CHAPTER 5
ARMOR
HOPLITE PITCHED BATTLES (424–418)

Why No Battle?

After seven years of war, there was still a virtual stalemate in the fighting. Even by 425 no Spartan fleet had emerged to challenge Athenian naval supremacy. The Corinthians had left the seas except for the nearby Gulf. Spartan ships, such as Alcidas’ armada, which had headed for Lesbos in 427, were capable only of short voyages akin to the German battleship Bismarck’s brief breakouts into the North Atlantic during 1941. These short-lived Peloponnesian raids were intended to harass merchants and tributary subjects before Athenian superior triremes could find and hunt them down. In turn, Athens had no desire or ability to force a showdown with the Spartan phalanx. Invasions of the Athenian homeland had ceased in 425, after Spartan prisoners had been captured at Pylos and brought back to Athens with the announcement that they would be killed the moment another Peloponnesian army entered Attica.

Widespread helot revolt had not followed the Athenians’ establishment of a series of bases in and around the Peloponnese. Seaborne raids of the Peloponnese had bothered the Spartans but had caused neither massive defection from its alliance nor famine or panic. Perhaps a quarter to a third of the Athenian population alive at the start of the war was dead seven years later, but mostly because of the ravages of the plague rather than Spartan spears. While small bands of killers and innovative commanders murdered and plundered, so far the Athenian empire remained intact. Mytilene was subdued. Corcyra did not become an oligarchic ally of Sparta. Persia was still hesitant to begin subsidizing the construction of a Spartan fleet that might wrest away the eastern Aegean.

A few old-style generals on each side began to see that major changes in the strategic calculus of the war might still come about only through some large-scale, dramatic victory. In Athenian eyes, that meant either knocking Boeotia out of the war or marching into the Peloponnese and crafting a hoplite alliance to defeat Sparta once and for all, on its home turf. If only Athens and Sparta had agreed to face-off in full armor on a summer afternoon—what Herodotus once labeled “a silly and most absurd” way of fighting “on the best and most level ground”—then at least Sparta could have won the war in a few minutes and saved Greece twenty-seven years of misery. Yet for that very reason Pericles in 431 had thought it “a terrible thing” for Athenians all by themselves to join battle with 60,000 Peloponnesian and Boeotian hoplites, to gamble the survival of the city itself on “a pitched battle.”¹

In both 410 and 406, it looked for a moment as though a much smaller Spartan contingent of occupation in Attica might precipitate an old-style battle by marching out from its fortress nearby at Decelea to the very walls of Athens. Yet in the first instance, the Spartan king Agis’ smaller force backed away at the last minute. On the second occasion, in 406, his more formidable army of 14,000 hoplites, as many light-armed troops, and 1,200 horsemen moved on the city again. But his nearly 30,000-man force was not willing to meet the Athenian phalanx until the latter ventured beyond the protection of the archers, slingers, and javelin throwers on the walls of Athens. Instead, a three-decade-long war raged between Athens and Sparta in which the chief Hellenic method of resolving conflict—hoplite pitched battles—occurred rarely between the two chief belligerents! Still, there were too many hoplites in too many places elsewhere in the Greek world for some old-style confrontation now and then not to transpire in the span of so many years. Thus, near the small seaside sanctuary of Delium, on the border between Athens and Boeotia, one of the traditional battles at last broke out seven years into the war in November 424.²

It is hard to walk freely now over the seaside hills overlooking the modern resort town of Dilesi. Vacation homes, wire fences, and access roads are springing up on what just thirty years ago were mostly open grain fields and range-land. Few of the contemporary upscale Athenians who spend their weekends here realize that thousands once battled near their backyards. This was a fight that saw middle-aged Socrates in defeat grimly fighting off pursuers, the corpse of Pericles’ nephew moldering in the dirt for over two weeks, brave Alcibiades winning the award for valor as he galloped through these gentle rises, and Plato’s cowardly father-in-law running for his life. Delium was but a two-day hike from the Athenian Acropolis.

The Hope of Delium

Why did Athens, which purportedly knew it was not wise to fight in such pitched battles with better hoplites, risk a campaign that might involve facing the Boeotians? Again, it was the age-old desire to be free of a two-front war, the specter that later haunted Rome when it faced the Carthaginians and Philip V of Macedon, the traditional German dilemma of being wedged between Russia and France, and the predicament America found itself in during World War II, with both Pacific and European theaters. In his hasty final few words, the surprised Athenian general Hippocrates had stirred his men with the promise that a victory would mean the Spartans could no longer cross Attica at will into the sanctuary of Boeotia, as the northern front would be forever closed. In contrast, he assumed that a defeat would doom Athens to a perpetual two-front war of attrition that it could not win.

So a single bold win at Delium, as was the case after the Athenian triumph at the battle of Oinophyta in 457, might lead to the democratization of Boeotia and the cessation of its open support for Sparta and its near-constant raiding across the border. Brasidas and the Spartans who were operating to the north would be cut off, with hostile territory barring their return to the Peloponnese. In short, the Athenians thought that they might have a chance of knocking out Boeotia in a single blow in a manner they believed impossible with Sparta, whose territory was too distant and invincible by land and its army far too formidable. On the other side, the older Boeotians, like the tough Theban general Pagondas himself, remembered that for a decade before the war (457–447) Athens had turned Boeotia into a friendly democratic federation and once more had similar dangerous ideas. At any rate Alcibiades, whose father, Cleinias, had died during the Athenian defeat at Boeotian Coronea (447), realized that regime change in Boeotia was not an impossible proposition.

The Athenians, encouraged by the recent amazing success at Pylos and Sphacteria, had sought to subvert the government of Boeotia in ways that might have avoided a single pitched battle like Delium. The Athenian general Demosthenes had sailed from home three months earlier, intending to raise democratic insurrection through the southern Boeotian countryside by an unexpected amphibious landing. Then, aided by partisans, he was to march east toward Delium at about the same time that Hippocrates and his Athenian hoplites marched northward to the border. The outnumbered Boeotian army would thus scatter beneath the hammer and anvil. Then the surrounding countryside would rise up in open revolt, in an operation that would take the logic of the Pylos campaign to an even more audacious level. After all, two years earlier, in the summer of 426 Nicias had landed 2,000 Athenian hoplites at the Oropus, met up with an even larger army marching from Athens under the commanders Hipponicus and Eurymedon, and together they had won a skirmish against the Tanagrans and a few Thebans in a small prequel to Delium. Apparently, their subsequent braggadocio had convinced the Athenian board of generals that another, but much larger, combined land-and-sea armada could repeat the petite victory in Boeotia on a massive scale.³

Or so it was thought. But triumph was possible only if the superior infantry forces of the Boeotians would face two simultaneously advancing Athenian armies and an aroused countryside eager for more egalitarian government. Unfortunately, Demosthenes’ naval assault to the west at the Boeotian town of Siphae was timed too early. Once his insurrectionary plans were betrayed by local oligarchs to the Boeotian authorities, he was of little value in drawing off opposition from the Athenian land troops marching up from the south. Diodorus says that Demosthenes, hardly eager to face an aroused assembly back home, then sailed away “without accomplishing anything.”⁴

But it was even worse than that. Demosthenes’ failure had ensured that a ragtag Athenian army of reservists by themselves would meet in open battle what may have been the finest infantry force in Greece. After the battle of Plataea (479), all Greeks talked of the “Dorian spear” of the Spartans. But throughout the latter fifth and fourth centuries, it was the Theban farmers who proved “mightier in war”—fighting a series of ferocious battles at Delium, Nemea, Coronea, Haliartus, Tegyra, Leuctra, and Mantinea, where they either crushed their opponents or died trying. In 424, Thebes was relatively unscathed. Its meager contribution heretofore in the war was parasitic and opportunistic: attacking a neutral Plataea, raiding across the Attic border, and joining in the invasion of Attica when the Peloponnesians first arrived in the thousands. In contrast, in the first seven years of the war an exhausted Athens had lost thousands to the plague, emptied its treasury in the nearly constant deployment of over 200 ships, and had its sacred soil violated on five occasions.

Throughout the later fifth century there had rarely been pitched hoplite battles, mostly because of two rarely remarked on reasons: first, the Spartan reputation won fifty years earlier at Plataea against the Persians suggested that it was national suicide to engage such an army; second, the only other formidable land power, the Boeotians, were similarly oligarchic and friendly to Sparta. But at the close of the Peloponnesian War, when the Spartan empire quickly imploded and Boeotia turned more liberal and finally democratic, their shared hoplite monopoly ceased. Old ethnic and new political differences arose; and they subsequently fought each other with a vengeance on at least a half dozen occasions. Hoplite battle, then, returned to its preclassical frequency, albeit settling theater disputes rather than local wars over borders. A mere three years later (421) the Athenians accepted a peace offering from Sparta, on the ostensible grounds that they had been beaten at two battles, at Delium and Amphipolis, and had thus lost “the confidence in their strength.”⁵

The Promised Showdown

The long-hoped-for battle was at last fought in late 424. The Athenian phalanx crossed its border to end the northern front against the Boeotian confederation on a late November afternoon, precisely on the assurance that the Spartans were far away and the majority of poorer Boeotians themselves might welcome rather than oppose the invaders on the promise of democratic liberation from landed oligarchy.*

Between 40,000 and 50,000 warriors met at Delium. Besides the 7,000 hoplites in each army, thousands more without armor were present on the Athenian side, outnumbering even the 10,000 or more light-armed troops of the Boeotians. The formal engagement broke out when thousands of demoralized Athenians were caught unawares walking back home after the failed invasion of the general Hippocrates. Most of their Boeotian pursuers were also squabbling among themselves, with no real desire to risk pitched battle with an enemy already in retreat. But then a Boeotian veteran general in his sixties, Pagondas, persuaded his reluctant generals to press home the attack and strike first. They must attack, the old man shouted to his Boeotians, even should the retreating enemy escape into Attica.

Pagondas’ pursuing army pulled up out of sight on a knoll across from the Athenians’ right on the poorly demarcated Athenian-Boeotian border. Suddenly, without much warning, his spirited hoplites charged downhill. The Athenian general Hippocrates was haranguing his own troops and was caught in midsentence. The lateness of the hour, the rolling terrain, the autumn dust, and the surprise approach of the Boeotians made Delium a different kind of hoplite battle, in which from the very beginning nothing was quite what it first seemed.

Pagondas had arranged the phalanx by confederate villages, his Thebans on the honored right wing of the allied Boeotian line. The hilly terrain probably explains why until the last minute the Athenians had little idea that the enemy was so near, much less had occupied a superior position. Caught unawares, the Athenians had few choices. This time they were not burning up the fields of nearby Megara without enemies but were pitted against the fiercest hoplites in Greece, who sixty years later would tear apart the Spartan phalanx not far away at the battle of Leuctra (371). The alternatives for the surprised Athenians were to trot uphill into the Theban mass, to retreat, or to stay put and be bowled over. Two large gullies on each side of the battlefield cut off any real chance of an outflanking movement. In fact, the two armies scarcely fit into the plain of little more than eight hundred yards or so. The ravines on each side of the killing ground may explain why Pagondas could pull some of his men off the line and safely stack them twenty-five shields deep on the right flank, three times the normal eight-man depth of a phalanx.

For better or worse, Hippocrates and his elite Athenian right chose to charge bravely ahead uphill. The Athenians may have thought that the hills and ravines offered some advantages in limiting the use of the enemy’s horsemen. They probably could not see just how deep the Theban right wing had stacked and so had no idea of the peril to come on their left from the greater enemy weight. The battle that decided the entire northern front of the conflict appears to have lasted not more than a few minutes—giving some credence to the two-century-old agrarian idea that brief hoplite collisions could settle entire theater wars. At first, despite the uphill run, the Athenian right wing broke through Pagondas’ weak confederates. From the very beginning it was a classic instance of each army seeking to win the battle on its strong right wing before its own weak left lost it.⁶

The allied villagers of Thespiae took the brunt of the Athenian right’s uphill assault. Thucydides called the gruesome fighting there “hand-to-hand,” which probably assumes spear jousting, pushing, swordplay, and finally brawling with shields, broken spear shafts, and even bare hands. Soon all 500 Thespians were at the point of obliteration. The allied contingents of another 2,000 hoplites on their immediate right had wisely, but less courageously, fled from the charging Athenians.

The collapse of most of the Boeotian left wing doomed the Thespians. They now would be cut off, detached from the main phalanx, encircled, and then butchered. The degree to which they slowed the Athenian juggernaut was their chief legacy of sacrifice, allowing their right wing under Pagondas time to finish off its own opponents without worry of being swarmed from the rear. Near the trapped Thespians, the other Boeotian allies of the left and center did not all escape. Some in vain tried to flee outright. Others fought. The more resolute hung on until their own right, across the way, scattered the Athenians and came up in support. Nearly all the 500 Boeotian dead infantrymen of the battle were either the surrounded Thespians or their disoriented and stampeding neighbors. The historian Diodorus says at this point the Athenian right wing “slew great numbers” of the enemy. Precisely what “great” means is unclear. But the cursory remark suggests that the fighting was ferocious if hundreds of soldiers protected by massive shields, breastplates, helmets, and greaves were nevertheless stabbed and hacked apart.

Killing a man in full bronze armor—breastplate, helmet, and greaves—was not an easy task, especially when all hoplites’ first concerns were to keep close to one another and to have their wooden shields locked in a near wall of defense. The playwright Sophocles once characterized Greek hoplite battle as the “storm of the spear.” That image suggests that heavily clad lumbering hoplites were jabbed repeatedly from all directions by a whirlwind of spear tips and hacked by swords in the limbs, groin, and neck—a very different type of warfare than that fought by unarmored men who might kill one another with a blow or two. In any case, compared to the lethality of the mace or the Roman sword, the spear did not easily penetrate armor, and was usually effective in killing a hoplite outright only when wielded with a downward stroke against the neck or groin, relatively small targets.

Too busy hammering the enemy Thespians to keep their bearings, the victorious Athenians on the right, at the cutting edge of the phalanx, soon began to circle completely around in the wrong direction. Then the confused Athenians stumbled head-on against their own troops shuffling up from the rear. There the general Hippocrates, a nephew of the dead Pericles, probably along with the philosopher Socrates, Alcibiades, and many of the elite of Athenian society, including Plato’s own stepfather, Pyrilampes, and Laches of a later eponymous Platonic dialogue, suddenly found themselves spearing other Athenians. Before these crazed hoplites could be pulled apart, dozens must have been impaled by their own brothers, fathers, or friends.

Thucydides drily notes of this chaos, “Some of the Athenians becoming confused because of the encirclement mistook and killed one another.”⁷ How such a self-inflicted calamity was possible in hand-to-hand fighting is difficult to imagine. Yet there are other instances in Greek literature of hoplites who became disoriented and attacked the wrong soldiers. Friendly-fire casualties in war are not just a phenomenon of the modern age of high-tech weapons and bombing from great altitudes but a result of the fear, panic, and confusion endemic to the fog of war of all ages. In the ancient world even sailors often grew confused and killed friends in ships of the same fleet. Triremes, like hoplite arms, were weapons uniformly adopted by friends and enemies alike, partly a reflection of a Panhellenic acceptance of the protocols of battle, partly testimony to the excellent form and function of such appurtenances themselves.

Next, something even more inexplicable transpired at Delium: at the climax of the battle, this victorious Athenian right wing abruptly disintegrated when it wrongly identified a few squadrons of Boeotian horsemen approaching over the hill as a fresh army. Men in bronze with spears and shields, arrayed in column, were usually able to withstand such wealthy aristocrats perched on stir-rupless small horses. But to the victorious and exhausted Athenians under Hippocrates, apparently the idea that cavalry would play a decisive role in phalanx battle was entirely unexpected. Even more unanticipated was the notion that such fresh troops on the horizon were still uncommitted and appeared seemingly out of nowhere. At last elated with the sense that the battle on their wing was won, the mercurial Athenians suddenly imagined that an entirely new army was upon them, replete with horsemen, and thus despaired. Again, rumor and panic were the prime forces in battle when thousands yelled, charged, and collided without clear sight and with impaired hearing. “Nobody,” Thucydides once wrote of battle, “knows much of anything that goes on except right around himself.”⁸

What was happening far to the right with Pagondas and his selected phalanx of Thebans? “Gradually at first,” Thucydides says, they “pushed” the Athenian left downhill, and cleared the battlefield through the advantage of favorable terrain and greater depth. Diodorus adds that their success was due to the superior physical strength of individual Theban hoplites—as if the agrarian lifestyle across the border had created stronger men than most found at more sophisticated Athens. But the momentum was just as likely due to numbers rather than bulging muscles—the force of 25 shields concentrated against 8, and the fact that the most experienced Boeotians were pitted against the less reliable of the Athenians. Greater mass (what the Greek historians called baros or plêthos) frequently decided battles in any case. The poor Athenian left disintegrated. Soon the entire army was “in panic”—the once victorious and savage right wing now running away from a mythical new army, the left wearied, beaten down, and fragmented by the pressure of the accumulated shields of Pagondas’ mass bearing down from higher ground.

Warring Against the Dead

All Athenians now fled to nearby Mount Parnes, the fortified sanctuary at Delium proper and the safety of Athenian ships, or for the woods in the Oropus along the border in Attica—the ancient equivalent of the disastrous Battle of First Bull Run, where thousands of the panicky defeated headed for the refuge of their own capital. In moments the ordered columns of a neat phalanx were shredded. Shields, helmets, greaves, and breastplates littered the hills; each man calibrated his survival on how quickly he could toss away his heavy equipment and outrun the victors. This was how the Peloponnesian War was supposed to be fought, brutally, quickly, and decisively. But for those unfortunate enough to be caught up in the whirl of spears, nothing quite matched the bloodletting of thousands crammed into a few thousand square yards of a killing field.

Some opportunistic Locrian horsemen, the perennial mounted scavengers of the classical battlefield, arrived for the spoils and joined the Boeotian predators in the open-ended killing spree that went on until darkness. Delium was the first battle in or on the border of Attica since Marathon (490), and it would prove as embarrassing as that earlier victory, paraded as the exemplar of native Attic courage and skill, had been glorious. The retreat was seared into the popular collective memory, the stuff of both Athenian contemporary history and later Platonic dialogues. The question “What did you do at Delium?” seems to have haunted men like the runaways Cleonymus, Laches, and Pyrilampes, and emboldened stalwarts such as Alcibiades and Socrates.

Soon the Boeotians learned that at least a few of the terrified Athenian fugitives had retreated to their seashore garrison at Delium. These holdouts not only continued in defeat to occupy Theban ground but were also ensconced on a Boeotian precinct sacred to Apollo. Why would the Athenians not give up and retreat in shame as the “rules” of hoplite battle usually dictated to the defeated? No doubt the five Peloponnesian invasions of Attica, the 80,000 Athenians lost to the plague, the nearly constant deployment of 60,000 imperial oarsmen and endemic terrorism across Greece had long ago destroyed any notion that the Peloponnesian War would follow the niceties of agrarian warfare, where one side admitted defeat when its manhood was routed in open and decisive fashion.

The Boeotians themselves decided to hold the decomposing Athenian dead “hostage” until the sanctuary at Delium was clear of its garrison. The Athenian sacrilege of occupying a holy place in Boeotia was now to be answered with the greater crime of holding on to the enemy dead, and then letting them rot. After seventeen days in the open autumn air, most of the corpses were probably a putrid mess. The outrage for a people just recovering from the horrors of unburied corpses from the great pestilence probably prompted the playwright Euripides to produce his tragedy Suppliant Women the next year. He revived the myth of the “Seven Against Thebes,” who in legendary times had attacked Thebes, been killed, and then been left to decay. The play was to convey to an audience of veterans recent moral outrage in denying soldiers a proper burial. The barbarity of the Thebans, so the Athenians in the theater were reminded, remained constant over the centuries. Euripides soon found a new direction in his wartime tragedies—perhaps starting with the horrific bloodletting in his Medea (431)—that for nearly three decades would serve as moral commentary on the ongoing and increasingly barbaric war.

After almost three weeks, the Boeotians brought in more reinforcements from their allies and formally besieged the trapped Athenian refugees in Delium. They even crafted an enormous flamethrower of sorts, a hollowed-out beam through which they blasted a pressurized concoction of sulfur, coal, and pitch to send a jellied flame into the Athenian breastworks. Quickly the garrison went up in flames, men and all. The few terrified troops who survived the flames and the noxious fumes boarded ships to evacuate the sanctuary, leaving behind the cinders of 200 of their trapped fellow Athenians.

The sordid finale to the battle was at last over. Again, there is no exact knowledge of how many corpses were finally given back to the Athenians to be burned, the bones collected and buried. The total may well have been over 2,000 if both hoplites and the irregulars are included. The Athenian losses at Delium constituted only a fraction of the fatalities that would follow nine years later, during the debacle on Sicily, and were probably no more than had been lost in any two-week period of the great plague. Yet the strategic consequences were just as calamitous: Boeotia, on the northern border of Attica, would remain an oligarchic and especially powerful ally of Sparta. Its continued hostility meant that Athens would be stuck with a two-front war for the duration of the conflict. Rumors of the entire debacle—unlike the news from Sicily, which took several days to arrive at the Piraeus—spread through the Athenian agora within a few hours, reminding the citizenry that a victorious enemy was a few hours’ march away.

Dreadnoughts of the Battlefield

Certain types of fighting are more memorable than others. The world of the samurai, the chivalry of the ponderous medieval knight, and the colors and pageantry of Napoleonic columns have captured popular imagination in a manner not explicable just by the record of battle or the degree of lethality of the warriors. Hoplite collisions were equally unforgettable. Maybe it was the frightening look of the shiny bronze armor or the formality and grandness of the massed columns. Certainly the shock and sounds of the colliding armies made a lasting impression. Surely such a formulaic way of fighting allowed thousands of combatants to assemble in a relatively small space—in a way impossible during raiding, ravaging, or amphibious assaults. Various phrases in the Greek language—“battles in the plain,” “battles by agreement,” “just and open battles,” and “drawn up”—were used to evoke the formality and morality of traditional hoplite forces squaring off.

From the anachronistic fighting of even the single collision at Delium comes a glimpse into the very cultural foundations of the Greek city-state—the protocols of an earlier age, in which small rural settlements agreed to solve their differences over contested border ground through formal pitched battles of armored militiamen. Although very little of the military history of the poleis before classical times is recorded, the Greeks at least preserved a tradition that hoplite warfare between 700 and 500 had been the most common and preferred way of fighting. War had once been heroic, local, and waged over disputed boundaries by like agrarian communities. In Plato’s Republic, his ideal states would naturally squabble over borderlands, assuming that proud and overbearing people would always covet (“give themselves over to the endless acquisition of material things”) the resources of another nearby.⁹

In the later romantic legends of hoplite supremacy, early wars supposedly had been decided honestly by picked contingents who fought at prearranged times and places to avoid larger bloodshed. Formal rules often outlawed the use of missile weapons. In the popular myth, armies were to seek out prearranged flat plains, where each side in similar heavy armor could more easily charge into the other. Battle then was not merely utilitarian but also moral: it was not just against whom or why one fought that mattered, but apparently how as well.

For centuries after the Peloponnesian War, later Greeks looked back nostalgically at just those lost hoplite moments, even if in reality they had been rather rare. Reactionaries lamented that militaries of the later fifth through third centuries had no longer sought to “crush the spirit” of an enemy by “fighting in open battle”—and that this avoidance of simple collisions resulted in disasters like the twenty-seven-year war of Sparta against Athens (431–404), the later Theban-Spartan near-constant fighting (378–362), and the rise of Philip of Macedon (358–338).¹⁰

Thucydides himself, anywhere in his history that he records the death of hoplite soldiers caused by light-armed troops, guerrillas, or archers, makes it a point to lament the loss in poignant terms. Yet this mythical hold of the hoplite on the popular Greek imagination seems to have made no rational sense. For example, throughout the Peloponnesian War, when there were very few occasions at all for phalanx battle, authors continued to talk of war only in terms of heavily armed soldiers. Thus the pacifist characters in Aristophanes’ comedies refer to getting rid of breastplates and spears, even as the tragedians describe battle courage as the domain of the hoplite, the favorite martial figure as well of contemporary vase painters and pedimental sculpture on temples. Yet rarely after the classical age would civic governments embrace war as defined largely by heavy infantry, in a manner so ill-suited to the rough terrain, Mediterranean summers, and narrow passes of the southern Balkans.¹¹

Archidamus and his Spartans, in their original hope for a hoplite showdown in May 431, did not envision the annihilation of the Athenian people or their property through plague and fire. Instead, by fighting without many tactics and in the open, Spartan reactionaries felt that there would remain no real excuse other than courage and strength for victory or defeat—no reason, then, to repeat the battle again and again until the manhood of one side was wiped out or, worse still, to transfer the conflict to messy third theaters that were as indecisive as they were deadly to good hoplite infantrymen.

Even by the beginning of the Peloponnesian War there was a brutal logic to such simplistic Spartan thinking. After the Athenians experienced defeat at Delium, they never again tried to invade Boeotia in force, despite later having available far more troops than those on hand in 424. Similarly, after the Spartan alliance won at the great hoplite battle of Mantinea in 418 (to be discussed at length in this chapter), there was never again talk of a grand democratic alliance to overthrow its Peloponnesian hegemony until the invasion of Epaminondas a half century later. There still remained some mystique to the hoplite code in the late-fifth-century mind from the earlier aura of great battles, making them pivotal in ways that cannot be explained entirely in terms of casualties, tactics, or strategy. After all, for the purposes of killing, hoplite warfare made little sense: fewer than 40 percent of the combatants of the phalanx could even reach the enemy with their spears at any given time, quarter-inch armor kept most thrusts from hitting flesh, and the spear itself was not an especially lethal weapon.

Nevertheless, it was not just that Athens had lost 1,000 of 7,000 hoplites at Delium, a surprising 14 percent fatality rate unmatched in classical phalanx battles, in which 10 percent was more the average. Rather, the real significance was that they had been beaten so badly in an apparently fair fight. The clash and the subsequent mad Athenian flight appeared to offer a clear referendum on the respective courage and skill of both sides. After the dramatic victory at Mantinea six years later, Thucydides relates that the Spartans “had wiped away through this one occasion” all the recent calumnies that arose from their supposed cowardice on Sphacteria.¹²

Alcibiades could later brag that earlier, in 418, he had forced the issue so that “the Spartans had staked their all on one day at Mantinea.” Although the defeat had in effect set back terribly the cause of Athens and her allies, Alcibiades claimed the battle as a work of his own genius that at least was able to bring both sides to the battlefield. There his allied coalition, in theory, had a 50 percent chance of winning the war outright. When, after all, were such good odds possible in the Peloponnesian War? “One occasion” and “one day” were used only in association with pitched battles, in a way impossible to use to characterize the Attic devastations, the cycle of revolutions at Corcyra, or the operations at Pylos or Amphipolis.

If there were only two major hoplite battles of the Peloponnesian War, the ubiquitous Alcibiades was involved in some ways with both of them. The fame he had won saving his kindred during the traumatic retreat at Delium, coupled with a succession of deaths of prominent Athenians—Pericles, Hippocrates, and Cleon—and the shame of others like Cleonymus and Laches, meant a meteoric rise in the career of the twenty-six-year-old hero.

Later he engineered the entire Argive-Athenian resistance at the battle of Mantinea, despite the fact that the Athenians had only committed a small number of combatants, and had sacrificed only 200 hoplites for the cause at the battle. Yet Alcibiades himself was not officially an elected general at the time, his oratory far more influential than his actual political clout to match fighting words with actual soldiers. In fact, unlike his ubiquity at Delium, he was nowhere to be seen on the day of the battle of Mantinea.

Churchill recalled of the battle of Jutland in World War I that the commander of the British fleet, Admiral Jellicoe, was the only man who through his failure might have lost England the war in a single day: battleships, like hoplites, were assets rarely used, but their destruction nevertheless left the enemy a deadly freedom of action. Athens may have had fortifications that stopped Spartans from reaching the Acropolis, but the very fact that its army could not prevent enemy hoplites from marching up to the walls took a psychological toll on the great city’s reputation.

A Thing of Fear

That is precisely what the Boeotian poet Pindar said of Greek warfare prior to the early fifth century, when hoplite battle was a common way of solving disputes. What was the carnage like for these men of the old phalanx in battles like Delium? Pretty awful by modern sensibilities. Enemy or ally, Pagondas’ Boeotians or Hippocrates’ Athenian hoplites, all alike donned helmets, breastplates, and greaves that were hammered out of bronze. About a quarter to a half inch thick, this armor provided substantial protection from the blows of most swords, missiles, and spears, but at a terrible cost in weight, discomfort, and heat. That thousands on both sides of the battle line, often from disparate city-states, owned almost identical armor implies an implicit shared understanding of such fighting in the life of the Greek city-states.

The entire ensemble might cost a citizen-soldier well over 100 drachmas. That was the equivalent of about three months’ wages. Later in the war, small factories—like the orator Lysias’ family shieldworks in Athens—could turn out the standard wooden elements of the panoply en masse. As the war became more desperate, in its second and third decades, the old idea of hanging inherited ancestral arms over the hearth was becoming passé, since the state armed thousands of the poorer regardless of their particular census status. Most fighters now used the panoplies to fight as skirmishers or marines rather than traditional hoplites arrayed in the formal ranks of the phalanx. Sometimes hoplites ditched the breastplate and Corinthian helmet altogether. Instead, many wore conical caps (piloi) and leather jerkins for combat that was increasingly often against light-armed troops rather than other hoplites in pitched battle.

Surviving examples of wooden shield cores and the thin bronze veneers that went over the wood—at the Vatican museum, the Athenian agora, and the sanctuary at Olympia—reveal real craftsmanship, reflecting pride in private ownership, as well as the small size and stature of the wearers. Until the Peloponnesian War, most armor was donned by its owners only in times of national muster. The panoply’s weight and design made it almost useless for hunting or skir-mishing—in fact, for much of anything other than pitched battle. But like modern tanks, which are sometimes caught singly outside an armored division, an individual soldier who put on all the cumbersome hoplite armor and carried a heavy shield was often easily surrounded and ambushed by the quicker and lighter-clad, who in the bargain gained the psychological satisfaction of killing their hoplite betters. Some of the most notable of Athenians—for example, the generals Cleon, Laches, and Lamachus—were killed in heavy armor when fighting in fluid formation or in retreat, most probably by skirmishers or peltasts.

Since the advent of gunpowder, moderns have tended to deprecate the idea of body armor. The fiery offensive arts have for some six centuries overshadowed the much older sway of personal defense, so much so that surviving panoplies in modern museums seem ridiculous to the modern eye. Nevertheless, the age-old tension between attack and defense is not static. Only recently an emphasis on body armor has returned as scientists have at last discovered combinations of synthetic fibers, plastics, ceramics, and metals that can withstand even the onslaught of high-velocity, metal-alloy bullets and shrapnel fragments, which can strike the body instantaneously with incredible force and numbers. Ironically, the catalysts for Kevlar helmets, bulletproof vests, and assorted insertable ceramic plates are somewhat similar to those that led to heavily armored hoplites: first, such protection can save lives; second, the value of each combatant is now prized in a way not true of previous wars of the twentieth century.

The grotesque shield insignias, the incised artwork on the bronze breastplates and greaves, and the masklike appearance of the helmets crested with horsehair all indicate that elements in the drama of hoplite battle were almost eerily ostentatious. Certainly the equipment only heightened the psychological terror of the formal meeting of two phalanxes. Recall that both like-armed armies formed up in similar columns, stared at each other across the battlefield, and lowered spears on command. Pan (whose name led to our word “panic”) was considered a fickle deity who could appear on the battlefield to scatter columns before battle even began.

For that very reason, the Spartans polished their bronze shield veneers to a high shine, wore long scarlet cloaks, draped their oiled and braided hair over their shoulders, and painted bright lambdas (for “Lacedaemon”) on their shields—to stunning visual effect, if one can believe ancient accounts that enemies sometimes turned tail and ran rather than endure the Spartans’ slow measured march to the killing zone, accompanied by the music of pipes. At Mantinea, despite being surprised and confused by the sudden appearance of a large enemy coalition force, the Spartans never lost their nerve. Instead, they quietly walked right into the enemy wall of spears, quite in contrast to the noisy “sound and fury” of their adversaries.¹³

In the actual fighting, the hoplite depended on the man next to him to shield his own unprotected right side and to maintain the cohesion of the entire phalanx, military service now solidifying the valued egalitarianism of the property-owning citizenry. Thucydides makes that point about mutual protection offered by close-ordered ranks throughout his history—implying that rote technique was critical, since men were not freelancing as individual warriors but cognizant that their own spearing must always be done in concert. Later writers stressed the importance of agility that might be formally inculcated by mastering set moves and war dances, but we are still not sure whether such individual skills were advocated for the pursuit or retreat, or simply to help hoplites attack within the confines of ranks and files.

Indeed, it is hard to think of any other form of fighting in which so much rested on the support of the men in the ranks. When the Spartan general Brasidas invaded Illyria in 423, he reminded his hoplites that their discipline and interdependence made them far more formidable warriors than the loud-shouting barbarian rabble they faced. In the eyes of Thucydides’ Brasidas, the Greeks differed from the barbarians precisely in the manner in which they preferred to fight, as if their singular group discipline on the battlefield was the dividend of Hellenic civilization itself. The Illyrians, Brasidas scoffed to his men, “are not what they seem” since they “have no regular order” and are no different from “mobs.”¹⁴

Of these supposedly preeminent Greeks, the Spartans themselves were far the best. Their domination was not necessarily due to their bodily strength (here the agrarian Thebans were far more formidable), numbers (Athens could field more hoplites than the aggregate number of Spartiates), or equipment (shields and body armor were almost uniform in size, shape, and construction the Greek world over). Instead, the Spartan mystique was a product of singular discipline and organization, and the ability to stay in rank. And why wouldn’t order be a premium when the typical hoplite of the phalanx was subject to tremendous pressures in every direction: men pushing at his back, comrades in line crowding him to the right, rows in front presenting an impenetrable obstacle? As he was buffeted by the force of armored bodies, the hoplite also dodged incoming enemy iron, the sharp bronze spear butts of his friends in front bobbing in his face, and the razor-sharp spear points of the ranks to the rear darting over his neck and shoulders. All the while he trudged over the detritus of fallen wounded and dead hoplites, friend and foe, often both sons and fathers.

Hoplite Logic

In this regard of close-order fighting, our present-day notion of Western discipline—marching in time, advancing and retreating on command, preservation of formation, and mutual protection within files and ranks—started with the Greek phalanx, was passed on through the Roman legions, and survived in medieval Swiss, Spanish, and Italian columns and tercios of pikemen to find its way into the gunpowder age with European mastery of drill and volley fire. If that seems a chronological stretch, remember that with the onset of firearms, the Europeans best seemed to have the prerequisite traditions to use guns most effectively in cohesion and mass, with ample attention paid to firing in unison and in accordance with group protocols. That legacy of the Greeks defining courage as staying in rank rather than counting individual kills seems as important for the survival of the Western tradition as the much more heralded ideas of democracy and rationalism, though a heritage for the most part underappreciated today.

Hoplite technology was craftsmanship at its highest. The three-foot in diameter shield, sometimes known as either the aspis or hoplon, covered half the body. A unique combined arm- and handgrip allowed its oppressive weight to be held by the left arm alone. Draw straps along the inside of the shield’s perimeter meant that it could be retained even should the hand be knocked from the primary grip, a common mishap given the shield weight and the constant blows of massed combat. The shield’s strange concave shape permitted the rear ranks to rest it on their shoulders. Anyone who has tried to hold up fifteen to twenty pounds with a single arm, even without the weight of other armor amid the rigor of battle, can attest to the exhaustion that sets in after only twenty minutes. Yet the hoplite shield was an engineering marvel: the round shape allowed it to be rotated in almost any direction even as the sloped surface provided more wood protection from the angled trajectory of incoming spear points.

Worse than the weight of such arms and armament was the sight of hundreds of enemy spear points, which ancient authors sometimes compared to the bristles of a hedgehog. That sea of incoming iron explains why such an unusually large shield was necessary, as well as the peculiar compactness and density of the ranks and files to deflect jabs at all angles and directions. Again, the aim was not to rack up kills through individual prowess—the polis Greeks deprecated as “barbarians” those such as the Carthaginians who kept such scores—but to keep the spear level, shield high, body in rank, and then to defend, push, and kill anonymously, as the collective body moved ahead in rank and formation.

At the battle of Mantinea, Thucydides takes great effort to explain the natural tendency of each hoplite to seek protection for his vulnerable right side in the shield of his companion on his right. Here one can appreciate just how pivotal the nature and shape of the shield was to the entire method of hoplite fighting: ranks were almost always referred to by Greek authors as so many “shields” deep—rarely as so many “spears” or “men.” Still, for all the genius of concavity and flexibility, there were grave problems with the round shield. Its circular, rather than rectangular, shape ensured that the body was not entirely protected; thus every soldier by instinct needed to lean to his right to find cover in the left part of his neighbor’s shield.

Greek generals—except for Spartan kings, usually amateur and elective officials—led troops on the right wing to spearhead the attack. In defeat, leaders usually perished: Hippocrates at Delium, the Corinthian general Lycophron at Solygia in 425, and both Athenian commanders at Mantinea (418), a battle in which the small Athenian contingent suffered 20 percent fatalities (200 of the 1,000 Athenian hoplites died). This exposure of leaders was sometimes quite in contrast to the practice of the Greeks’ foreign adversaries. No Greek elected official, like Xerxes at Thermopylae or Salamis, sat above his men on a throne, gazing at the fighting below and issuing orders to a throng of court toadies to kill this fainthearted company and reward that resolute one. Thucydides himself was exiled for allowing Brasidas to take Amphipolis, probably through little fault of his own, since his promptness and audacity probably saved nearby Eion. There is also not a single major Greek general from any citystate in classical Greek history—Miltiades, Themistocles, Pausanias, Aristides, Pericles, Cleon, Brasidas, Gylippus, Lysander, or Epaminondas—who was not put on trial, demoted, fined, exiled, executed, or killed in battle.

After the great naval victory at Arginusae (406), the Athenian assembly nevertheless worked itself into one of its murderous moods and executed 6 of the 10 admirals responsible for the victory—among them Pericles’ own son—on dubious charges of negligently allowing wounded sailors to drown. Oddly, the chief crime for Greek commanders seems not to have been lost fights per se. Charges were more likely brought against those alleged to have avoided battle or to have failed to recover the dead. Generalship in the field was also in and of itself a deadly business: 22 Athenian elected leaders died in battle during the Peloponnesian War, or about 12 percent of all those who took up some sort of command.

Even more astounding was the Panhellenic custom of accountability and audit of generalship, often right on the field of battle. Some generals in effect apologized on the battlefield to troops for tactical defeat, partly to recover their morale, partly to instruct them about their past mistakes in hopes of better performance in the future. The Spartan general Gylippus, after a small loss of his Syracusan fort, said he was sorry by pointing out that it was his fault for leading a force dependent on light-armed and mounted troops into a confined space against hoplites. Although Nicias was de facto commander of the entire first expedition in Sicily, he nevertheless felt it necessary to explain his plight in detail in a lengthy letter to the Athenian assembly. In the modern world, many successful generals eye a postbellum political career; in the Peloponnesian War, most battle commanders were themselves already politicians.¹⁵

Killing Hoplites

Because of the limited tactical options open to a phalanx once battle commenced, complex maneuvers and tactics were problematic and so rarely attempted. A phalanx plowed through “like a trireme ram” on the stronger right side before its own inferior left wing collapsed and eroded the cohesion of the entire army. Well apart from a king on a hill, there was not even a grandee on horseback galloping in the rear—issuing complex orders by trumpet and signal flag for particular segments of the phalanx to attack in echelon, backpedal, or be held in reserve. Such articulation of forces would wait a century, for Alexander and his phalangites.

Thucydides goes to great lengths to explain how innovative the Theban decisions were to mass deeply and coordinate cavalry at Delium, as well as the Spartan frantic ad hoc efforts to redirect their attacks in the midst of the melee at Mantinea. In most normal cases, the generals apparently had sent their similarly formed columns out to hit each other head-on, tactical thinking being essentially nonexistent and almost unwelcome.¹⁶

In the two great battles of the Peloponnesian War, at Delium and Mantinea, one sees the very beginning of the Greek infantry tactics of deep columns, reserves, integrated cavalry units, adaptation to terrain, and secondary maneuvers, which would only accelerate in the fourth century under Epaminondas and come to fruition with Philip and Alexander. Hoplite battle in the Peloponnesian War began a slow transformation, from phalanxes rather artificially deciding wars to hoplites becoming a part of an integrated force of horsemen, light-armed troops, and missile troops that could win theaters of conflict on the basis of military efficacy rather than traditional protocol.

To kill and maim, the hoplite depended on his spear. Should the shaft break, he might turn around what was left of its nine-foot length to employ the reverse end, which was outfitted with a bronze spike, sometimes called a “lizarder” (saurotêr). Some hoplites stumbled and fell, only to be stomped on by oncoming infantry who slammed their upraised spears downward, the butt spike providing the coup de grâce as it smashed through the unfortunate man’s backplate into his chest or stomach.

A small iron sword was carried in case the spear was lost altogether. Vase paintings often show broken shafts; reference at Delium to “hand-to-hand” battle probably meant slashing with swords or stabbing with butt spikes. Because of the congested nature of the fighting, hoplites were hit repeatedly from all sides. But to be lethal, strikes had to be aimed at the unprotected groin and neck. Wearing hoplite armor in battle was in some sense the equivalent of placing a bull’s-eye over one’s unprotected throat and genitalia.

Sometime during the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks first began to explore the dilemma of proper depth versus width. Taking men off the battle line to stack them deeper than the standard eight shields gave the phalanx more penetrating power, even as the shortened front was in consequence left vulnerable to outflanking movements. The green Syracusans, for example, fought their sole hoplite battle against the Athenian invaders sixteen men deep, in hopes that their stacked columns would provide moral reinforcement to their inexperienced troops, while the resulting vulnerable and extended flanks were covered by a huge force of some 1,200 cavalry.

At Delium, Pagondas’ spirited hoplites, like Napoleon’s columns, thought they could blast apart their adversaries without being flanked, but only with the assurance that cavalry or rough ground protected the margins of the battlefield. This entire modern military dilemma of column or line, depth in contrast to breadth (or power versus maneuver) also first arose in the Greeks’ search to find the proper ratio within their phalanxes. The problem remained unsolved well into the nineteenth century, even in the age of gunpowder, until Wellington’s thin red line at Waterloo tore apart the massed ranks of the French Old Guard. Those who stacked deep, like the Syracusans and Thebans, in the manner of the later Macedonians, usually had superior cavalry to guard the exposed long files. In the same manner, George S. Patton repeatedly urged his division commanders to plow ahead, without worry about the flanks; but then he was protected by superior air support, the modern equivalent of ancient heavy cavalry.

If the hoplite kept his nerve and formation with his fellow fighters, his seventy pounds of armor and the length of his spear made him invulnerable to cavalry charges and skirmishers alike on level ground. Even in the most desperate circumstances his line was impenetrable to any but other hoplites, as long as every man (a parastatês, or “one who stands side by side in rank”) kept his nerve in battle, did not waver, and held his shield up and his spear out. At Delium the nearly 20,000 unarmed or light-armed auxiliary fighters dared not attack either side’s phalanx while in formation. The unusually large contingent of 1,200 horsemen at Syracuse rode into the fray in the flight and pursuit only when both sides found themselves out of formation. When the victorious Athenians on the right ran from the sudden appearance of cavalry behind the hills of Delium, it was largely on the impression that it presaged the arrival of another infantry army altogether.

One of the peculiarities about Greek warfare at the dawn of the Peloponnesian War was the archaic idea of class, not military efficacy, determining the role of the soldiers. In theory, the landless rowed and threw missiles. The propertied served as hoplites. Only the very wealthy rode horses or outfitted and commanded triremes. Thus, the armored ranks of spearmen were not solely a military hedge against cavalry but a social statement as well that the larger property owners of the city-state who could afford ponies were nevertheless not as important as yeomen farmers to the collective defense of their societies. This cherished idea was also a casualty of the Peloponnesian War.

This class element in classical warfare has always struck me as paradoxical. In the ancient Greek world, those with property were the most likely to fight in the deadliest fashion, as if owning a farm earned one the privilege of getting stabbed in the face in a way unlikely for the landless. On occasion wealthy Athenian knights could feel the pressure to go “hoplite.” Thus, wealthy horsemen bragged that they had chosen to give up their mounts and fight instead as hoplites, illustrating that the greater military cachet was acquiring real “combat experience” in the melee alongside agrarian infantry rather than patrolling as aristocratic horsemen.¹⁷ In general, like everything in the Peloponnesian War, twenty-seven years of fighting finally eroded the strict correlation between status and military service. By the last years of the war, citizens (as well as aliens and slaves) fought in any manner that the city needed at its moment of crisis, as knights rowed and the poor donned state-supplied armor.

After the meeting of phalanxes, hoplites marched out screaming the war cry Eleleu! or Alala! Blinded by the dust and their own cumbersome helmets, they stabbed away with their spears, and in unison pushed ahead with their shields, sometimes grabbing, kicking, and biting, desperately hoping to make some inroad into the enemy’s phalanx. Usually they had little idea whom, if anyone, they had killed or wounded. Hearing and sight by those in the ranks were difficult, if not sacrificed entirely. Both of Thucydides’ descriptions of the two major hoplite battles of the war—Delium and Mantinea—reveal just such rampant confusion and misdirection: the Athenians accidentally killing their own at the former, or the Argives in the latter battle completely being unable to see an entire Spartan army approaching nearby.

The din of clashing metal and screaming men must have been earsplitting, but it went relatively unnoticed by the hoplites, their hearing almost obliterated by the heavy bronze helmet that had no cutouts for the ears. Dust, the crowded conditions of the battlefield, and the crested helmets with small eye slots would have limited their vision severely. Mistaken identity was commonplace, given that distinctive uniforms and national insignia were often absent.¹⁸

Descriptions of gaping wounds to the unprotected neck and groin, involuntary defecation and urination, and panic abound in Greek literature. This dark and mostly forgotten side of hoplite battle suggests that once the two sides clashed together, the interior of the melee was sheer bedlam. In such a mess, weight and discipline were crucial to hoplite success: the greater cohesion and thrust of the column, the more likely it was for a phalanx to shove itself over and through the enemy. Perhaps all the terrible battle calculus of this type of fighting was what horrified Pericles. Certainly, the very idea of sending his citizens into such an inferno against trained killers like the Spartans must have driven him to craft a strategy to win the war without risking hoplite confrontations.

Usually, within an hour the pushing (ôthismos) ceased, as one side collapsed and then fled the field. The exhausted victors stripped and returned the dead, and erected an ostentatious trophy as testament to their prowess. Often they annexed the disputed territory from the defeated. There are few instances of multi-day pitched battles in the manner of a Shiloh or Gettysburg, much less a weeks- or months-long holocaust like a Somme or Verdun. Instead, at Solygia, Delium, Mantinea, and outside Syracuse, the fight was probably over in a few minutes. During some twenty-seven years of war, Greek hoplites fought in pitched battles probably no more than four or five hours in the aggregate.¹⁹

Scholars debate endlessly whether the parochial rules of hoplite war stifled tactical and technological innovation or reflected the preexisting backward state of Greek warfare before Alexander. For example, did a characteristically limited chase really reflect the rules of battle, or was it a de facto admission that exhausted winners in armor, without many horsemen, could hardly catch losers who tossed away their equipment and fled once lightened by sixty or seventy pounds of cast-off weight? Quite unlike the bedlam at Delium, at Mantinea the entire defeated left wing of the democratic allies ran to safety without much serious pursuit from the Spartans: “The flight was neither pursued nor did the retreat go on very far; for the Lacedaemonians fight their battles long and stubbornly until they turn back their enemies; but once their enemies flee, their pursuits are both brief and only for a little distance.”²⁰

Terms of deprecation like lipostratia, “leaving the ranks,” and tresas, “trembler” or “fleer,” referred to those who fled the phalanx or showed manifest signs of fright. The classical Greek language in addition had at least two specific terms of aspersion just for jettisoning the hoplite shield (rhipsaspis, “shield tosser,” or apobolimaios, “throw-awayer”)—an act that threatened the integrity of the phalanx and revealed the hoplite’s worry about his own, rather than the group’s, survival. These public slurs were serious stuff and stuck, haunting a man for the rest of his life, given the public nature of both phalanx warfare and civic life within the polis. In his comedies, Aristophanes was merciless to the Athenian popular leader Cleonymus for tossing away his shield to save his life at Delium. His infamy three years after the battle became a stale joke repeated ad nauseam in front of several thousand Athenian theatergoers.

In the same manner, the young Plato was probably ashamed that his stepfather, Pyrilampes, had also run at the first sign of trouble at Delium and was captured by (and later ransomed from) the Boeotians, a battle where his teacher Socrates’ fortitude, in contrast, became a subject of table talk at an entire generation of subsequent Athenian dinner parties. Much of the family cachet that propelled the teenager Alcibiades into prominence at Delium derived from the fact that his father, Cleinias, had died bravely at the front ranks not far away, twenty-three years earlier at Coronea.

If Greeks sensed that fright and courage were not so public during sieges, in the midst of civil strife, or at sea, hoplite battle was a different story. It could make or break a man’s civic life for decades afterward. The good citizen, in other words, throughout the Peloponnesian War was not the tosser but the aspidephoros (“shield carrier”), who always holds his shield steady and right, and stays in rank in the phalanx—even though there was almost no opportunity to do so over some twenty-seven years of war.²¹

Panic and fear were ubiquitous on the battlefield, given the curtailment of sight and hearing, and the ever-present danger of panic among such large mobs. Often in the Peloponnesian War unexpected natural phenomena—sudden thunder and lightning, an eclipse, or an earthquake—would shatter the morale of a Greek human herd in massed rank.

Rampant slaughter could on occasion occur, but careful analysis reveals an economy to pitched fighting, and that the real killing occurred well off the hoplite battlefield. Rarely did more than 10 percent of the men who fought die in a single pitched battle—1,500 total hoplites were killed at Delium, or a little over 10 percent of the 14,000 armored assembled on both sides. Although the Athenians suffered a staggering 14 percent fatality rate among their hoplites, such a number of dead was unusual and made the battle among the most costly in classical Greek history. At Mantinea the combined hoplite dead of 1,400 suggests a similar fatality rate of about 7 or 8 percent—if, in fact, 17,000 to 20,000 hoplites crashed together. Throughout the entire war, Athens lost little more, on average, than 200 hoplites a year. Its aggregate of only 5,470 hoplite battle dead was less than half of those heavy infantrymen who perished during the war from the plague alone—and the vast majority of them fell outside hoplite battle in skirmishes, sieges, and at sea.²²

Posthoplite Warfare

Two new factors in the fifth century had changed three centuries of past hoplite practice. First, the Persian Wars, particularly the invasion of Xerxes in 480, had shown that even a successful battle like Marathon or Plataea could not guarantee total victory against an enemy that did not share ideas about the primacy of agrarian warfare but sought annihilation of its enemy by land and sea through any means available. In response, that war was won in a large part through the destruction of the Persian fleet at the sea battles of Artemisium and Salamis, but only after Athens, along with most of northern Greece, had been burned and occupied. Had the Athenian defenders depended solely on their hoplites, the Persian Wars would have been lost. Ten thousand Athenians, even if they were the brave veterans of Marathon who a decade earlier had defeated 30,000 of Darius’ invaders, could hardly have withstood 100,000 Persians in a pitched battle in the Athenian plain.

Classical hoplites and later phalangites might defeat Persian infantry—as the Hellenic infantry victories from Marathon and Plataea to Issus and Gaugamela attest—even at a 5 to 3 numerical disadvantage, but not at 10 to 1. At the battle of Cunaxa (401) the Greek Ten Thousand routed their Persian adversaries. But after the death of their patron Cyrus the Younger, the vastly outnumbered mercenary force found itself on the Euphrates facing tens of thousands of enemies in what is now southern Iraq, and conducted a fighting retreat rather than invite a pitched battle.

By the time of the Peloponnesian War hoplites enjoyed a role similar to that of the majestic dreadnoughts of the First World War, formidable capital assets that likewise “feared nothing.” Highly prized and much touted even in their anachronism, such imposing ships could blast apart in minutes an entire fleet and thus change a war—and yet rarely got the chance to fight one. So it was too with a classical hoplite phalanx. On the eve of the expedition to Syracuse, Alcibiades deprecated the supposed hoplite strength of Sicily by scoffing that throughout the Peloponnesian War states usually bragged of hoplites whom they did not have, even though such highly prestigious forces rarely any longer won wars outright.²³

Alcibiades seemed to wish to reassure the Athenians that they might win, given the paucity of Syracusan heavy infantry—and then brought far too few cavalry along, only to discover that it was Sicilian horsemen, not hoplites, that most harmed the Athenian army. Such hoplite chauvinism lingered even after the Peloponnesian War. In the fourth century, Plato’s Socrates makes the almost treasonous claim that the great naval victory at Salamis was an unhappy occasion because it empowered the landless naval crowd at the expense of proud landowning hoplites. Again, it was how you fought, not whether you won or lost, that mattered. War had as many internal ramifications as it did external consequences. The great catastrophe to the founder of Western philosophy was not that the democracy at Athens had lost, but that it had inaugurated a type of fighting in the Peloponnesian War that divorced virtue from military efficacy.

During the discussion about the Peace of Nicias (421), the Argives suggested to the Spartans that they both resolve their disputes “just as once before” by selecting champions to meet at a prearranged time and place. Even the conservative Spartans at first scoffed at such reactionary thinking. “A moronic [môria] thing” was their initial reaction to the strange proposal of deciding an entire war by allowing a few hoplites to crash together in phalanxes. After a decade of frustration in Attica and having been stymied by light-armed troops on Sphacteria, the Spartans were no longer under the illusion that ceremonial battles could settle any dispute.²⁴

Triremes, along with the poor men who rowed on them, the marines who sailed along as skirmishers, and the public taxes that built them, proved far more critical to the war effort than agrarian militias. Yet at the outbreak of the war Thucydides takes care to note that Athens had at least 13,000 front-rank hoplites and another 16,000 reserve garrison infantrymen made up of old and young citizens and augmented by resident aliens with heavy armor. In other words, the Athenians had enough men to have manned an additional 150 ships. The purpose of these nearly 30,000 Athenian deployable hoplites under a policy that sought to avoid their use in pitched battle is not altogether clear, other than for marching out to Megara to intimidate the smaller city and provide cover while light-armed troops ravaged its agriculture.

By the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War both Athens and Sparta, far more so than other city-states, found themselves immune from the old restrictions on hoplite warfare. Neither needed to be home at harvesttime—triremes or helots, respectively, could supply enough food to exempt thousands from farm chores. Thus, neither learned to predicate short wars on the prestige of winning rather insignificant borderlands. Throughout the Archidamian War (431–421) it was the Peloponnesian agrarian allies, not the Spartans per se, who were reluctant to march northward to Attica. Why? Unlike Sparta, they worked their own fields, and, as Pericles had foreseen at the outbreak of war, such men had no capital to endure a long war.²⁵

Athens, through its overseas empire of tribute and imported food that supplied at least two-thirds of the population, had similarly transcended seasonal hoplite warfare. With the port at the Piraeus, a navy of some 300 ships, a large populace of voters who did not farm, and annual commercial income, it too did not confine itself to a few weeks of spring campaigning in hopes of deciding conflict by glorious battle. Moreover, since the Greek victory at Plataea over the Persians, the Spartan phalanx had established a reputation of invincibility that was to last well into the fourth century, the disaster at Sphacteria (425) being considered an aberration and quickly redeemed by the dramatic hoplite victory at Mantinea.

Quasi Hoplites

Thus, all during the Peloponnesian War the Athenians felt that meeting such hoplites on a flat plain was tantamount to suicide, like sending out cruisers to face battleships when there were carriers available.²⁶ The victors of Delium and Mantinea—the Boeotians and Spartans—came away from the conflict convinced that their own hoplites were unbeatable, thus explaining why both confident armies were willing to meet each other in the numerous battles to come at Haliartus, Nemea, Coronea, Tegyra, Leuctra, and second Mantinea, which followed the Peloponnesian War. Despite only two major old-style battles, fighting throughout the twenty-seven-year war was nearly constant and took place everywhere—on rough terrain, in mountain passes, and through amphibious operations. Indeed, there are some eighty-three instances in the text of Thucydides of what might legitimately be called a land “engagement” of some sort, illustrating that most soldiers were killed far apart from a typical phalanx battle.

On long marches, cavalry, light-armed troops, and archers were needed to provide reconnaissance, cover, and pursuit against like kind. Light troops, mostly highly mobile javelin throwers unencumbered by body armor, were especially prized once battle moved away from the plains and onto difficult ground. Clumsy hoplites away from the phalanx were often ambushed, their breastplates of quarter-inch bronze not always a sure defense against a storm of arrows and missiles from skirmishers who could target arms, legs, and the neck. Horsemen were no longer mere ancillaries at the peripheries of hoplite battle but were often critical to military success against a mélange of enemies in a variety of locales. Poor men, rich grandees, slaves, foreigners, aliens, even women and children during times of siege—they all got into the fighting, once more disdaining the old idea that rural communities would let farmers adjudicate border disputes by brief collisions.²⁷

As the fighting wore on, the nostalgic Thucydides could find ever more poignancy in the destruction of the old hoplite infantry of both sides of the Peloponnesian War, especially when they died outside of pitched battle or at the hands of their social inferiors. He listed the losses of the Athenians to the plague first in terms of dead hoplites. A Spartan who surrendered at Sphacteria after seeing his hoplite comrades suffering from a barrage of arrows was made to sigh, “An arrow would be worth a great deal if it could pick out noble and good men from the rest.” When the Athenians lost 120 hoplites in the wilds of Aetolia to hill men, he remarked of the dead that they “were truly the best men whom the city of Athens lost in this war.”

Recalling an earlier incident before the war when Corinthian hoplites had been ambushed and slaughtered, he pronounced it a great “tragedy.” He also concluded that the dead Thespian hoplites at Delium had been the “flower” of their city-state.²⁸ In Thucydides’ view, hoplites should have fought in pitched battle—not fallen less gloriously to disease, ambush, or missiles. The Greeks themselves were conscious of the military revolution in their midst. In the fourth year of the Peace of Nicias (418), Thucydides grieves that the two sides went after each other through ambushes and raids, precisely because neither side would march out to fight a battle “with formal preparation.” Aristophanes ridiculed the youth of his day. They could not even hold their shield chest high—as if that skill would ever be needed in a war without hoplite battles. Both during and after the Peloponnesian War, Greeks agreed that something had gotten out of control and led to slaughters never before anticipated, not unlike the modern repulsion at World War I, which soon proved to be quite unlike the expected short and decisive campaigning a half century earlier during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.²⁹

Besides Delium and Mantinea, there were only a few other occasions when two phalanxes collided. These engagements were usually small affairs and thus decided little. In summer 425, for example, the year before Delium, the Athenians had embarked a small army of some 2,000 hoplites near Corinth, just the sort of nontraditional mixed use of hoplites that Plato would later condemn as impure. At the small village of Solygia, seaborne Athenian hoplites were met by Corinthian heavy infantrymen. The two sides fought a tough, though atypical, hoplite battle in difficult terrain. Thucydides points out that the battle was “entirely hand-to-hand,” and apparently brutal. Reserves, a retreat behind fortifications, and the prominent role of the cavalry—as well as confusion, panic, dust clouds, pushing, and the death of the defeated general—proved more pivotal to the Athenian victory than hoplite courage.

The Athenians claimed Solygia as a tactical victory, by virtue of driving the Corinthians off the field, losing little more than 50 dead to the Corinthians’ 212, along with their general Lycophron. Still, they were unable to establish a secure base, and so suffered a strategic setback in that they returned to their ships and sailed away. Then the general and old conservative hoplite Nicias belatedly discovered that two Athenian corpses had been left behind, requiring an embarrassing return to ask the defeated for the bodies, thus in formal terms nullifying the psychological dividends of the limited victory.³⁰

About a year and a half later, in winter 423, the Mantineans fought the neighboring Tegeans, in a precursor to the great battle of Mantinea that would follow in that same valley five years later and at last involve the great powers of the Peloponnesian War. Of this earlier and similarly minor affair Thucydides notes only that the engagement was hard-fought and mentions some characteristic elements of phalanx battle: each side claimed victory on its right wing and broke off hostilities at darkness. Such backwater and mostly unrecorded fights between hoplites must have been ubiquitous as smaller states over the three decades of the war went on with the normal business of settling border disputes—even as Sparta and Athens simultaneously tried to transport their own larger hoplite armies into peripheral theaters to obtain local advantages against numerically inferior and poorly armed and led militias.³¹

Thus, such “hoplite” battles were not exactly purely hoplite affairs. In most of them there were ambushes, seaborne attacks, and hoplites employed more on garrison duty than in rank. Perhaps the most famous was the engagement at Amphipolis (422), where 600 Athenian hoplites were killed at a cost of a mere 7 on the Spartan side. Both opposing generals, who had agitated for continuation of the decadelong war, the Athenian demagogue Cleon and the maverick Brasidas of Sparta, were killed in action. With their joint demise, peace factions arose to allow the Peace of Nicias the next year, suggesting that most of the war’s key figures died with their armor on, and that hoplite battle in a day still had a tendency to alter the course of the war. Of course, Thucydides makes it a point to note that Amphipolis was not quite a “regular battle” (what he calls a parataxis) but, rather, a more confused effort by Cleon to approach the Spartan garrison at Amphipolis—only to be surprised by joint sallies of Spartans from the city walls who surrounded the Athenians and quickly routed them.³²

What did the term “hoplite” then come to mean? Not much more than a heavy infantryman with some sort of bronze armor. He was no longer per se of a particular class. Nor did he necessarily fight in the phalanx—or even observe the age-old protocols about notification and cessation of pitched battle.

The Last Hurrah at Mantinea

After the Spartan failure of annual ravaging (431–425), after the Athenian toll from the plague (430–426), after the Spartans had lost at Sphacteria (425), and some of their best warriors—among them high-ranking officers—had shamefully surrendered and been taken hostage (425–421), after the Spartans became terrified that their helots might revolt en masse, after the defeat of the Athenians in Boeotia (424), and after Cleon and Brasidas both perished at Amphipolis (422), both sides acknowledged that the war had degenerated into a messy calamity that neither could win outright.

A breather was welcomed. After some failed brief truces, the conservative Athenian statesman Nicias negotiated with the Spartans the peace that bears his name and would prove to last about six years (421–415). If Athens was exhausted from the plague and the dislocations of evacuating the Attic countryside, Sparta had been so shattered by the rather light losses at Sphacteria and the Athenian garrisoning of Pylos and Cythera that its citizens “thought they would fail in whatever risk they undertook, because of the loss of self-confidence arising out of not before experiencing such calamity.”³³

So eager were the Spartans to get back their prisoners taken at Sphacteria some four years earlier that they signed on to the agreement over the objections of their allies Thebes, Megara, and Elis, which, in fact, remained nominally at war with Athens. However, rarely do peace agreements last when the original conditions for hostilities have not ended. Both Sparta’s purported fear of the power and growth of the Athenian empire and Athens’ unwillingness to make painful concessions to assuage Peloponnesian anxieties were not altered. Despite a decade of carnage, by 421 neither side believed it had really been beaten.

Thus, the “cold war” lasted only a few years before it began to heat up again in the Peloponnese, near the small town of Mantinea in 418, as the old Spartan alliance threatened to unravel. Alcibiades and the war party at Athens were the surrogate players. Their grand strategy—once more like the ambitious schemes that had come to naught at Delium in 424—was bold, hinging on creating a democratic revolutionary movement that might turn once-hostile Peloponnesians into friends and thus in one big battle shut down an entire theater of the war in the south.

Under the leadership of Alcibiades, the Athenians intrigued with Argos to fashion an ad hoc coalition of newly democratic Peloponnesian states—Argos, Elis, and Mantinea—that might surround Sparta and dissolve her alliances, especially with Thebes and Corinth still nursing resentments on the sidelines over the recent peace with Athens. The Peloponnesian League itself was rife with tension. Argos had fought Sparta repeatedly in the early fifth century, both in pitched battles and border skirmishes, and always represented a potential nexus of rebellion. Elis was a wealthy unified city-state, home of the Olympic games, site of the magnificent temple to Olympian Zeus (larger than the Parthenon), and itself quasi-democratic as early as 460.

During the peace, the Athenians were at last starting to fathom the rough outlines of a winning approach of fomenting helot rebellion in Messenia—all the while in hopes of liberating the major Peloponnesian allies in the Argolid, Arcadia, and Elis. The occupation and fortification of Pylos, along with the defeat and taking of the Spartan hostages on the island of Sphacteria, were now to be complemented by surrounding Sparta with hostile democratic states. At the hub of this grand plan of anti-Spartanism in the Peloponnese, both figuratively and geographically, was Argos. Its leadership sensed that the Spartan surrender at Sphacteria, coupled with the failure of devastation in Attica, had improved Argos’ chances to serve as a democratic and autonomous Peloponnesian rallying point. The post-Pylos leadership in Sparta had done nothing between 420 and 418 to stifle this growing alliance other than to marshal a few troops on the border and then disband them because of “bad omens.”

Athens, however, failed to grasp this golden opportunity to undo the Peloponnesian empire. Alcibiades had led the groundwork for this anti-Spartan alliance, but in a foolhardy move the Athenians had rejected his candidacy for general in 418, preferring instead the lethargic Nicias and his associates. This ensured that they would only haphazardly support the resistance when it finally came to real fighting in the Peloponnese.

Alert to the danger in early summer 418, the Spartans under King Agis arrived in the Mantinean plain to put an end to such nonsense and protect Tegea, their first outpost ally that was targeted in the new coalition’s grand ambitions. This insurrection proved to be like none other in Sparta’s recent history. The recalcitrant states were the most powerful in the Peloponnese. And they could field good infantrymen. Had they won then, the Peloponnesian War would have been, for all practical purposes, over in an afternoon—as the Spartans could never have marched northward into Attica again, Corinth and Thebes would not have returned to the Spartan coalition, and the state itself would probably have been immediately plagued by massive helot revolts at home.

King Agis brought some 12,000 hoplites into Arcadia to force battle and restore the old reputation that it was not a wise thing to face the Spartans in battle. Thucydides thought his force “was the finest Greek army brought together up to that time”—apparently a suggestion that these elite hoplites were intent not on ravaging the Attic countryside but on killing Argives in pitched battle. After a few false starts, each army—the allies had roughly equivalent forces—maneuvered for position in the plain of Mantinea before squaring off and colliding. The final onslaught probably took place sometime around August 1, 418—the hottest time of the year in one of the hottest and most humid plains in mainland Greece.

At the very outset of the war Pericles, in advising his countrymen to retreat into their walls, had conceded that the Peloponnesians could defeat “all the Greeks put together in a single battle.” Unfortunately, he would be posthumously proved right, as Mantinea would now confirm the late Athenian leader’s worst fears about the prowess of Spartan hoplites. Unlike the Spartans’ arrival into Attica in 431, King Agis came to the flatlands of Mantinea with a much smaller force that convinced their adversaries to march out in hopes that a victory was possible after all. Yet so ready were the Argives and the Mantineans to induce battle that their brashness startled the late-arriving and methodical Spartans. Thucydides claimed that few could recall another occasion on which the Spartan army had been so dumbfounded.³⁴

Both Delium and Mantinea were in a tactical sense near accidents. The respective armies did not know quite where their adversaries were camped, or even less their exact location seconds before they charged. Take away just two old men—Pagondas at Delium and an anonymous old Spartan hoplite who warned King Agis to back off his initial approach—and the two decisive hoplite engagements of the war either would not have taken place or at least would not have been fought where and when they were.

If one were to pick a place to fight a hoplite battle, Mantinea would be just about right. For killing people out in the open, generals need ample space, lots of food, clean water, level ground, easy accessibility, and nearby protection. Mantinea, unlike Delium, fits all such requisites. As the nearby modern freeway proves, it is on the strategic route between north and south. Mantinea is also a narrow plain where 20,000 warriors can still easily fit, as they did in August 418—and on several occasions afterward.

The killing fields are surrounded by mountains that provide both defense for the flanks of heavy infantrymen and a refuge after defeat. A few thousand brave men who can span such a narrowing plain can stop whole armies. Thus, Mantinea served as a choke point where the grand routes from southern Greece constrict to a mile or so—before opening up again to flatland and various roads that branch out northward to Argos, Corinth, and Athens. If Sparta had lost this battle, it would not only have gained an entire host of new enemies but found its main artery out of Laconia essentially blocked.

Mantinea is fertile. Then and now the black earth can grow wheat in abundance, and so it ensured food for thousands of men as they milled and jockeyed around for days, seeking preparatory advantage to kill one another. The plain suffers from too much rather than too little water. The runoff from the surrounding steep mountains explains the ubiquity of sinkholes and streams. Greek generals of the ages liked Mantinea. Numerous times in Hellenic history Spartan kings, the Thebans under the great liberator Epaminondas, and the national hero Philopoemen (253–182) all fought in battles here for causes and ideas that are now the stuff of classical scholars, but of little interest to anyone else.

Few tourists, then, visit Mantinea today. The new freeway interchange is about five miles distant; and the ugly modern cement city of Tripolis lies about ten miles away. There is nothing here at the battlefield but a few country homes, a bizarre church that a wild-eyed eccentric spent his life building by scrounging marble and bricks from the countryside, and the traces of a vast lost city that peeks out amid the weeds and wheat fields.

But walk carefully again through this plain. Scan the random blocks of the theater. Climb among the fallen bastions of the once great circuit wall, navigate through the precincts of the ancient sanctuaries of Herakles and Poseidon, and far from being empty, Mantinea is, in fact, full of ghosts. Thousands have died here over the centuries. The voices of Greece’s greatest statesmen, generals, and writers once echoed off these hills before they fell in the alluvial mud of the battlefield. Well off to the distance there is the small hillock of Skopê (“Lookout Hill”), where the greatest military man Greece produced, the liberator Epaminondas, died in 362—his retainers pulling out a spear from his guts as he gazed down at his retreating Theban army, which had broken on news that its beloved general had been carried off and was bleeding to death on the hill above them.

Somewhere beneath the present-day barbed-wire fences and cement irrigation ditches are the footprints of the rabble-rouser Alcibiades, who well before the battle traversed the landscape, trying to create an alliance of democratic states to encircle Sparta and crush oligarchy for good—only in typical fashion to miss out on the actual fighting in 418 altogether. His grand machinations to end the Peloponnesian War in an hour also ended in vain here on the battlefield of Mantinea.

Alcibiades was nowhere to be seen. After crafting the alliance, his candidacy for general was rejected, his homeland sending a scant 1,000 Athenian hoplites and 300 horsemen to fight in the climactic battle that it had engineered. Perhaps Athens was worried about inciting the Spartans by arriving en masse at a time of ostensible peace; if so, nothing in war is so dangerous as to be a little aggressive or somewhat provocative.

The Spartan army that lined up on the plain was emblematic of the demographic crisis that would eventually undo the entire military caste system of the state. In short, its hoplite military was no longer an army of elite Spartan Similars. The left of the line was manned by some 600 Sciritae, tough mountain people from the borderlands of Arcadia who enjoyed some limited privileges of Spartan citizenship—and as a token of appreciation usually found themselves in battle facing the enemy’s elite right. Next to them were several hundred freed helots. These were equally brave men, but without the training or the élan of the Spartiate class.

The core of the Spartan army manned the center, along with some Arcadian allies; the right was given to local Tegeans and another division of Spartiates. If one adds up the 12,000-some Peloponnesian hoplites, 5,000 light-armed troops, and 1,000 mounted Boeotians, King Agis had roughly 18,000 men with which to break up the Argive bid for a free Peloponnese.

The allied coalition opposite had somehow collected 11,000 to 12,000 hoplites, which was an approximate match of King Agis’s heavy forces. About 2,000 skilled Mantineans anchored the right, opposite the Sciritae. Along with 1,000 picked professionals from Argos and some Arcadians, they constituted about as good a force of hoplites as any in the Peloponnese and were determined to be free of the Spartan yoke.

The rest of the Argives, the Eleans, and militias from some smaller cities filled out the center and left of the battle line (about 7,000 men), along with a mere 1,000 Athenians on the extreme left wing. Unfortunately, the center and left stared across no-man’s-land at the cream of the Spartan army. Their only hope of salvation was to hang on long enough for the Mantineans and the Argive elite to finish off the Sciritae and immediately come to their aid. Beneath barren Mount Barberi, King Agis marched his Spartan killers right through the enemy left, his right and center wings immediately shattering the men of Argos, along with the trapped Athenians. His professional killers plowed on and lowered their spears, “walked slowly to the music of pipes,” and then impaled the few who fled too slowly.

Thucydides wrote that the hoplites of the terrified and collapsing allied phalanx “trampled each other” in their very eagerness to escape the dreaded red-cloaked spearmen. An entire corpus of passages in Greek literature reflects the ancient view that the Spartan army—its look, discipline, skill, organization, and method—terrified any Greek hoplites unfortunate enough to regard it across the battlefield as it slowly walked to the killing zone. Just as it was felt a terrible thing to go against the German army in the twentieth century’s two world wars, so too the Greek world recognized that it was deadly to square off against the Spartans.³⁵

Like a methodical modern cyborg, the victorious Spartan center and right of the phalanx stopped, turned hard left, allowed most of the frightened and defeated Argive survivors to run away—after killing some 700 of them with their allies—and continued on laterally across the now broken battle line. All the tough talk about teaching the Spartans a lesson like Pylos had vanished in the reality of having to face such unrelenting killers on their terms. Once more silently walking en masse, the Similars sought to rendezvous head-on with the enemy’s other wing of Mantineans and allies, over a half mile away.

For a brief moment these Argives and Mantineans were relaxed and ebullient that they had driven off the weaker Sciritae and freed helots before them. Fools! Their transitory sense of victory only further incited the approaching Spartans, who, as if stung by a bothersome pest, now unleashed their remaining fury on these men, planning to cut them apart without mercy. Little did the victorious Argives and Mantineans know that for a few minutes a few thousand men had almost had in their power the ability to reverse the entire course of the Peloponnesian War, a brief window of opportunity to accomplish what all the raiding, siegecraft, and trireme war of the last decade could not. That unforgiving moment was lost almost as quickly as it arose.

The only hitch in the final Spartan battle plan to finish off the coalition had occurred during the initial few minutes. The outmanned Sciritae on the left had been outflanked by the Argives and Mantineans. As Peloponnesian companies from the middle of the line drifted leftward to form a buttress against the surging enemy right, for a moment a dangerous gap opened in the Spartan lines. King Agis ordered two companies on the victorious right to disengage and head over to the hemorrhaging left. Both Spartan officers refused such an unparalleled order—and were later exiled on charges of insubordination arising from alleged cowardice—on the logic that the reckless enemy would not capitalize on their temporary victory and hit the Spartans on their vulnerable left sides, but rather first plunder and chase the defeated. Thus, soon enough the Argives and Mantineans would find themselves vulnerable and targeted by the elite Spartan right, once it polished off the enemy and turned to deal with these unsuspecting allies.

If hoplite battle was a story of each right wing winning as its left lost, then total victory was determined only by a second phase of the battle—by how quickly and effectively the triumphant right could make a hard left and hit its counterpart in the flank. Sometimes such a collision could lead to only more death and stalemate as the two best wings slammed head-on and found their adversaries a different sort of folk from the inferior troops whom they had each just routed. Unfortunately for the allies, that did not happen here, and the second Spartan collision proved almost as deadly for the coalition as the first. At Mantinea, Sparta won the second phase of the battle and with it obtained victory as it blasted apart the Argives and Mantineans before they knew what hit them. For professionals who so rarely had the opportunity to put their long training into practice, the Spartan hoplites at Mantinea killed as if it were second nature.

Most of the once victorious 200 Mantineans who were now caught and killed by the Spartans were buried in the soil where they had been born and had worked. For centuries they remained in obscurity, until a few decades ago American archaeologists found a stone inscription embedded in one of the surrounding abandoned houses. It may well record a partial casualty list of these Mantinean dead of some twenty-four hundred years past. Who were these hoplites with names like Eutelion and Epaines, and where on the battlefield did they die? Modern readers of epigraphy have no idea what Glausidas and Mnasias did in their last minutes. But they and dozens of others at least live on as names in stone because they died in glory rather than perished old and in obscurity—and so were commemorated on heroes’ lists that ended up over the ages as thresholds and windowsills for today’s similarly struggling farmers in the same plain of Mantinea.³⁶

Thucydides himself probably sat in these hills and wrote what he saw, with a bird’s-eye view of the killing as it unfolded below. His eyewitness description of the great fight of 418 remains the ancient world’s most detailed and informative battle narrative, ending with his dry assessment that here transpired “the greatest battle that had occurred for a very long while among the Hellenes.” By “greatest” Thucydides apparently did not mean size. More soldiers were likely present seven years earlier at Delium. Thucydides instead implied that for once the outcome of a single battle might have determined an entire conflict, inasmuch as Sparta at last got her long-hoped-for hoplite clash against most of her enemies.³⁷

Yet there is another Mantinea that transcends tactics, strategy, and politics, a story of accidents, brutality, and human fickleness. Alcibiades’ intrigue prompted the battle. But other Athenian generals, not he, fought and died here, among them Laches, the eponymous interlocutor of a Platonic dialogue, who was stabbed in the back as he ran away. Years earlier the same Laches had taken off from Delium; this time he was just as nervous but not so lucky. The Spartan king Agis, deemed incompetent or worse, had no belly to fight at Mantinea, and so twice backed his army out of the valley in the week before the battle. But fight he finally did and won the greatest single-day Spartan victory of the Peloponnesian War—ensuring that Sparta would at least not lose its struggle with Athens and that he would conduct a successful war against Athens in the decade to come.

The Anatomy of Battle

When the Spartans invaded the plain of Mantinea to break up the nascent democratic alliance of rebellious Peloponnesian states, they faced a coalition enemy army of radically variant composition. That group of 1,000 elite Argives, who trained at public expense and were mostly oligarchic, were ostensibly to serve as crack troops on the coalition’s right. They, along with the Mantineans, had initially broken through the weak Spartan left, where a gap had opened between it and the center. But then the allies had foolishly paused to plunder the baggage train and had not continued spearing the Spartan center from the rear. Had they pressed home their attacks against the backs of King Agis’ elite, the Spartans may well have lost the battle and the hundreds of Athenians and Argives would probably have been saved over on the left. Either the chance of plunder or the sheer fear of meeting Spartiates—even from the rear—explains their fatal hesitation. Clearly, allies on the same side of the battle line did not always work in concert.

Such leniency accorded a trapped adversary was soon reciprocated. The Spartans on the right and center blew apart the regular Argive army and slew hundreds. Then for some reason when they swung over and turned their attention to the victorious Mantineans, they left the retreating 1,000 Argive elite—the real spearhead of the enemy coalition—alone. The suspicion immediately arose that the Spartans were looking past the battle and plotting for a return of a docile oligarchic Argos. Such a reconstituted conservative ally later would need men like the 1,000 elite to keep democratic firebrands at bay. In contrast, the more hoplites killed from Mantinea the better, to teach them the wages of democratizing against fellow Peloponnesians.

What about those equally defeated Athenians on the allied left? The Spartans killed only 200 of them, allowing the other 800 to flee. After all, the two states were officially still at peace. So it made no sense to annihilate Athenians, especially when a moderate board of generals at Athens had already chosen not to send a full force to Mantinea, several thousand additional hoplites that might well have spelled defeat for the Spartans.³⁸

In coalition warfare in which several allied city-states fought alongside one another, who and what determined which phalanx fought where, either on the esteemed right, where there was little danger, or the inglorious left, where peril was greatest? Usually the honored right slots were given either to the host poleis—the Tegeans and Mantineans, respectively, in 418—or to the strongest and most numerous force, usually Thebes, Athens, or Sparta. In response, allies usually resented the fact that they had followed the lead of such larger city-states only to end up fighting the strongest adversaries as their supposed betters over on the right wing faced the enemy’s weakest troops.

The later tactical breakthrough of the general Epaminondas at the battle of Leuctra in 371 was not merely that he put his best on the left to a depth of 50 shields to ensure a slugfest with the Spartan elite right, but that by doing so he ensured to his own allies—and Sparta’s confederates across the battlefield as well—that neither weaker side would have to face their betters and play the roles of sacrificial lambs. The next winter Epaminondas invaded Laconia with a unified army and encountered Peloponnesian states that appreciated his past magnanimity and were now eager to join him. How odd that the basic idea that a leader should bear the greatest risk in battle by putting his men on the left of the phalanx waited until the twilight of the hoplite age.

Normally, however, because such alliances were often shifting and predicated on internal political upheavals—various factions installing democratic government one day, oligarchy the next—there was constant suspicion within a coalition army. Sometimes as much enmity arose along as across the battle line. At Delium, remember, the Boeotian confederation was racked by internal strife among its several member city-states. The Theban hegemons especially distrusted their neighbors the Thespians. It was probably out of enmity that Pagondas and his generals placed the suspect Thespians directly across from the Athenian right wing, perhaps in hopes that they would either fight well and hold off Hippocrates or be annihilated in the attempt.

As the battle unfolded, the Thebans got both their wishes. The Thespians were almost obliterated and yet kept back the Athenian elite until reserves could arrive to stabilize the wing even as Pagondas shattered the Athenian left. The result of such sacrifice was that there were at least 300 Thespians killed at Delium, perhaps out of an original contingent that numbered 600 to 700.

What were the ramifications of the fatalities at Delium: cui bono? Almost 50 percent of the Thespians present at the battle were killed in an hour or so. Such catastrophic losses meant that a third of all the small farmers at Thespiae were now dead. Of the roughly 7,000 Boeotian hoplites present at the battle, perhaps 60 percent of the dead came from those that made up 10 percent of the army.

There were immediate consequences to such one-sided sacrifices. Thucydides reports that a few months after Delium, in summer 423, “The Thebans destroyed the walls of the Thespians, on the allegation of pro-Athenian sympathies. They had always wished to do this, but now they found an easy opportunity since the flower of the Thespians had been annihilated in the battle against the Athenians.” Thespiae, it should be noted, had suffered the same fate when its hoplite army had been wiped out at Thermopylae a half century earlier, and would again lose nearly its entire small army at Nemea (394), thirty years after Delium.³⁹

Hoplite Fumes

After the battle of Mantinea, the allies of Athens never again fought the Spartans in pitched battle. In a mere hour or so, the Spartans and their allies had killed at least 1,100 of the democratic coalition at a cost of only 300 Peloponnesians. Like the battle of Delium, a supposedly anachronistic way of fighting had settled an entire theater of war for the duration of the conflict. For the final fourteen years of fighting, there was only one more traditional hoplite battle—a small skirmish between the Athenians and Syracusans in Sicily. By 413 Sparta began to develop a serious fleet and to build permanent fortifications in Attica, giving up the old pipe dream that any army would meet its own in battle.

The hoplite battle outside the walls of Syracuse (415) did not involve all the combatants of the Sicilian campaign, and the Athenians’ victory did nothing to prevent their eventual defeat. The Athenians formed in almost the same way they had three years earlier at Mantinea: Argives and crack Mantineans on the right, Athenians in the center with assorted allies on the left. But this time the Athenians and their allies grew confident because they were facing amateurish Syracusans, not deadly Spartans.

The fight once more revealed the usual chain of events. Confusion was evident at the very beginning. The Syracusans, like the Athenians at Delium, were surprised at the sudden attack. Thunder and rain panicked the less experienced Sicilian defenders. After a fierce struggle, the battle was, as was customary, won on the right, where the Argives and Mantineans scattered the enemy. Cavalry no longer protected just the flanks, but played an integral role both in the pursuit and defense of the defeated.

The small battle was similar to the earlier engagement at Solygia, even down to the number of dead: 260 Sicilians, a little more than 50 Athenian and allied fatalities. But just as earlier the seaborne Athenian hoplites, with 300 horsemen, had won a tactical victory over the Corinthians but been unable to translate such battle success to strategic advantage, so too in 415 the Athenians won a small battle but could not press their advantage. In short, hoplite fighting in such small numbers had little effect on the strategic goal of their campaign: the capitulation of Syracuse.⁴⁰

If during the Peloponnesian War cities were increasingly often protected behind strong stone walls, and if they weighed carefully the wisdom of committing their entire armies to old-style collisions against either numerically superior or more experienced phalanxes, then naturally fighting would be redirected against the entire urban community itself. Moreover, since the two most-feared armies of the age—those of Sparta and Thebes—were allied, what army would be so foolish to fight either and thereby guarantee its own destruction?

Yet if there was a dearth of hoplite battle in the Peloponnesian War, there were instead attacks on cities in a manner unprecedented in earlier Greek history. Each side soon ignored the old idea that courage should determine victory, but instead looked to innovation, capital, and sheer manpower to storm the strongholds of their adversaries. Few, if any, Greeks were executed or enslaved in the aftermath of the hoplite battles at Mantinea or Delium. Tens of thousands most surely would be when war turned to the cities.