CHAPTER 4
TERROR
WAR IN THE SHADOWS (431–421)

After a one-year hiatus arising from fear of the plague, the Spartan alliance resumed invading Attica in 427, even as its Boeotian partners pressed on with the siege of Plataea begun during the epidemic at Attica. Yet in these first years of the conflict, not all Athenians were dying from the pestilence or patrolling the Attic countryside in futile efforts to repel Peloponnesian ravagers. Thousands in the imperial fleet, infected or not, were determined to make Sparta and its friends pay for their attacks and to experience something of the humiliation that they had inflicted on others both out in Attica and inside Athens.

In Plutarch’s words, as a result of these raids against Spartan territory there was for the Athenians some “consolation to be had from what their enemies were suffering.” If prewar observers had worried that the internecine conflict between Athens and Sparta might be far different—far more lengthy—than past Greek wars, they were soon to be proven prescient.¹

The first years of hostilities (431–423) more or less bore this gloomy antebellum prognosis out: the Athenians avoided battling Spartan infantrymen, while Peloponnesian ships were usually not willing to meet the Athenian navy in any major engagement. The stage was set for “asymmetrical,” “fourth-dimensional,” or “postmodern” war—conflict in which an array of political, social, and cultural factors, rather than conventional military doctrine or traditional combatants, determines how one side chooses to harm its adversary. Some pretty uncouth killers would now step out of the shadows of the Greek world to do what traditional generals and admirals could not. Both sides would employ fear in unconventional ways, reminding us that terror is a method, not an enemy, a manifestation of how a particular belligerent chooses to wage war rather than some sort of independent entity that exists apart from men, money, and places.

Peter Krentz has made the point that hoplite battle was not the primary means of fighting by counting up all the examples of deception and surprise attacks, often by night and fought by nonhoplites.* His thirty-seven instances in the Peloponnesian War dwarf the two large, set-piece hoplite encounters at Delium and Mantinea, and the smaller clashes of phalanxes at Solygia and Syracuse. Similarly, W. K. Pritchett collated forty-three examples of night attacks during the Peloponnesian War, engagements that were antithetical to the old idea of drawing up armies in broad daylight to settle the issue through infantry clashes.²

Such nontraditional hostilities broke out immediately in spring 431. Predictably, they intensified once the stalemated conventional war turned to distant theaters beyond the annual invasions of the Attic countryside, involving a host of surrogate forces that were not evenly matched. The tragedy here was that rarely was the fighting symmetrical or the outcome in these localized engagements in doubt. It was lamentable because only evenly matched and conventional combatants were likely to adhere to the old Hellenic idea of rules and protocols that tended to preclude gratuitous killing, given the uncertainty on both sides of victory and thus the shared need to worry about their own treatment after defeat. But in the backwaters and hinterlands of Greece, away from public duels in the plains, the Athenians and Spartans, and an array of their odious henchmen, usually did not meet the main forces of the enemy but instead found in particular locales and for brief moments unquestioned superiority in numbers. In those cases, the lives of the weak and innocent depended entirely on the particular attitude of a particular commander on a particular day, the likelihood of mercy diminishing as the war escalated ever more.

The New Killers

FOR THIS TYPE of war there was no need for either the cumbersome personal armor of the hoplite infantryman—breastplate, greaves, shield, helmet, spear, and sword—or the costly state investment in triremes (170 to 200 seamen in an expensive galley). True, hoplites were used on ships, for raiding, and at sieges, but they increasingly often lightened their panoplies and questioned their traditional training as misguided for such a new theater of warfare. Instead, novel types of combatants were emerging—the light-armed warriors, known variously to Greeks as the “light-guys” (psiloi), the “peltasts” (because they carried the small crescent-shaped shield known as the peltê), or simply the “naked” (gymnoi) and “unarmored” (aoploi or anoploi). Traditionally, light-armed corps contingents were only loosely organized and used primarily in pursuit and ravaging. These were less frequent arenas where hoplite formations were either absent or already in shreds, and thus lighter, more nimble warriors could out-maneuver armored combatants, who were vulnerable outside of rank.

Before 431, Athens, for example, whether due to its enormous fleet, which required the full service of the poorer and landless population, or because it trusted in naval engagements abroad and hoplite and cavalry defense at home, never organized an official body of light-armed troops. Instead, its older and younger citizens might tag along on expeditions to nearby Megara or Boeotia in hopes of plundering or ravaging under the aegis of heavy infantry. The Peloponnesian War would change all that. By the last decade of the war, even Athens was regularly hiring and deploying its own light-armed forces, with enormous implications for the future of Greek warfare.³

Originally, light-armed troops were identified as the “other” in the sense of both geography and expertise and thus were often concretely and metaphysically outside the Greek city-state. In Greece proper they were the poorer without land who could not afford body armor, much less a horse, and usually brandished a spear or javelin and only a cheap wooden or leather shield. Outside of the mainland, on the periphery of the Greek world, the light-armed were more specialized and often tribal warriors adept at fighting in rough terrain with little or no experience in, or need of, facing down phalanxes.

Peltasts were originally a Thracian specialty, quick tribal fighters without much body armor other than their crescent-shaped shields, often leather caps, and long thrusting spears or throwing javelins. Early in the war both Athens and Sparta hired such Thracian mercenaries, and they played key roles in the Athenian victory over the Spartans at the island of Sphacteria (425) and Brasidas’ success against Athenian subject states in the Chalcidice (424). Yet by the end of the war Greek troops that had copied the Thracian equipment and tactics were deployed far more frequently than hoplites.⁴

Slingers were a specialty from the island of Rhodes, while the best archers were imported from Scythia and Crete. In the same manner that superior cavalry roamed the plains of Thessaly and Macedonia, so too areas of the Greek-speaking world that had never fully embraced the agrarian protocols of the polis saw no reason to deploy heavy infantry to dispute their extensive plains. Rather, they found it cheaper and more effective to fight in the hills or to hit, run, and raid, a fact well illustrated by the multifaceted force that Thucydides says the Athenians sent to Sicily in its first wave. Besides hoplites and sailors, there were 700 poor Athenians equipped as marines, 480 archers (including 80 Cretan experts), 700 slingers, and another 120 light-armed Megarians—in other words, 2,000 light-armed troops, or about 40 percent of the 5,100-man hoplite force itself. And of the total manpower sent on the 134 ships of the first armada to Sicily, hoplites made up less than 20 percent of the roughly 26,800 sailors and combatants. Even earlier, the Athenians had deployed slingers in Acarnania in hopes of matching the irregular troops of their unconventional enemies there. Similarly, the Boeotians called them in before finishing off the trapped Athenian garrison at Delium in 424. Light-armed warriors—not hoplites in phalanxes—turned up everywhere in the Peloponnesian War.⁵

What was the attraction of such missile fighters? In a word, they could kill from afar. Through long training and expertise, they achieved lethality without the expense of either heavy armor or ships. When slingers, for example, had access to aerodynamic small lead projectiles of between twenty and thirty grams, rather than rougher clay pellets or stones, they could easily outdistance archers and hit targets at some 350 yards. Heavily armored men in rank with shields raised would be largely invulnerable to a rain of pellets, but how often did that occur in the Peloponnesian War, when most infantry fighting was outside the phalanx?

As the war progressed, the use of these nonconventional troops only increased. Even the reactionary Spartans drafted a corps of both bowmen and cavalry by 424. Their sudden turn to these forces only came after the disaster on Sphacteria, and the Athenian use of Pylos and Cythera as forward bases in Peloponnesian territory. After the failures in Attica, and the inability to match Athens at sea, the Spartan leadership at last grasped that their own crack hoplites were not the answer. This recognition sent shock waves throughout Sparta, a state dependent on a homogenous hoplite elite now revealed to be unable to win the war it had started.⁶

Radical social and cultural effects followed widespread use of the light-armed killers in their new unconventional war. Because Greek military service had for so long been predicated on class—the nature and size of land owned rather than military efficacy per se determining how citizens fought—the turn to the poor and the skirmisher called into question all the existing protocols of centuries past. This military revolution risked overturning the very social accords of the Greek city-state, and is best appreciated in retrospect from the fourth century when nostalgic elite Greek thinkers deplored the legacy of the Peloponnesian War, especially the importation of foreign killers who were as deadly, but not nearly as respected or honored, as hoplites.⁷

It is a truism of most Western militaries that their peacetime bureaucracies are centered around heavy conventional infantry forces that are designed to fight their counterparts of a similar nation-state. In contrast, reliance on irregulars and special forces not only calls such assumptions into question but temporarily elevates a type of warrior who is himself uncomfortable with any protocols and thus the logical target of social and class disdain.

The dichotomy is as old as Homer himself, whose Iliad of the late eighth century B.C. relegates the archer and the irregular to a decidedly inferior social caste. Achilles or Ajax, spearing in the melee, seems the more resolute, honest fighter than the cowardly (although lethal) archer Paris. Contemporary hostility to the terrorist, guerrilla, and insurgent—who, armed with rocket-propelled grenades, land mines, and suicide bombs, can raise havoc with the billion-dollar armored divisions of the nation—is not unlike ancient lamentations over the newfound power of the bowmen, catapult, or light-armed skirmisher who lacked the respectability of the hoplite infantryman. Unlike hoplites, ancient skirmishers, again like modern insurgents, were more likely to target civilians, whether on Corcyra or in the small Boeotian hamlet of Mycalessus. There is no record in earlier Greek history of a hoplite phalanx murdering civilians, and little evidence that hoplites killed many combatants who ran away from battle.

Tit for Tat

Periclean strategy would prove enormously expensive and far-reaching—and, ironically, far more intricate than the much simpler “offensive” plan of meeting the Spartans in pitched battle. Almost immediately on news of the first Spartan invasion of Attica, the Athenians sailed southward to plunder the coast of the Peloponnese. Perhaps they remembered that a quarter century earlier, during the First Peloponnesian War, their legendary general Tolmides had been so brash as to burn the Spartan dockyards at Gythium and ravage the Peloponnesian coastal plains. Now they at least sensed that the muster of the Spartan allied army and its subsequent march into Attica made it likely that back home there was little territorial defense of the seaboard of the Peloponnese. The modus operandi of the allied Athenian armada of some 100 ships was simple, requiring only ships, bases to supply food and water for the fleet, and circumspect commanders who would select the most vulnerable hamlets and villages and not tarry too long, blood drunk on easy killing and plunder.⁸

What was the ultimate Athenian purpose behind such operations, strategies that had, in fact, been tried numerous times earlier during previous conflicts with the Peloponnesians in past decades? It was obvious: disrupt commerce on land and sea, destroy war matériel, demoralize the enemy home front, and demonstrate that the Spartans either would not or could not protect their friends. All the while they were to assure a long-suffering Athenian public back home that despite the avoidance of pitched battle their military was not as inactive or cowardly as it seemed.

Over the course of the long war there were somewhere around fifty-five clear-cut naval engagements, land battles, and sieges—instances of conventional fighting, in other words, with an identifiable beginning and an end aimed at tactical objectives. In contrast, the sheer instances of towns, states, and regions attacked by the Athenians in the first few years of the conflict were in the many hundreds, and represented almost constant engagement, as their fleet sailed around the Peloponnese, throughout the Corinthian Gulf, along both the northwestern and the northeastern coasts of Greece, and freely in the southern Aegean. This was raiding and killing, not formal war as previously defined by the Greeks.

There is no accurate record of how many were killed or lost in such operations. A partial chronological tally of the targets from 431 to 421 burdens the reader: Sollium, Astacus, Thronion, Acte, Methone, several towns in Elis, Aegina, Epidaurus, Troezen, Halieis, Hermione, Prasiae, Aetolia, Amphilochia, Acarnania, Oeniadae, Leucas, Corcyra, Anactorium, Melos, Cythera, and Crommyon. Thucydides points out that the second seaborne punitive expedition of 430, led by Pericles himself, was in some respects as large as the first armada that set sail for Sicily.

Indeed, 150 imperial triremes, 4,000 hoplites, and 300 horsemen gave the Athenians immediate—if transitory—numerical superiority at almost any Peloponnesian territory they chose to attack. The raids were not merely symbolic reprisals (even though attackers rarely ventured more than five miles inland from their ships). Instead, the incursions were deliberately timed to be simultaneous with the Peloponnesian assaults, and thus effective in getting the enemy to leave Attica early—and provide a retaliatory deterrence for the future. Yet the constant deployment of Athenian troops abroad between 431 and 426—at Potidaea, in Thrace, around the Peloponnese, in the Corinthian Gulf, at Mytilene, at Sicily, and in the wilds of northwestern Greece—altogether cost the state nearly 5,000 talents and nearly led to state insolvency.⁹

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:

“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 infantrymen.” 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 unconstitutional 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

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:

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

Ethnic cleansing on a massive scale was commonplace to “purify” sanctuaries, eliminate suspicious populations, or steal land and redistribute it to friendly peoples. Thus, all the Aeginetans were forcibly removed by the Athenians from their island in the first year of the war. The Athenians also exiled the entire population of the island of Delos in 422. In 415 Melos was ravaged, starved, sacked, conquered, and its population rounded up, all the adult males being killed, women and children enslaved. Little is known of the ultimate fate of the Athenian colonists who were settled in their place, since at war’s end Lysander brought back some Melian natives, and these must in turn have completed the cycle of violence by either exiling or killing the Athenian interlopers who had farmed their island for a decade. Such nightmares were repeated at Mytilene, Naupaktos, and Scione.³⁰

Finally, there was simply war as the Greeks had always known it, the border disputes that went on throughout the great conflict, now and then heightened by the allegiance of one of the parties to the larger Spartan or Athenian cause. How many were killed, wounded, or enslaved in these mostly forgotten tangential wars on the frontiers does not interest Thucydides much. But now and again in his history he matter-of-factly hints that thousands here, too, were lost in often quite enormous expeditions.

A good example was the massive muster of King Sitalces of Thrace, the erstwhile ally of Athens, who in winter 429 invaded the Chalcidice and Macedon. He may have raised the largest land army of the entire war—some 100,000 infantry accompanied by a huge cavalry force of 50,000 mustered from thousands of miles of Thracian territory—which for a month overran much of northern Greece and threatened states as far south as the pass at Thermopylae.

By the same token, a coalition of Syracusans and Italians in 425 invaded nearby Messana and attacked Rhegium. Much of northern Sicily and southern Italy was subsequently engulfed in an ongoing border conflagration. In summer 419 the Argives mustered a formidable army and marched into Epidaurus, ravaging the countryside and causing enough havoc eventually to draw in the Spartans, prompting in part the battle of Mantinea the next year. Perhaps the largest invasion of the entire period was the Carthaginian attack on Sicily shortly after the Athenian defeat (410–404), a savage war that saw tens of thousands of dead, far more even than the losses incurred during the Athenians’ massive and failed efforts. In some sense, the Punic attack on Sicily was predicated on the idea that the island was still reeling from the failed Athenian invasion and thus ripe for attack.³¹

The Indirect Approach

Both Athens and Sparta had no thought-out, consistent policy of overthrowing neutral states, much less a general sense of how to thwart each other’s war-making potential by attacking to the rear. But a few remarkable men emerged in the first decade of the war to refine these unconventional methods of winning the war. Key to the new strategy was one salient fact: Athens and Sparta alike depended on both servile labor and manpower from dependent subjects.

Athens had thousands of chattel slaves who served as arms carriers for hoplites, rowers in the imperial fleet, miners of silver, and farmhands in Attica, in addition to workers in allied states who provided the grain and timber so critical to the engine of the Athenian empire. Sparta was in an even more vulnerable position. It sat on a volcano of angry helots, perhaps 250,000 indentured servants in both Laconia and Messenia, by whose field work the Spartan state was fed, and its some 10,000 elite warriors freed from the drudgery of farm labor to drill year-round.

Quickly two capable generals, the Athenian Demosthenes and Sparta’s Brasidas, grasped that in theory the enemy could be robbed of its wherewithal to make war should the thousands who worked for either empire be induced to revolt or be killed. The problems with such an audacious strategy, however, were multifold. It required expeditions deep into the heart of enemy-held territory—lengthy and often isolated deployment abroad, plus some sort of permanent base or fortification to serve as a clearinghouse for booty and a refuge for runaway slaves. Inciting the slaves also evoked internal opposition from traditional generals who had no confidence in such unconventional strategies and were not sure that servile revolts might not backfire into a Panhellenic notion of radical equality, given the presence of slaves in every military. Yet precisely out of that calculus arose the strategy of epiteichismos, or the fortification of forward bases, and the creation of light, mobile armies that could work well with cavalry troops and easily be transported by sea.

For a man like Brasidas or Demosthenes, the world was not, as in the past, divided between slave and master but, rather, between those either pro-Athenian or pro-Spartan. A helot was a better friend to Athens than a free Spartan was; and the Athenian slaves that later fled to Decelea were seen as Spartan assets, not the free men inside the Long Walls some thirteen miles away. Cleon might have smelled of tanned leather, but he, not Nicias, better understood the weakness of the Spartan empire.

It was a terrifying thought for Athenians to land in a far corner of the Peloponnese and in the heart of darkness, so to speak, two hundred miles from home—and attempt to overturn the very basis of the Spartan state. The Pylos campaign of 425 in some ways is analogous to the long-range patrols of Major General Orde Wingate, whose much-celebrated Chindits in 1943–44 conducted hair-raising raids deep behind Japanese lines in Burma to disrupt supplies and communications, but in the process suffered terrible losses without systematically thwarting the main enemy forces. The Athenian maverick general Demosthenes was an archetypical Wingate himself; in 425 he landed in the southwestern Peloponnese at the small harbor of Pylos. Almost immediately he constructed a small fortification to serve as a base to harass Spartans in Messenia and offer refuge for runaway helots.

Prior to Pylos, Demosthenes had had a checkered record in such unconventional warfare—disaster in Aetolia followed by military success in Ambracia—despite mobilizing indigenous peoples to bring about an Athenian presence in strategically valuable locations. Such operations were fraught with peril. They relied on surprise and good communications in an age when intelligence was rudimentary and generals often had little reckoning of the exact time or distance involved in operations. Even after his stunning success at Pylos, Demosthenes would fail utterly to raise insurrection the next year in Boeotia in the Delium campaign—and then engineer an even more foolhardy night attack on Sicily, before being executed by the Syracusans after the general surrender of the defeated Athenians. But whether due to luck or timely support from Cleon, in 425 his audacious plan of hitting the Spartans in the rear bore stunning results that reversed the course of the war in just a few weeks.

In spring 425 an Athenian fleet of some 40 ships under the command of Eurymedon and Sophocles set out toward western Greece and beyond with two main goals. They sought to restore Athenian prestige in Sicily (eroding after setbacks following its first invasion of 427) and to cut off easy commerce around the Peloponnese, and thus provide support for the democratic factions on Corcyra. Demosthenes accompanied the fleet. He had only a vague mandate from the assembly “to employ the ships, if he wished, around the Peloponnese.” That afterthought almost led to the outright defeat of Sparta, as a series of unlikely events unfolded to bring an unforeseen bonanza to the Athenians.³²

A sudden storm prevented the generals’ progress toward Corcyra. Demosthenes was able to persuade the fleet first to dock at Pylos, a small promontory on the southwest Peloponnese. There he apparently had plans to fortify a base and harass Spartan-held Messenia. As the high command waited out the storm, Demosthenes persuaded the idle crews to build a wall around the base, despite the absence of tools and iron. After the weather improved and the fleet departed, Demosthenes was at least left with an ad hoc defensible position and a small fleet of five ships. For one of the few times in Greek history, a permanent Athenian force was now acting independently on Spartan-held territory nearly two hundred miles from home. Demosthenes was apparently counting on the notorious inability of Spartans to take fortified positions, the spontaneous support from helots in the region, and the resolve of the Athenian navy to keep out Spartan ships operating in their own homeland.

“A Most Amazing Thing”

Even more miraculous events followed from such daring. The terrified Spartans cut short their invasion of Attica. They proved more afraid of a few hundred Athenians in the Peloponnese than tens of thousands of them in Attica. But instead of immediately storming Pylos, the Spartans landed 420 hoplites on the nearby island of Sphacteria. They hoped that by garrisoning the island and deploying a fleet, they could cut off the tiny base of some 600 enemy sailors at Pylos from land and sea support, and starve its hoplites and light-armed troops into submission.

The Spartans mounted one assault against Pylos, led by none other than the brilliant Brasidas. But they quickly retreated and then found themselves confronting the Athenian fleet that promptly returned from Corcyra with 50 allied ships. The attackers were now the attacked, with little chance for success even in home waters. After defeating the Spartan fleet and driving it off, the Athenians blockaded Sphacteria, prompting hysteria back at Sparta. The elites in the Spartan assembly were now terrified that some of their leading warriors were trapped on a desolate island off the coast of Messenia, surrounded by the Athenian fleet, with a magnet garrison for runaway helots nearby.

Sphacteria was hardly a Stalingrad. The 420 hoplites on the island represented only about 5 percent of the Spartan state’s hoplite strength. Besides the fact that many of those on Sphacteria might have been well connected, much of the Spartan mirage rested on the appearance of invulnerability. Thus even a small loss near home—or, worse, the annihilation of a small force in the field —could send ripples of instability throughout Messenia, where a few thousand patrolled tens of thousands.

After a brief truce, both sides hunkered down. They were still unsure whether in this new war of attrition it would be more difficult for the Athenians to maintain a large blockading fleet and expeditionary force now totaling some 14,000 men in Spartan territory or for the Spartans adequately to supply their hoplites when cut off from their mainland. But soon it was Sparta who sued for a general cessation of hostilities. Athens refused—in a tragic preview of what would happen numerous times later in the war after climactic Spartan reverses. Both sides then pressed on with the struggle that took on cosmic importance in a manner that was not true of even the thousands who had battled earlier at Potidaea, Plataea, and Mytilene.

After recriminations at Athens over the failure to accept the armistice and the ensuing stalemate so far from home, the assembly voted Cleon full powers to join Demosthenes, and thus along with the admirals in the region to take Sphacteria. As Thucydides put it, “The sensible men were delighted: for they figured that they were bound to obtain one of two good results—either they would be rid of Cleon, which they preferred, or if they were disappointed in this matter, he would beat the Spartans for them.”³³

Cleon met up with Demosthenes. In the meantime, the latter had made a probing raid on Sphacteria, accidentally set the island’s dense brush afire, and thus inadvertently removed much of the cover that had helped hide the fact of the shockingly small Spartan garrison. Now, upon arrival of Cleon’s auxiliaries, the two generals attacked the island. They used their missile troops to good effect in the newly cleared landscape, killed 128 Spartans, and took 292 prisoner, among them 120 of the Spartiate elite. Few Athenians perished. As Thucydides recorded, “The battle was not a hand-to-hand affair.” Cleon had boasted that he would solve the problem in twenty days. And that is precisely what happened; “a most amazing thing,” Thucydides concluded, more so than any event of the entire war.

Nothing in the conflict—except for the stunning Athenian naval victory at Arginusae (406) two decades later—was so inexplicable as a disreputable Athenian politician boasting about defeating the Spartans in the Peloponnese and then sailing down to accomplish just that in a matter of days. Not much later, the aristocratic Thucydides himself would fail utterly to save Amphipolis, despite knowing far more about the Thraceward region than Cleon did about the southwest Peloponnese.

Suddenly the psychology of the entire war was changed. Spartan hoplites, the mythical heroes who had perished to the man at Thermopylae, did not lose infantry battles. And on the rare occasion they did, at least they never surrendered, especially to Athenians. “Of everything that happened in the war, this came as the greatest surprise to the Greeks. For none believed that the Spartans would ever hand over their arms, either out of hunger or any other necessity, but rather would keep their weapons and fight as long as they were able until they died.”³⁴

The mystique of Spartan invincibility was now shattered. Worse still, the entire Spartan state was held hostage in fear that their 120 elite Spartiates, in this new style of war, might be executed at Athens should they not meet the terms of a new armistice. The next year Athens would lose 1,000 dead at the battle of Delium and have another 200 taken hostage by the Thebans. Yet the loss of so many men and the knowledge of Athenian captives in Boeotia had little effect on the democracy, which could neither be intimidated nor blackmailed. Athens had far more manpower resources than did Sparta and had never invested in the mythology of hoplite infallibility.

The Spartans now ceased their invasions of Attica out of fear of execution of the prisoners. They did not return until their hostages were recovered and the Athenians were reeling from the disaster in Sicily—for over a decade, between 425 and 413. The tiny fort at Pylos was to remain a thorn in the Spartans’ side for some seventeen years, as it was not handed over during the so-called Peace of Nicias, and its Messenian garrison fell only in 409, after a period of Athenian retrenchment following the losses in Sicily and the Aegean.

The Other

The role of slaves in the war has until recently often gone unappreciated—odd, considering that both Herodotus and Thucydides pointed out that the richest city-states in the Greek world, such as Athens, Syracuse, Chios, and Naxos, possessed thousands of chattels.³⁵ But in the Peloponnesian War they began to play at least several critical roles in the fighting, especially during the latter years of the conflict as the manpower reserves of both sides were increasingly depleted.

Given that there may well have been over 100,000 hoplites who took part in the war (the aggregate heavy-infantry strength of Argos, Athens, Corinth, Sparta, Syracuse, Thebes, and the major cities in Asia Minor), at least half that number of slave baggage carriers may have at one time or another gone out on infantry campaigns. Furthermore, by the end of the conflict nearly one in five rowers in the Athenian navy may well have been a slave—perhaps as many as 10,000 or so oarsmen—with even greater numbers serving in the allied and Peloponnesian navies. At the climactic last sea battle of the war at Aegospotami, Athens had over 180 ships, and this was only a decade after losing more than 40,000 imperial sailors and marines on Sicily. Only the drafting of slaves could have ensured rowers for such an enormous deployment in the city’s eleventh hour. Naval outlays had nearly ruined Athens; but the expense was not so much in building triremes as in manning them. When it cost as much in one month to row as to build a warship, the recruitment of slaves became the only way of cutting costs.

Thousands of slaves changed sides during the war, markedly affecting the pulse of the war, both by serving in the military forces of their masters’ adversaries and robbing their former owners of critical manpower. Thucydides, for example, thought that over 20,000 slaves fled from the Athenian countryside to the Peloponnesian base at Decelea, and implies that such a loss had a terrible effect on the economy and security of Attica in the last decade of the war. How many helots made their way over to Pylos during the seventeen-year Athenian occupation is not known, but the number of runaways must have been in the hundreds, if not thousands. One of the reasons for the rapid deterioration of the fleet and army on Sicily during the last wretched months was the flight of slaves, who were critical for carrying the arms and baggage of the infantry and sailors.³⁶

Pylos was a metaphor of just how radically the war had evolved since the Spartans had crossed into Attica six years earlier. The entire infantry campaign involved only 420 Spartan and 800 Athenian hoplites. In contrast, some 8,000 rowers, 800 archers, and 2,000 light-armed Athenian troops had overwhelmed the Spartan elite on Sphacteria—the triumph of soldiers from the lower classes without body armor who were not supposed to beat hoplites, much less Spartan hoplites, even at numerical advantages of 20 to 1. Thucydides remarked that their agility and ability to bombard the clumsy hoplite with missiles made them “most difficult to fight.”

Athenian generalship was equally unconventional. Cleon was a radical demagogue, hated by Thucydides (who may well have been exiled through Cleon’s machinations) and slurred by Aristophanes as a rabble-rousing tanner. Yet he had accomplished what neither the majestic Pericles nor the aristocratic Nicias could even have envisioned. Everything about the successful campaign was untraditional. Many of Demosthenes’ troops were Messenian exiles, that is, former helots who had fled their Spartan overlords. Moreover, the strategy had nothing to do with forcing the Spartan fleet to meet the more formidable Athenian armada (though they did and lost), much less with staging a pitched battle against Spartan infantry.

Instead, the vision of Demosthenes was predicated on the idea of rebellious serfs: how best to encourage helot desertion and thereby rob the Spartan state of its critical field hands. True, the idea that all 250,000 helots might flee to such a small sanctuary such as Pylos or the Malea peninsula was a fantasy; but Demosthenes apparently thought the mere chance of insurrection would be enough to prompt some wild Spartan response. Pylos helped to expose the absurdity of the Spartan state: it was paranoid about the loss of any of its scarce Spartiates and yet accepted that these very same troops were of little value in keeping sailors, light-armed troops, archers, and helots from doing what they wished in their own backyard.

Right after Pylos and Sphacteria, the Athenians occupied Methana, on the coast of the Argolid, hoping that such a fortified base in the Peloponnese would help raise additional insurrection among allies throughout the Argive peninsula. The next season, Athenian maritime troops grabbed Cythera, in the sea off Laconia. This was a key base for merchant ships heading to northern Africa, and an ideal fort from which to mount continual seaborne raids on the southern Peloponnese. With Athenians ensconced in the Peloponnese by land at Pylos and at sea on Cythera, Thucydides concluded that a stunning change suddenly came over the Spartans, one achieved at very little cost in lives to the Athenians. They had more or less ignored the thousands of crack hoplites stationed at Sparta and instead sought to tear the very political and economic fabric of the Spartan state:

The Athenians had not beaten Sparta—to do that would require an invasion of the Laconian heartland—but they seemed to have achieved the stalemate that Pericles once envisioned. The Pylos syndrome proved contagious. Within months of its success the tactic of forward basing was breaking out almost everywhere. By 424 almost the entire Peloponnese seemed to be ringed by permanent Athenian forts—at Aegina, Cephallenia, Cythera, Methana, Nisaea, Naupaktos, Pylos, and Zakynthos—designed to cut off trade to Sparta from Sicily, Italy, Egypt, and Libya, to encourage helot rebellion, and to provoke dissension among the Peloponnesian alliance.

Still, the problem in this conceptually brilliant plan of encirclement that arose after Pylos was threefold. The maintenance of these bases with enough permanent troops to cause harm to the economy of the Spartan state was beyond the resources of Athens. The strategy presumed that the Spartans themselves would not copycat such success and send long-range patrols deep into Athenian territory. And there was still no plan to deal with the 10,000 Spartan hoplites who, in theory, could march anywhere they pleased to put down rebellious states.

After Pylos

If Cleon and Demosthenes had turned out to be not quite the regular sort of Athenian generals, then neither was Brasidas. He had started out as a traditional Spartan ephor, or government overseer, and ended up as something altogether different. But even in the first few years of the war Brasidas had proved no mere functionary. In 430, for example, he had rushed to save the Messenian town of Methone from Athenian seaborne raiders. For much of the early 420s he patrolled the Corinthian Gulf and tried to intervene on behalf of the oligarchs in the bloody killing on Corcyra. Brasidas led a spirited attack against the Athenian fort at Pylos in 425, and was almost killed for his efforts. The next year this Spartan fireman rushed to Megara to head off a democratic revolution.

Pylos obviously made a terrible impression on him. Consequently, in the year after the capture of the Spartans at Sphacteria, Brasidas sought to turn the tables on the Athenians, striking deep at their rear, both to disrupt their commercial trade in the Thraceward region of northern Greece and to put such fear in the heart of the Athenian empire that it would think twice about persisting in attacks deep into the Peloponnese. As Thucydides drily put it, “The Lacedaemonians thought that the best way to hurt the Athenians in return would be to send out an army against their allies.”³⁸

Unlike traditional Spartan generals, Brasidas enrolled a new army of Peloponnesian allies, mercenary soldiers, and, most interestingly, 700 helots—the “Brasideans,” a force not unlike many of the enslaved peoples of the Third Reich, who on occasion were conscripted into the Wehrmacht as if it were the better of two bad alternatives. Spartan officials were only too glad to see potentially rebellious helots (and perhaps Brasidas too) sent far from their homes as Spartan shock troops. And thus Brasidas headed hundreds of miles northward to free some of the most important states of the Athenian empire.

Once there, in less than two years he “liberated” the key Athenian subject city of Amphipolis—Thucydides himself was exiled by a furious assembly at home for his failure to keep Brasidas from the town—and began raising general insurrection in neighboring communities. These were no marginal cities. Instead, Brasidas’ targets were renowned for their rich farmlands, supplies of timber critical for Athenian naval construction, and numerous gold and silver mines—an area where the aristocratic Thucydides had substantial holdings and in vain, with an Athenian fleet, was trying to thwart the Spartan intrusion.

The largest city, Amphipolis, situated on the Strymon River, might offer a good base to raid routes to the Hellespont by land and sea. With a quasi-private army, Brasidas more or less ignored the brief armistice of 423 and kept at his grand plan of raising havoc throughout the entire northern theater of the Athenian empire, before dying—along with his Athenian adversary Cleon—in a desperate clash during the defense of Amphipolis. At the battle some 600 Athenians perished to the Spartans’ 7 fatalities; but the death of Brasidas meant that Sparta lost its only gifted leader of the Archidamian War and thus the confidence to continue the conflict.

Brasidas’ battles were like none Spartans had ever waged—offering the carrot of autonomy and liberation to key subject cities of the Athenian empire along with the stick of brilliantly unconventional war that ignored the old Hellenic distinction between civilian and combatant. At the grape-growing port city of Acanthus he threatened to destroy the town’s vintage, ripe for harvest outside the walls—the sole cash crop of the entire coastal community. Next he set up camp outside nearby Amphipolis and began to plunder the rich farms of the surrounding countryside, while his agents inside the city laid the groundwork for the citizenry to go over to the Spartan cause. Arriving at Torone, he sent assassins into the city by night to open the gates and allow his own light troops to storm the city. After taking Scione, he refused to give it up, even though the newly concluded armistice agreement of 423 had made it clear that the city was to be returned to the Athenians.³⁹

When Brasidas was finally killed in the defense of Amphipolis, the locals gave him a hero’s funeral, erected a monument to him as the “liberator of Hellas,” and instituted yearly games and sacrifices in his honor. Brasidas’ preference for irregulars and soldiers of questionable background, coupled with his romantic lectures about the need for freedom from Athenian imperialism, made him a near saint among Third World Greeks—a most un-Spartan Spartan.

Indeed, his dash and magnetism must have been formidable if he could make thousands forget that he was an agent for the most repressive state in the Greek world, which had itself enslaved 250,000 Messenians. In that eerie sense, the 700 Brasideans did more harm to the cause of promoting helot unrest than all the good done by the liberators at Pylos. What is striking about the near-simultaneous careers of Demosthenes and Brasidas is that while the Athenians in the south tried to promote instability by offering freedom to Sparta’s underclass, in the north the Spartan used such serfs to advance liberty and autonomy among the subject states of Athens—suggesting that realpolitik rather than consistent idealism was the engine that drove both men and the policies they advanced.

Of all the characters in Thucydides’ history Brasidas is the most intriguing, an ancient romantic version of Fidel Castro or Che Guevara who combined ostensible idealism and brutal guerrilla warfare in such a dazzling fashion that most formerly enslaved soldiers forgot the nature of the harsh master they worked for. In the last analysis, Brasidas’ efforts counterbalanced Pylos and achieved a rough stalemate, as he proved that the Athenians had just as much to lose to their own rear as did the Spartans. His ragtag mercenaries and few hundred freed helots did more damage to Athens than had King Archidamus’ enormous grand army of 60,000, which eight years earlier had trudged into Attica, convinced by its sheer size that it might bring the empire to its knees.

In peace treaties that followed throughout the war, the terms sometimes reflected the new realities. No longer was an armistice a matter of seamen and hoplites ceasing hostilities. There was rarely a call to forgo sieges or a delineation of territory to be returned and alliances to be established. Rather, all sorts of codicils called for specific conduct regarding plagues, slave revolts, hostage taking, plundering, and forward field fortifications, as both sides took formal account of the new, multifaceted warfare.⁴⁰

Where was Alcibiades amid the raiding and terror of the Peloponnesian War? In fact, no mode of war better fit his skills as both an intriguer and a practitioner of diplomatic subversion. Wherever the arts of betrayal, plotting, and execution were needed, Alcibiades could be found. Apart from his presence at the major hoplite battles, naval engagements, and sieges of the war, a simple recitation of his career following the agricultural conflict in Attica and the plague at Athens reveals that throughout his late twenties and early thirties Alcibiades was knee-deep in the new terror. Indeed, he was now in his proper element.

Aside from the fact that he intrigued to establish democratic governments at Argos and Patras, bolted from Sicily, persuaded the Spartans to attack his kinsmen in both Sicily and Attica, triangulated with the Persians, and then rejoined the Athenians after toying with revolutionaries at Samos, Alcibiades was more directly involved with a number of paramilitary operations. He may well have been one of the architects of sending the Athenian fleet to besiege Melos, and then a strong advocate in the assembly of the subsequent execution and enslavement of all the island’s inhabitants.

In the same year, 416, Alcibiades arrived at Argos and kidnapped 300 rightists as insurance against an oligarchic coup that might bring in the Spartans. They were all later brought to Athens and executed. He was also probably involved in the assassination of the popular Athenian leader Androcles and some other radical democrats, an act instrumental in facilitating his own return to the Athenian side in 411. A little later Alcibiades was equally responsible for the murder of the rightist Phrynichus. Again, the employment of terror, rather than any sign of ideological consistency, was his trademark.

After his second exile from Athens, at the end of the war he used his skills gained from raiding the coast of Asia Minor to craft a life as a privateer in Thrace with his own hired army. Alcibiades, like few others in the Peloponnesian War, grasped that the conflict was no conventional fight but, rather, a new sort of civil war in which there was no divide between war and politics, external policy and internal intrigue, killing on the battlefield and murder off it.⁴¹

It is hard to calibrate exactly what effect the unconventional fighting had on the ultimate outcome of the war. Certainly the Pylos campaign and the subsequent Spartan operations in Amphipolis resulted in the eventual temporary peace of 421, in a manner none of the traditional fighting at sea or on land had accomplished for either side. The fort at Decelea irrevocably harmed Athens. The city itself soon suffered irreparable psychological damage as well from a rightist revolution in 411. At the end of the war the city was taken over by oligarchs who concluded the peace with Lysander. Ultimately, however, terror, revolution, and murder were no substitute for the climactic battles of thousands that were to decide entire theaters. Had the Spartans lost the battle of Mantinea, had the Thebans been defeated at Delium, or had the Athenians won Aegospotami—a mere three critical days among some twenty-seven years of conflict—the outcome of the war would have been forever changed, in ways impossible to envision being accomplished by all the daring and machinations of a Brasidas, Demosthenes, Cleon, or Alcibiades. Thus, Athens, of all city-states, finally resolved to organize allied armies to end its wars with Boeotia and Sparta through single days of battle—efforts that were as heroic as they were doomed.