A War Like No Other Page 15

  How exactly were so many Greeks, like the 2,000 helots or the 1,000 Mytileneans in 427 or the thousands of Athenians taken after Aegospotami, executed en masse? “Executed” is a euphemism in the age before the guillotine, gas chamber, firing squad, electric chair, or lethal injection. For those who were not run down and stabbed or shot by hostile skirmishers and archers, a variety of macabre methods are recorded, besides the usual lining up of bound captives and slitting of throats. The Spartans, for example, often threw bound prisoners live into a pit not far from town, the feared Kaiadas, where the disabled and wounded slowly starved or bled to death.

  Thucydides relates an especially brutal method of killing on Corfu, where in 425 the Athenians stormed Mount Istone in an effort to put an end to the ongoing civil unrest that the oligarchs had precipitated over two years earlier. The Athenians then claimed they would grant leniency to the captured garrison, on the provision that not a single one of the prisoners dared to escape. But after tricking a few to risk flight, they executed the rest on grounds that the accords had been broken. Apparently the remaining captives were roped together in twos and whipped by special executioners equipped with cat-o’-nine-tails as they were forced to run a gauntlet between two long lines of jabbing hoplites. After sixty or so were torn apart, the rest refused to come out of their barracks. They either perished under a hail of arrows and roof tiles or killed themselves by jabbing captured arrows into their throats or hanging themselves with nooses made from their own clothes.20

  Coups and Ethnic Cleansing

  A systematic study of all the major betrayals recorded in literary sources during the Peloponnesian War, for example, revealed fourteen overt instances between 431 and 406 of various factions colluding with the enemy to turn over towns and garrisons. Such tactics brought far more dividends than pitched battle, collaborators being successful in about half the instances recorded. Indeed, both sides were busy undermining the other’s civilian base, as agents were about evenly divided in their efforts to intrigue with either Athens or Sparta. For their part, traitors wished personal aggrandizement, political change, revenge on old enemies—or a simple end to the war and its accompanying misery. The use of the fifth column was integral in Nicias’ efforts to win over Syracuse through betrayal of the city, and in King Agis’ efforts to wear Athens down from Decelea, by appealing to insurrectionists and exiles to join his fortified stronghold right outside the city.21

  When the war appeared to be stalemated and the eventual victor uncertain, internal revolution was less likely. Yet after a particular setback—the Spartan surrender at Pylos or the Athenian catastrophe on Sicily—one side or the other grew emboldened that change at home might reflect the course of the larger war. If proof were needed that many people lack an ideology but instead prefer to look first to their own self-interests, no better examples exist than the Peloponnesian War; Thucydides repeatedly and drily points out the ebb and flow of popular Greek opinion that followed each particular Spartan or Athenian reverse. War, his “harsh schoolmaster,” when combined with political tension, turned what would have otherwise been heated, but mostly restrained, civil disputes into unchecked bloodletting. Like the plague, internal upheavals served as didactic examples in which all of society’s careful constructs—language, mercy, reason, and customs, ranging from burial to due process of law—were stripped away by war. Thucydides thought civil unrest and coups were central to his story of the war itself and that soon after hostilities broke out the “entire Hellenic world, so to speak, was so convulsed.”22

  Those Greeks who owned larger farms (i.e., twenty to one hundred acres) and accumulated capital generally favored constitutional oligarchy, or at least government run by property holders with social privileges accorded to those of “good” birth. Despite the peculiar nature of the Spartan state, Greek oligarchs nevertheless looked to Sparta to help ensure their own rule or, if on the outs, to find support for a coup attempt. In contrast, democracies believed that all residents, rich or poor, born to two citizen parents—later, just one sufficed—should be accorded full privileges of citizenship and most office-holding. Accordingly, they often crafted a number of institutions, from forced liturgies to ostracism, to engineer an equality of result rather than of mere opportunity.

  For all the coercive tactics of the Athenian empire, most of the Hellenic world’s poor by the time of the Peloponnesian War saw that the Athenian fleet could be an instrument of revolutionary change. Once the war broke out, the perennial tension between rich and poor took on new urgency since there were now outside powers willing and able to bring issues to a head—and that occurred frequently, at Corcyra (427), Megara (424), Mende (423), Thessaly (424–423), and Argos (417). The promise of insurrection and outside intervention lay behind the killing all over the Greek world, from the revolt at Lesbos (427) and the entire Pylos episode (425) to the Delium campaign (424) and Brasidas’ efforts in the Chalcidice (424–422). Oligarchs usually sought to parade their cause under the misleading rubric of wishing for “a temperate aristocracy” (aristokratia sôphrôn). Democrats countered by professing loyalty to the idea of “equality under the law” (isonomia). Once the struggle began, the former were rarely temperate and the latter seldom lawful.

  Athens’ allies had most of the advantages. The poor were always more numerous. In the early years of the war the Athenian fleet could usually arrive more quickly at a crisis spot than the Spartan hoplites, all the more so since the democratic assembly at Athens was far more audacious than its risk-averse counterparts of old men of the Spartan gerousia. Moreover, the class of small-property owners that made up almost half the population—sometimes known as the “middle guys” (mesoi), the “hoplites” (hoplitai), or the “farmers” (geôrgoi)—was not all that reactionary. The birth of the Greek city-state was a result of the rise of just this class of arms-carrying farmers, and they often had no desire to hand back government either to tyrants or to a small clique of aristocrats. They frequently stayed out of the contest. Sometimes they even joined the radical landless democrats against the oligarchs. Yeomen farmers in bronze armor were a tough force to be reckoned with when the light-armed poor targeted the aristocrats, who traditionally rode small ponies but were as lightly armed as the landless.23

  Such strife didn’t usually end in stalemate but ceased only when one faction drove out or killed the prominent representatives of the other side. In most cases local oligarchs seemed to have started the unrest in hopes of coming to power during the dissolution of the Athenian empire, especially after strategic catastrophes such as the plague, Sicily, or Aegospotami. But the democrats, with help from a swift Athenian fleet, usually finished it by murdering their richer opponents, who paid for their gambit with their lives or their property or both. In the midst of such political strife, these revolutions often became more than mere proxy wars between Athens and Sparta, unleashing a real fury that transcended the strategic calculus of the war. Wealthy citizens joined the democrats if they saw advantage in taking out powerful rivals. In turn, among the masses (dêmos) there were always factions who either welcomed in or resented Athenian succor or cut private deals with the wealthy. Much of the Athenian success in spreading democracy—Plato once remarked that the Athenians had run an empire for seventy years by making key friendships in each of their tributary allied communities—hinged on convincing wealthy people to support a new democratic order. The result was that in the general chaos thousands were killed for reasons that had nothing to do with Athens or Sparta and affected their ultimate struggle not at all.24

  Mytilene, Corcyra—and Beyond

  Thucydides himself was particularly interested in four or five of the bloodiest incidents. For example, in 428 some thousand or so wealthier residents of the most important city of Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, not far from the coast of Asia Minor, sought to change the makeup of the citizenry by recruiting sympathetic and conservative rural folk into the city. Apparently these out-of-touch idealists thought that they could unite the
entire island under nationalistic, oligarchic, and anti-Athenian auspices. And they seem to have been prompted by both Spartan and Theban agents, who, in collusion with the propertied classes, wished to remove Mytilene from the Athenian empire, thereby either making it a neutral or a de facto ally of the Peloponnesians. The degree of popular support among Mytileneans for leaving the Athenian empire is uncertain. Yet as long as the rightists’ plan had some chance of succeeding, perhaps even the poorer classes might well have supported the nationalist idea of ending tribute to Athens and increasing the power of Lesbos. An intrigued Sparta apparently thought such a defection might spread and could accomplish what its inferior fleet could not.

  Despite the effects of the plague and the presence of thousands of Peloponnesians in Attica, Athens responded—as it always did to revolt—with a rapid naval assault on the rebellious capital. A state could join or remain in the Athenian empire, but one could rarely leave. Thus a systematic blockade of the city soon followed. In typical dilatory fashion, the Spartans neither mounted a sufficiently large second invasion of Attica to draw off Athenian support nor sent a fleet rapidly enough to relieve the city. The result was that soon the revolution collapsed.

  The furious Athenians took some 1,000 ringleaders captive. They even rounded up a number of the poorer who for a time had joined the wealthy to contravene the Athenian blockade. In the end, after raucous debate at Athens—the Athenian popular leader Cleon had wished to slaughter thousands on the grounds of collective guilt—about 1,000 were executed. Much of the island was ethnically cleansed and redistributed to Athenian settlers. The number of dead Mytileneans equaled all the hoplites that Athens lost at the battle of Delium and essentially wiped out the aristocracy of Mytilene in one fell swoop. The usually cool Thucydides called the action of his countrymen “savage” (ômon).25

  The bloodletting at Corcyra (the modern-day island of Corfu) that followed in 427 was even worse. The series of revolutions and counterrevolutions is almost impossible to reconstruct, given the myriad of plots and counterplots. Suffice it to say that the Peloponnesians thought that through subterfuge they could turn Corcyra, which had the second-largest fleet in Greece and was critical in monitoring naval traffic to Italy and Sicily, away from Athens very early on in the war. In lieu of a naval battle, they began by returning some 250 Corcyraean prisoners of war taken earlier from fighting around Epidamnus. These suspicious folk might, as sleeper cells, induce a right-wing coup, ensuring Corcyra’s return to neutral status and with it taking some 100 triremes away from the Athenian fleet.

  Soon the Corcyraean terrorists murdered the democratic leader Peithias and some 60 of his prominent followers, emboldened to such desperate action by the timely arrival of some Spartan agents. In response, the “people” waged a guerrilla counterwar inside the city. The poor hoped that their greater numbers and the liberation of hundreds of slaves would prevail over the capital of the oligarchs, who in response forthwith hired 800 foreign mercenaries. The hired and unfree, not hoplite militias, were the key to winning Corcyra.

  Next the democrats descended from the heights of the city to rout their adversaries, who were terrified in turn by the arrival of an Athenian fleet. Slaves cut down their masters. The women of the city joined the democrats and pelted the rich with roof tiles. In desperation, the oligarchs tried to torch the city, vainly attempting to ward off the popular uprising even as their hired soldiers deserted in droves. After lengthy but confused negotiations with the democrats and their Athenian supporters, about 400 of the oligarchs agreed to leave their sanctuary and to be transferred to a small island off Corcyra for safekeeping. At that critical point—houses burnt, slaves freed, mercenaries hired, key politicians assassinated, and killing in the streets—the stasis began in earnest rather than abated. Corcyra was one of the largest states in the Greek world; its combined free and slave population was not that much smaller than Attica’s, perhaps almost a quarter of a million residents.

  In a strange sequence of events, a Peloponnesian fleet of more than 50 ships under the notorious Alcidas, the Spartan butcher of Myonnesus, now showed up, fresh from his killing spree in the eastern Aegean. He quickly engaged the Corcyraean fleet of some 60 triremes, reinforced by 12 Athenian ships. Several oligarchic sympathizers were on the Corcyraean triremes. These local rightists immediately tried to win their crews over to Alcidas; in the midst of a naval battle, there was additional fighting among the crews of the triremes as well.26 As was so frequent during the Peloponnesian War, whether at Plataea, Mytilene, or Amphipolis, there were two wars going on at once: the ostensible conventional struggle between Athenians and Peloponnesians, and the internal, nontraditional ideological battle between the richer conservatives and the more radical democrats.

  The Peloponnesians won the subsequent fight, not surprising given the open dissension among the Corcyraean crews and the paltry number of Athenian ships. Yet Alcidas chose to ignore the advice of his brilliant subordinate Brasidas to follow up with a general assault on the city. Instead, he withdrew. His retreat was perhaps none too soon: reports circulated that a huge Athenian fleet of some 60 ships was on its way to help the democrats, commanded by the no-nonsense Eurymedon, a tough admiral who fourteen years later was to have his rendezvous with death as part of the doomed Athenian armada in the Great Harbor of Syracuse.

  Immediately the newly confident Corcyraean democrats turned on the 400 imprisoned oligarchs, began murdering them, and then went on a general killing spree against anyone suspected of oligarchic sympathies. Eurymedon looked on. He was apparently convinced that such mass killing could only benefit Athens, which welcomed the continual alliance of a strong maritime and democratic state like Corcyra. The Peloponnesian War had opened with executions in the town of Plataea, and now many Greeks were grasping that murder and insurrection were weapons as lethal as hoplite phalanxes or triremes.

  Many of the trapped oligarchs in despair killed themselves. About 500 others escaped to the mainland and for a time renewed guerrilla operations against Corcyra. But months later they surrendered, having been promised legal trials at Athens. Instead, the democrats made some run the gauntlet, executed the rest, and allowed the remainder to commit suicide. How many perished in the revolution at Corcyra in this first round of killing? If one includes the 250 original firebrands sent back by the Corinthians, adds the 400 hostages taken and held offshore, and counts the 500 who fled to the mainland, then well over 1,000 men of oligarchic sympathies and an unknown number of their enemies perished. This tally does not include those who died later fighting on the acropolis, in the subsequent fires, in the battle at sea, or in the general roundup of the oligarchs. Thucydides’ graphic description implies a holocaust that may well have engulfed thousands more who were targeted on charges of subverting the democracy:

  Some perished also merely as a result of private hatred. Others were murdered by those who owed them money. Every form of death followed. Whatever type of killing is apt to transpire at such times took place—and things even worse. In fact, father murdered son; suppliants were dragged from the temples and executed on the spot; some others were even walled inside the temple of Dionysus and thus perished.27

  Thucydides went on in another famous aside to show how in the chaos that soon spread throughout Greece language lost its meaning, as the extremists took control of the public debate and libeled the men of moderation. Oaths, the ancient simplicity of fair dealing and lack of guile, and the rule of law were all thought passé and the refuge of the naive and the weak. The historian’s aim in such a bleak commentary on human nature is to provide a background for the numerous other revolutions that would break out later on in the war and would thus need far less attention given the detailed blueprint of civil insurrection at Corcyra. Almost one-quarter of the third book of Thucydides’ history is devoted to the bloodletting on just Mytilene and Corcyra.

  The Third World

  Despite the lack of any clear strategic results from fomenting revolution in the first decade
of the war, both the Spartans and the Athenians still realized that at very little cost to themselves—almost no Athenians or Spartans had died on either Mytilene or Corcyra—they could instigate civil unrest that in theory could win over an entire state to their side. The Athenian general Eurymedon, remember, who commanded the second Athenian fleet of 60 ships, watched the killing proceed even though he had some 12,000 seamen and 500 hoplites under his command who could have easily restored order. And Corcyra was to experience more killing and stasis for years; in 410 another 1,500 people were killed, seventeen years after the initial outbreak.

  Still, not a single important ally of Sparta—Megara, Corinth, Thebes—was permanently taken over by democratic insurrectionists. In contrast, given the nature of the far-flung Athenian empire, Athens would lose, at least for a time, a few of its strongest allies and subjects—Argos, Methana, Chios, and Mantinea—which either became mired in civil strife or had their governments turned over to oligarchs eager to join the state to the anti-Athenian cause. More importantly, when one examines even the fragmentary figures of the dead provided by Thucydides from these dirty wars, the number of killed quickly reaches the many thousands: 1,000 executed at Mytilene (427), another 1,000 on Corcyra (427–426), hundreds slain at Argos (417), as well as those caught in the upheavals at Megara, Boeotia, and in Thrace.28

  In 411, for example, 200 were murdered on Samos, another 400 exiled, and the lands and houses of the rich confiscated, all to be followed months later by a second round of killing those suspected of fomenting oligarchic revolution. In 412, civil strife returned to Lesbos. A decade and a half after the horrific Athenian executions on the island, the Spartan and Athenian fleets once more vied to support their own local surrogates. And in 412 Chios also revolted and for the next two years was racked with nonstop civil unrest. The rebellious island was convulsed by executions of its democratic supporters of Athens, then constantly plundered by Athenian forces from their permanent fort at Delphinium, all while massive slave revolts went on in the countryside and the entire population was beset by famine.29