Potidaea and expending 2,000 talents in the process—the price of constructing two Parthenons, or enough capital to build and launch an armada of 2,000 triremes and keep them busy for half a year. By the start of the third year of the war, the single siege of Potidaea had cost Athens 40 percent of its prewar capital reserves, an enormous sum that should have warned all the city-states of the financial catastrophe that might accrue from a drawn-out siege.10

  No Rules

  Almost immediately after 431 there arose two Peloponnesian Wars. Historians more or less concentrate on the well-known land battles at places like Mantinea and Delium, the famous sieges of Mytilene, Syracuse, and Melos, and the climactic naval showdowns such as Arginusae and Aegospotami. But an even more atrocious combat in the shadows, in out-of-the-way places like the Aeolian Islands, off Italy, and Sollium and Cythera, went on simultaneously. The repetitious language of Thucydides’ descriptions of these raids—“they plundered,” “they attacked,” “they killed”—by needs is matter-of-fact, given the frequency of indiscriminate slaughter that quickly became part of this low-intensity plundering.

  Both Spartans and Athenians began to augment their major theater operations with smaller incursions for the next twenty-six years. Before the war was over, almost every sector of the Greek-speaking world had suffered a sudden attack from marauding Spartan or Athenian commandos. At one time or another, the Spartans hit Salamis, Hysiae, Argos, Iasos, Clazomenae, Kos, and Lesbos, while the Athenians continued during and after the Peace of Nicias (421–415) in their reign of terror, landing and plundering Melos, dozens of Sicilian villages, Lampsacus, Miletus, Lydia, Bithynia, Caria, and Andros.

  Thucydides himself was often repelled by the sheer barbarity of these raids. Both attacker and attacked gave no quarter, and battle often turned into little more than chasing down desperate men and killing them from the rear. A particularly graphic example was the Athenian disaster in northwestern Greece during the sixth year of the war, in summer 426. After the Athenian attackers became confused and were ambushed in the unfamiliar hills of Aetolia, General Demosthenes lost control of his panicked army. And once the arrows of the surviving Athenian archers were exhausted—the last bastion of the army’s safety—the light-armed tribal skirmishers of the Aetolians rushed in from every quarter. It was a ghastly scene where the Athenians fell into “pathless gullies,” many buried by a sea of javelins but even more caught in dense underbrush and woods, where they were torched alive:

  Every type of flight was attempted; but every manner of destruction befell the Athenian force. Only with difficulty could the survivors flee to the sea at Oeneon in Locris, the very place they had started out from. Many of the allies perished and 120 Athenian hoplites as well. So great was the number of such dead, and all of the same age that perished here—literally the best men that the city of Athens lost in the entire war.11

  “The best men” suggests that the aristocratic Thucydides, like Plato later, particularly abhorred this type of combat, when good infantry found no conventional theater to showcase their training and bravery. An even worse massacre transpired not far away in Amphilochia, a few months later (winter 426) during another large-scale Athenian raid, as part of the ongoing efforts early in the war to secure the shores of the Corinthian Gulf and the gateway westward to Sicily and Italy. After a truce, some Ambraciots tried to flee their captors without being noticed by the Athenian general Demosthenes and his Acarnanian allies. But almost immediately the Acarnanians ran them down and slaughtered about 200. Meanwhile, a relief column of Ambraciots arrived and in ignorance camped nearby for the night. Demosthenes’ men fell upon the sleeping Ambraciots and began butchering them as they struggled to rise.

  Most Ambraciots making it out of the camp were hunted down by the native Amphilochians. Suffering the fate of the Athenians the summer before in Aetolia, they were soon chased into ravines and rough country and killed in droves. A few terrified Ambraciots waded out to the sea and jumped into the surf, despite the presence of an Athenian fleet patrolling the shores. So desperate were the Ambraciots to get out of the undergrowth and flee the hated tribes of Amphilochians that they preferred to be killed or captured in the water by Athenian sailors. All of this was a long way from the pomp and protocol of hoplite battle.

  The exact number of those who were murdered in flight is unknown. Killed in their sleep, in the woods, or in the water, the dead Ambraciots counted well over 1,000. In an unusual editorial note of disgust, Thucydides remarks that the Ambraciot holocaust was the greatest disaster that befell a Greek city in such a short period of time. He adds that he could not give any precise figure of the dead, since “the multitudes of those said to have perished seem unbelievable given the size of the city.”12

  During this sad spectacle in Amphilochia, the Acarnanian allies of the Athenians slaughtered troops retiring under truce, turned on their own generals who sought to stop such gratuitous violence, and got confused over the exact nationalities of the troops they were supposed to be killing. The archconservative Plato hated such unconventional war in his own time (429–347). He seems to have blamed its fourth-century ubiquity on its odious birth during the Peloponnesian War. Then in his teens and twenties, he had seen imperial Athens lose the war, his aristocratic friends fail in their efforts at oligarchic overthrow, and his mentor, Socrates, executed by radical democrats shortly thereafter. Apparently connecting the dots, he offered a strange rant about the pernicious use of “naval in
fantrymen.” Plato deplored battle in which there were no clear-cut combatants to settle the issue through discipline and courage.

  Instead, rabble “jump ashore on frequent stops and then run back as quick as they can to their ships. They think there is no shame at all in not dying courageously in their places.” Apparently so disgusted was he at the practice of employing ships to tarnish the reputation of war and the heroic code of good hoplite infantry that he scoffed that in mythical times it would have been better for the Athenians to have given old King Minos all the hostages he wanted rather than to have resisted him by sea, and thus have initiated the successful maritime example that led to the present shame.13

  The Lebanonization of Greece

  A climate of lawlessness soon swept Greece, much like the terror and chaos that characterized Beirut between 1975 and 1985, during which 150,000 Lebanese lost their lives. Very quickly after the Spartans crossed the Attic border, almost any Greek in transit became fair game—if he ventured into the wrong place at the wrong time. In 430, for example, some Peloponnesian envoys traveled through Thrace on their way to Persia as part of the initial Spartan plan of obtaining Persian capital. Local Athenian ambassadors, however, convinced the Thracians to have the diplomats arrested and extradited to Athens. Once there they were summarily executed without trial, their bodies thrown unceremoniously into a pit. The kidnapping of diplomats was an abject violation of Greek custom, which both respected the sanctity of heralds and envoys and often provided for proper burial of the dead.

  In explanation of this shocking behavior, Thucydides relates that the Athenians were furious because of the recent Spartan practice of intercepting all Athenian or neutral vessels, both warships and merchant transports, found off the shores of the Peloponnese, and then executing the crews. How many civilian sailors and military crews were killed in such a piratical and atrocious manner, as is true of so many bloody incidents in the Peloponnesian War, is not known. Yet the number could well have been in the thousands. These were state-sanctioned operations to harm the enemy, but in many instances personal profit was the primary incentive for the thousands who opportunistically joined in.14

  Cowardice was a requisite for such butchery, since rarely were troops willing to meet like kind. A good example is the especially cruel Spartan admiral Alcidas, a thug who found his natural calling in the war once it quickly degenerated into no-holds-barred theft and murder. With 40 triremes he was sent from the Peloponnese in 427 to relieve the embattled rebels at Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, who themselves would shortly surrender and face mass execution by the Athenians. While Alcidas was in transit, word reached him that Mytilene had fallen and the revolt from Athens had been crushed. In response, he immediately discarded suggestions either to sail on to Mytilene and confront the victorious Athenian fleet or to raise a general revolt among the Athenian subject communities of Asia Minor. Both were risky propositions that might result in a set-piece fight with the superior Athenian fleet.

  Instead, Alcidas looked for easier prey—and then a quick getaway back home to the Peloponnese. Before the Athenian disaster on Sicily and the loss of two-thirds of the imperial fleet (413), it was a dangerous thing for a Spartan fleet to be anywhere in the Aegean for very long. Alcidas ducked into the small Ionian town of Myonnesus, where he summarily executed all the crews that his triremes had intercepted en route from the Peloponnese, in line with the Spartan vow at the beginning of the war to kill any seamen thought to be allied with the Athenian cause. How Alcidas advanced Spartan war aims, and in what manner his fleet of killers fitted into the general calculus of the war is unclear; apparently, though, he wished to send the message to neutrals that his breakout voyage across the Aegean meant that the seas were no longer the sole domain of the Athenian fleet.15

  Guarantees now meant nothing. The Athenian general Paches, for example, who was chasing Alcidas, gave up the pursuit and wound up landing with a fleet at Notium, in Asia Minor. There he quickly sought to recover the town for the Athenians and put down an incipient rebellion. Rather than being outraged at Alcidas’ behavior, the Athenian admiral adopted his tactics. Thus, he offered to parley with one of the enemy mercenary commanders, the Arcadian Hippias. When Hippias came out of his negotiations, Paches quickly attacked, took his garrison, and then broke his promises of immunity and killed Hippias on the spot.

  Next Paches went on to deal with the rebels at Mytilene, rounded up the Spartan instigator Salaethus, and sent him back to Athens, where he was executed—even as the assembly sent word for Paches to kill en masse the guilty parties at Mytilene.16 In a metaphor for the entire war, the Athenians sent to hunt down the Spartan butcher proved to be greater butchers themselves, each side now fearful that mercy would be seen as weakness while murder conveyed a salutary warning that the wages of rebellion or even neutrality were death.

  There was no general rule—any more than there was in Beirut during the Lebanon crisis—indicating whether captors, either out of concern for eventual ransom money or from transitory feelings of mercy, might keep alive their hostages. Instead, innocent civilians were abducted, whisked away for safekeeping, and then brought out to be executed at a more opportune time. Such was the fate of 300 Argive conservatives whom Alcibiades kidnapped in summer 415, on charges that they harbored “pro-Spartan” sympathies and were thus a danger to his efforts to reforge an Argive-Athenian democratic alliance. A year later, when the Argive democrats were worried about a possible coup and foreign invasion and Alcibiades himself was under suspicion, the Athenians retrieved the 300 from the islands and sent them home, where they were executed upon arrival.

  Such hostage taking was not new. At the very beginning of the war, the Athenians had arrested all the Boeotians found in Attica on news that the Theban terrorists and insurrectionists had attacked Plataea. And in 424 the Athenians had captured some Aeginetans at the frontier town of Thyrea—but only after they sacked the town, razed the walls, and enslaved all the inhabitants. They transported the entire cargo of captives to some unnamed but safe islands, and then on order of the Athenian assembly later executed them all—apparently an unexceptional event given the hatred between Aegina and Athens.17

  The historian Xenophon noted, when news arrived at Athens that Lysander was on his way into the Piraeus, that panic broke out among the citizens who thought that they might now suffer some of the barbarity that they had inflicted on others, running the gamut from planning to cut off the right thumbs or entire hands of captive seamen and throwing captured crews overboard in the high seas, to butchering the Histiaeans, Scionaeans, Toronaeans, Aeginetans, “and many other Greek peoples.” In the new Athenian world there was nothing intrinsically at odds with citizens watching a play of Euripides’ one day and voting to kill the adult male citizens of Scione the next.18

  Indeed, in the very midst of the war the Athenians nevertheless pursued art and culture as they always had. Take, for example, a sample period between 411 and 408, when a seemingly exhausted Athens was plagued by internal revolution and the Spartan plundering from Decelea, while fighting for its life in a series of climactic sea battles at Cynossema, Abydos, and Cyzicus. Nevertheless, in the midst of such killing and calamity, Aristophanes staged his masterpiece antiwar comedy Lysistrata (411), followed by Thesmophoriazusae—fantasy plays in which women take state policy and the courts into their own hands. And while the masons were nearing completion of the Erechtheum, the last and most daring of Pericles’ envisioned Acropolis temples, Euripides produced one of his darkest tragedies, Orestes, and Sophocles his majestic Philoctetes—about the unconquerable will of an unfairly tormented hero who resists the forces of accommodation. Actors, theatergoers, and artisans alike might ride, row, or riot in between plays and stonecutting.

  Meanwhile, once these Athenians got into their collective minds to kill, kill they did, whether the citizenry of Melos or old Socrates, with impunity. Under the laws of Athenian democracy there was neither an independent judiciary to strike down a popular decree as un
constitutional nor a sovereign and immutable body of constitutional law protecting human rights and proscribing the powers of the assembly. Athens’ conduct during and right after the war—whether killing Mytileneans, Melians, or Socrates—was all done according to majority vote, besmirching the reputation of democracy itself for centuries to come. Almost every savage measure taken by generals in the field was either preapproved by the sovereign Athenian assembly or understood by fearful commanders to be in line with the harsh dictates of an unforgiving voting citizenry back home.

  The Spartans were often worse—as a horrendous case of mass murder of 2,000 helots attests. Terrified by the Athenian base at Pylos (425), which raised the specter of wide-scale helot revolt, the Spartans passed a proclamation offering freedom to any of their Messenian serfs whose prior military record on behalf of the state might serve as proof of courage and their past benefaction. Once 2,000 came forward, the Spartans crowned them and paraded them as heroes around temples. Then in secret they executed all of them on the logical fear that such resolute men might someday pose a threat to the Spartan state. How so many serfs were slain in secret—Thucydides says “no one knew how any of them died”—we are not told. The murder of the helots was never acknowledged by the Spartans. It is one of the tragic quirks of history, or perhaps a reflection of the biases of ancient historians themselves, that more is known about how 120 Athenians died in Aetolia than 2,000 murdered serfs in the Peloponnese.19