A War Like No Other Read online

  Aristophanes, the brilliant comic dramatist, argued that the nonending war made the farmers broke, the male leaders silly, the generals bloodthirsty, the poor too reckless, and the arms sellers rich—and nevertheless trusted that Athens was more right than wrong. Patriotism, in both its exalted and its debased forms, finally overshadowed Socratic pretensions that all Greeks were citizens of the world. As Socrates himself is made to say in Plato’s later Protagoras, it is a “noble” thing (kalon) to go to war.26

  Behind the contradictions of politics and philosophy, and the hypocrisies of the Hellenic world’s greatest generation, remain the thousands of ordinary Greeks—the subjects of this book—who were slaughtered for nearly three decades for the designs of fickle men, shifting alliances, and contradictory causes. No war of the ancient world—not Xerxes’ earlier invasion of Greece, the later grandiose invasions of Alexander the Great, or Hannibal’s romp into Italy—is more riveting and yet contradictory than the three decades of intramural fighting between Athens and Sparta.

  Just think of it: a land versus a maritime power, the starkness of the Dorians contrasted with Ionian liberality. Oligarchy was pitted against democracy, practiced dearth set against ostentatious wealth. A rural hamlet dethroned a majestic imperial city; and a garrison state professed the cause of Greek autonomy abroad even as a humane imperialism killed the innocent.

  No one foresaw such carnage in 431. Who believed that in just two years, the majestic Pericles would end up covered with pustules, grasping an amulet as he coughed out his life in the fevers of the plague? The millionaire Nicias never imagined that twenty years later he would beg for his life before having his throat slit eight hundred miles away on Sicily. Nor did the handsome Alcibiades, the rage of Athens, envision that he of all people would be murdered by assassins in an obscure hamlet in Asia Minor. Everything considered wisdom at the beginning of the war would be proven folly at its end.

  Hopes and Dreams

  There was little surprise that Athens and Sparta fought a final war to the finish in 431. Perhaps the wonder instead was that they had not done so far earlier. Indeed, between 461 and 446 (the First Peloponnesian War), the two great powers had battled on and off, although most of this earlier conflict was waged between their respective surrogates, the Boeotians, Megarians, Corinthians, Argives, and Thessalians. Still, rarely since their brief alliance to repel Persia (480–79) had there been real affinity between the two states. Not more than a handful of Athenian elites and generals had ever visited Sparta. Almost no Spartans other than a few envoys had ever gazed upon the Acropolis. True, both Athens and Sparta were still Greek poleis. They shared a common language and were in matters of religion similar; but on core political, social, and cultural issues they remained mostly antithetical to each other.

  By 431 each of the two city-states was in its own way militarily powerful precisely because it had bucked the old Hellenic agrarian tradition that had heretofore moderated the normal conditions of warfare: brutal battles of an hour or so defining war between reluctant farmers with harvest responsibilities at home. Astute prewar observers began to understand why there would be neither natural constraints nor easy victory for either side when helot serfs and galleys meant there was little need for the soldiers of either state to stay home and farm.

  Pericles himself, for example, on the eve of the fighting said, “War is inevitable.”27 The idea that Persia might reinvade a divided Greece was unlikely after its calamitous defeat a half century earlier. Instead, there was a general uneasiness that this would be a new, unrestricted civil struggle. The Corinthians rightly warned the Spartans to jettison their “old-fashioned” strategies of war—consisting of attacking farms in hopes of prompting battle—and find new ways to destroy a city like Athens.28

  The conflict between the principal rivals officially started when the Spartans violated the sworn thirty-year peace treaty and invaded Attica in spring 431. They crossed the border a mere eighty days after their ally Thebes, without warning, had also sought preemptive action by attacking the neighboring Boeotian city of Plataea, a protectorate of Athens about fifty miles away.

  Both sides claimed detailed grievances. Sparta’s ally Corinth, the rich Greek city on the Isthmus, felt that Athens earlier had belligerently intervened on the side of the rival island of Corcyra against it in a series of disputes. The small nearby state of Megara chafed under an Athenian trade embargo and asked for Spartan support. The nearby island of Aegina, which loomed on the horizon within easy sight from the Acropolis—Pericles once dubbed it “the eyesore of the Piraeus”—claimed that Athens interfered in its internal affairs and expected Sparta to preserve its sovereignty. Athenians, in turn, alleged that the Peloponnesians had encouraged their own tributary ally, the northern city of Potidaea, to revolt. The Boeotians residing to the immediate north of Athens wished to eliminate the outpost city of Plataea, which had brought the old fear of Athenian imperialism to their doorstep—and on and on.29

  Of course, an Athenian embargo against Megara, past Athenian interference in the nearby island of Aegina, rivalry over the allegiance of a powerful Corcyra with “its very large fleet,” and disputed lands on the border of Megara or Boeotia were no small matters.30 But more frequently it was again the perception of grievance, involving matters of fear and honor, that propelled Sparta to act while it could, especially among generations in both Athens and Sparta that “were unfamiliar enough with war to welcome it”31 Athens apparently thought that over the long duration its culture really could either ignore or, if need be, overwhelm Sparta, even without demonstrating in any real way in the short term how it could make Sparta pay dearly if it dared send thousands of its hoplites into Attica. Pericles’ own goal, instead, was “to survive.”32 Yet planning to just not lose was a poor way in the short term to deter Sparta from acting on its fears; all Spartans believed that they could cross the Attic border with near impunity.

  Pericles saw less of a need to enter into any direct squabbles that might endanger the empire or the decade-and-a-half peace since its last brush with Sparta, an armistice during which it reached an unprecedented level of wealth and security. The Athenians apparently felt that the Spartans would grasp that they could not win and so would not try, foolishly thinking in terms of long-term deterrence rather than immediately about how to warn their enemies that invasion across the border was synonymous with their destruction. Pericles was determined to take the first blow and so offered no credible counterthreat because he never really had any clear strategy for how to mount an offensive action that might knock Thebes or Sparta out of the war.

  He was at heart an admiral. Before the war Pericles had conducted successful sieges of recalcitrant maritime states and fought sea battles. So he had never directed a long infantry campaign or even led a hoplite army into pitched battle. He apparently envisioned Athenian naval superiority as a tool for unfettered raiding rather than the transportation of a large army to the enemy’s rear. Sparta and Thebes were singularly unimpressed. Thousands were to die on both sides because their leaders took them to war without a real plan of how to defeat the enemy on the battlefield and destroy its power.

  The Mythical Spartan Fleet

  The Spartans had their own problems as well. A modern comparison can illustrate some sense of their dilemma: it would be as if in a world without nuclear weapons the old Soviet Union at some point before the 1990s had presciently accepted that ultimately it could not compete with the freewheeling democratic and capitalist juggernaut of the United States. Thus, the Soviet hard-liners would have felt it necessary to send 300 divisions into Europe before their own allies, and the world at large, shared this pessimistic appraisal of their future and thus abandoned allegiance to their empire.

  The Spartans could field hoplite soldiers who were unbeatable in an open fight. Their tough agrarian ally Boeotia could muster even more heavy infantrymen—perhaps 7,000 to 12,000 if need be—who were every bit as formidable as Spartan professionals. And the league of alli
ed states in the Peloponnese under Spartan leadership could for short periods march out an enormous army of 60,000 that could sweep any adversary off the field of battle. The best cavalry in central Greece was Boeotian and on the Spartan side.

  For all these reasons, an impressed Thucydides emphasized that Sparta herself “occupies two-fifths of the Peloponnese, exercises control over the whole, and possesses many allies on the outside.”33 Even if Sparta and its allies could not win such a war against a maritime empire, at least they were confident that such “hard power” precluded an Athenian army occupying the Spartan acropolis.

  Yet the strength of Sparta and its league was in some ways a chimera. At the war’s outbreak the allied Peloponnesian force could not be projected by sea. It was certainly not sustained through real economic power. Sparta started out with no capital, few ships, and almost no cavalry or light-armed troops. Under the regimented totalitarian system founded by the mythical ancestor Lycurgus, civic virtue, not economic efficiency or individualism, mattered.

  For example, iron spits, not coinage, served as money precisely because in such a strange moral universe they could not be used with the ease of ordinary (and thus corrupting) currency. Third-party boatbuilders or rowers for hire did not flock to Sparta in hopes of being compensated with a hoard of metal barbecue skewers. The Spartans had been warned on the eve of the war by their allies that their ossified manner of envisioning war as hoplite battle was a formula for suicide. The harping Corinthians continually urged them to strike out to help friends around the Aegean to resist Athenian imperialism.

  Pericles was probably right when he claimed, “The Peloponnesians have no money, public or private.” There was certainly no imperial tribute pouring into the Spartan acropolis, and there were few Spartan colonies. Should Athens choose not to fight a pitched battle, Sparta possessed neither the capital nor the material reserves to keep an army in the field for any great length of time. Much less did it have either the know-how or the desire to conduct an unconventional low-intensity war of raiding, plundering, and sustained sieges.34

  A generation before the war the Spartans had swallowed their pride and called in Athenian siege engineers to help them storm insurrectionist helot strongholds. If Spartans had once needed Athenians to control their own subordinated peoples, what would happen when Athens would inevitably use its money and expertise to incite rather than subdue helot rebellion?35

  The combined fleet of Corinth and a few other Spartan allies counted only a little over 100 ships, less than half the size of the active Athenian imperial fleet. What triremes the Peloponnesians had existed only because of recent breakneck Corinthian efforts at naval construction to match the fleet of its rival Corcyra, but there was little accumulated capital to ensure that even a 100-ship armada could be deployed for very long. Warriors in heavy armor perched on tossing decks and powered by bought rowers were not Sparta’s idea of martial virtue.

  In desperation, Sparta ludicrously proposed that her allies build a colossal fleet of some 500 triremes—a pipe dream from a state that had no port other than Gythium, some thirty miles away from the city proper. War planners imagined that the hated Persians might provide capital to lay down triremes and allure new allies to box in the Athenians—strategies that would work only if Sparta could first show some success, such as either a hoplite victory or substantive damage to the cohesiveness of the empire.

  These were all grand aspirations that were not well suited for a blinkered and landlocked state. At war’s outbreak, only the three city-states of Corinth, Corcyra, and Athens had sizable fleets, and two were hostile to the Spartans.36 So at least some Peloponnesians realized that eventually they would have to embrace a multifaceted strategy: defeat the Athenians at sea and disrupt her empire, while finding a way to cut the city off from its hinterland permanently. To accomplish those goals, they needed more and diverse allies, both Greeks and Persians, as well as innovative thinkers. Until then, they had to accept the bitter fact that in a simple contest between Sparta and the Athenian empire, the money, manpower, variety of military assets, and experience of military leadership were all on the Athenian side. Indeed, two decades later, even after the Athenian disaster at Sicily (413), when the Greek world predicted an imminent Athenian collapse, Sparta still found it hard to organize a Peloponnesian fleet—so reluctant and timid were her allies to challenge long-held Athenian superiority at sea.37

  Spartan Calculations

  When war broke out in 431, the Spartan generals remained unimaginative. Two hereditary kings were by law leaders of the army and were often annoyed by the board of ephors, some of whom accompanied the royalty on campaign as overseers. Strategy at Sparta merely reflected the thinking of a closed hierarchical society of group messes and the unquestioning assumptions of a brutal indoctrination that began at age seven, when young boys were inducted into military life. Because so few Spartan statesmen had seen mercantile cities in action, they were both naive about interstate relations and the size of enemy populations and unusually prone to corruption and bribery.

  The larger and prouder allied states of the Peloponnese, like Mantinea and Elis, resented brutal Spartan leadership and were in the process of liberalizing their constitutions. In the Peloponnesian way of traditional war, harvesttime was the flash point of battle: infantrymen tramped in to burn ripe dry grain or consume it; defenders tried to evacuate it; and farmer-warriors all worried that there were harvests back home to tend that were far more important than campaigning. The Athenians had once (460–446) controlled the routes through Megara to Attica; now, however, they did not. In the Spartan mind, then, marching into Attica was possible in a way that had been difficult during the First Peloponnesian War.

  Nearly 250,000 long-suffering indentured servants in the surrounding territories of Laconia and Messenia (the so-called helots) worked farms under coercion to feed the Spartan military messes. Because of the nature of barracks life and the near-constant drilling and policing in occupied Messenia, male Spartiate warriors were seldom at home. Thus, the population of the city continually fell even as the number of oppressed helots grew. If 8,000 true Spartiates had once fought Persia, by the time of the Peloponnesian War, fifty years later, there were fewer than half that number. The result was a garrison state that could scarcely cobble together 8,000 to 10,000 hoplite soldiers of varying status, while it sat atop a volcano of tens of thousands of male serfs (“a disaster waiting to happen”) who purportedly wished, by their own admission, “to eat their masters even raw.”38

  The helots and their dream of a free Messenia were not the only fault lines in Sparta’s complex pyramidal society. In its immediate environs there were also 20,000 to 30,000 adult male Laconian perioikoi (“those who live around”), nearby villagers who enjoyed free but subservient political status and were sometimes just as unhappy as the helots with Spartan hegemony.

  Even without the worry of controlling a vast Messenia and its quarter million helots on the other side of Mount Taygetus, Sparta, like many contemporary Western societies, was in perpetual demographic crisis, entirely dependent on the menial labor of serfs. On the eve of the war King Archidamus in vain tried to remind his constituents that they were contemplating war against a state that “had a greater population than any other in Greece.” What had developed into the finest infantry in Greece was by nature a domestic police force, or perhaps a Waffen-SS if you will, whose original reason for existence was to thwart domestic insurrection and ferret out alleged dissidents.

  Finally, the cause of the volatility of most helots was not, as in the case of chattel slaves elsewhere, merely their inferior status. Instead, their zeal arose out of a sense of nationalism about their occupied home of Messenia. They were an entire tribe, in their dispossession somewhat akin to the modern-day Kurds, who despite the absence of a homeland understood that they had once been a free people with a territory and population larger than that of their conquerors.39

  At the beginning of the conflict, Spartan strategy
was as simple as it proved to be naive: the old Pavlovian response of when in doubt “invade Attica.” King Archidamus would march a massive force of allies into Attica to challenge the Athenians to battle.40 If the enemy did not venture forth from their walls, Archidamus would then systematically ravage Attic agriculture, causing famine, or at least humiliation, to make the arrogant and sophisticated city come to terms. Throughout his history Thucydides reiterates that the Spartans were flabbergasted that their simplistic reliance on ravaging had not worked. How, after all, could the Athenians call themselves an imperial power when they could not stop enemies from marching in view of the Acropolis?41

  Sparta saw no reason to alter its strategy after some two hundred years of success, even if Athens had evolved into a city that could survive despite enemies at its gates. Indeed, the Spartans seemed to have had no clear idea of the size or rural defenses of Athens. They knew even less about the maritime economy of Athens and its theoretical ability to import food to replace the third to half of the city’s supply lost out in the countryside. Even more naively, the Spartans believed that if they ravaged Attica the overseas subject states of the Athenian empire would take heart and revolt, despite the reality that Sparta had no real means to send any warships to aid them if and when an angry retaliatory Athenian fleet sailed in.

  While the actual degree of Athenian self-sufficiency in grains is unknown, it should have been common knowledge that in a crisis, importing sufficient additional food into the city was assured—especially since Athens had the money to pay the increased costs. Later, even when the Spartans were camped right outside the walls at Decelea (413–404) and the Athenians were denied use of their lands for much of the year, King Agis lamented that his raiders could still not bring the city to its knees as long as he could see grain ships continually sail into the Piraeus.42