A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Read online

  PRAISE FOR A WAR LIKE NO OTHER

  “Definitive. Engrossing. A masterpiece. It is difficult to marshal all the requisite superlatives for Victor Davis Hanson’s new book on the Peloponnesian War. Hanson takes up the story where Donald Kagan, whose four-volume history of that world-altering conflict … left off. Kagan provided a sweeping political and strategic overview of the war; Hanson … shifts the focus and brings the reader into the guts of battle.… Hanson’s command of his subject is as impressive as his erudition is lightly worn.… Hanson, like Thucydides, teaches us about the tragic nature of war.”

  —National Review

  “The age of Pericles was also a time of famine, pestilence, and atrocity: a ‘Thirty-Year Slaughter.’ In order to understand the lesson this offers for civilization, one must try to feel it as the Greeks felt it, and reflect on it as they did. In this dual task, Victor Davis Hanson once again demonstrates that his qualifications are unrivaled.”

  —CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS,

  author of Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

  “This book will immediately become the standard companion volume in English to Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War. Its own battle narratives are unexcelled; but its singular merit is its comprehensive and detailed description of how the actual fighting was done, how generals led, and why each side—Sparta and Athens—went to war. The author is a man of action and a practicing farmer as well as the premier classical historian and military commentator of our day.”

  —JOSIAH BUNTING III,

  author of Ulysses S. Grant

  2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2005 by Victor Davis Hanson

  Maps copyright © 2005 by David Lindroth

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade

  Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing

  Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States

  by Random House, an imprint of The Random House

  Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2005.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Hanson, Victor Davis.

  A war like no other: how the Athenians and Spartans

  fought the Peloponnesian War / Victor Davis Hanson.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-490-6

  I. Greece—History—Peloponnesian War, 431–404 B.C. I. Title.

  DF229.H36 2005 938′.05—dc22 2004062892

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  List of Maps

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1. FEAR

  Why Sparta Fought Athens (480–431)

  CHAPTER 2. FIRE

  The War Against the Land (431–425)

  CHAPTER 3. DISEASE

  The Ravages of the Plague at Athens (430–426)

  CHAPTER 4. TERROR

  War in the Shadows (431–421)

  CHAPTER 5. ARMOR

  Hoplite Pitched Battles (424–418)

  CHAPTER 6. WALLS

  Sieges (431–415)

  CHAPTER 7. HORSES

  The Disaster at Sicily (415–413)

  CHAPTER 8. SHIPS

  The War at Sea (431–404)

  CHAPTER 9. CLIMAX

  Trireme Fighting in the Aegean (411–405)

  CHAPTER 10. RUIN?

  Winners and Losers (404–403)

  Appendix I: Glossary of Terms and Places

  Appendix II: Key People

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  LIST OF MAPS

  The Spartan and Athenian Empires

  The Peloponnesian League and Other Spartan Allies

  The Spartan and Athenian Empires

  The Athenian Subject States and Allies

  Invading Attica

  Athens and Environs

  The Coast of the Peloponnese

  Battles and Sieges of the Peloponnesian War

  The Athenians Attack Syracuse, 414

  Final Military Operations, Winter of 415–414

  Naval Battles in the Aegean

  PROLOGUE

  In April 404 B.C. the Spartan admiral Lysander finally led his vast armada of ships, crammed with some 30,000 jubilant seamen, into the hated port of Athens at the Piraeus to finish the Peloponnesian War. After the destruction of its imperial fleet at the battle of Aegospotami (“Goat Rivers”) in the waters off Asia Minor the prior September, the once splendid city of Athens was now utterly defenseless. Worse still was to come. It was soon surrounded, broke, jammed with refugees, starving, and near revolution. Such an end would have seemed utterly inconceivable just three decades earlier when a defiant Pericles promised his democracy victory. But then neither had 80,000 Athenians fallen to plague nor 500 ships been sunk at Sicily and on the Aegean.

  Two Spartan kings, Agis and Pausanias, had encamped outside the walls of the city in command of thousands of tough infantrymen of the Peloponnese, the large peninsula south of the Isthmus at Corinth that makes up the southern part of Greece. The people of Athens were still for a time safe behind massive walls, but tens of thousands of refugees inside were cut off from both homegrown and imported food—and waiting for the end. Gone was the old lifeline of imperial tribute by land and sea. To end this growing general famine, Athens finally gave up, agreeing to dismantle most of what little was left of its once renowned fleet, famed fortifications, and vaunted democracy. Thousands of citizens were thus entirely at the mercy of Spartan clemency; perhaps 100,000 residents congregated in the streets, terrified that they might suffer the same fate they had once meted out to so many other Greeks throughout the Aegean.

  The conquering Lysander wasted little time in carrying out the terms of the capitulation, most poignantly destroying most of the Long Walls—two fortified lines extending over four miles from Athens to its port at the Piraeus, and symbolizing Athenian democracy’s commitment to seapower and a maritime empire: “The Peloponnesians with great zeal pulled down the Long Walls to the music of flute-girls, thinking that this day was the beginning of freedom for the Greeks.”* Liberation was what the Spartans had once promised the Greeks, when so long ago at the outbreak of war they had warned the Athenians, as Thucydides put it, “to give the Greeks their autonomy.” And now these parochial warriors seemed to have proved good on their word. The Spartan occupation thus ended over twenty-seven years of conflict with the utter defeat and humiliation of Periclean Athens. How did such an unbelievable thing come to pass?1

  This book does not answer that question through a strategic account of the conflict’s various campaigns. Much less is it a political study of the reasons that caused the Spartans to fight against Athens. Fine narratives in English by George Grote, George Grundy, B. W. Henderson, Donald Kagan, John Lazenby, Anton Powell, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, and others cover those topics. So there is no need for another traditional history of the Peloponnesian War.

  Instead, how did the Athenians battle the Spartans on land, in the cities, at sea, and out in the Greek countryside? What was it like for those who killed and died in this horrific war, this nightmare about which there has been little written of how many Gree
ks fought, how many perished, or even how all of it was conducted? My aim, therefore, after a brief introduction to the general events of the Peloponnesian War, is to flesh out this three-decade fight of some twenty-four hundred years past as something very human and thus to allow the war to become more than a far-off struggle of a distant age.

  From the strange label “Peloponnesian War,” who imagines bloody civil strife? Most envision instead something akin to the “Persian Wars,” “Macedonian Wars,” or “Dacian Wars,” all tough ancient conflicts that were waged against foreign peoples. But the vast majority of lives lost between 431 and 404 were Greek. The money consumed, the towns sacked, the fields ravaged—these disasters were also mostly Greek. This ancient civil conflict today is called the “Peloponnesian War” since Westerners are in some respects Athenocentric. Everyone equates Athens with Greece. And while moderns are familiar with Sparta, they hear almost nothing of states such as Corinth, Syracuse, or Thebes, Athens’ other formidable enemies, who collectively knew the three-decade-long fight quite differently, as the “Athenian War” to destroy the democracy and its empire.

  Most later writers, both ancient and modern, have adopted Pericles’ view of a “war against the Peloponnesians,” its history most famously written by the Athenian Thucydides. Yet in regard to the actual nature of the fighting, the Peloponnesian “War” was not really directed just against the Peloponnesians in open conflict but involved almost everyone in the Greek-speaking world—and many beyond it from Thrace to Persia. The struggle much more resembles the seemingly endless killing in Northern Ireland, the French and American quagmires in Vietnam, the endless chaos of the Middle East, or the Balkan crises of the 1990s rather than the more conventional battles of World War II with clear-cut enemies, theaters, fronts, and outcomes.

  A better name for our subject, perhaps, would be something like “the Great Ancient Greek Civil War.” Athens and Sparta and their respective allies were, except for the final entrance of Persian financiers, all Greek speakers who worshipped the same gods and farmed and fought in the same manner. Although there was never a successful Panhellenic nation, Greeks of the city-states still felt themselves to be a single people. Their twenty-seven-year strife, in terms of the percentages of the population who fought and died, was one of the most horrific civil wars in early recorded history—conventional battles, terrorism, revolutions, assassinations, and mass murder all unfolding at once among a baffling array of shifting allies and enemies.

  In this focus on the battle experience, there is a Thucydidean pedigree to be found. Far from his history being a yearly and comprehensive account of all the events of the war, as he seems to purport, Thucydides (c. 460–395), our chief source of knowledge about the Peloponnesian War, instead offers up exemplary snapshots that ground his entire narrative in the human experience of killing.

  For instance, his detailed account of the siege of the tiny town of Plataea allows it to become a template of all sieges in the history, which subsequently warrant only passing mention. In a similar manner Pericles’ first funeral oration is recorded in full—a Lincolnesque occasion to summarize the essence of Athens. But the other twenty-something Athenian eulogies are never mentioned. The madcap killing on the island of Corcyra is emblematic of ubiquitous later civil strife; the details of the battle of Mantinea serve as a guide to the infantry engagements earlier at Delium and later on Sicily. There were five mass evacuations from Attica between 431 and 425; only the first is described in any detail.

  Thucydides offers dozens of poignant illustrative scenes of desperate men and women on ramparts, spear thrusting, and warship ramming at sea. So he was certainly not the dry realist and compiler of exhaustive detail as is sometimes believed but, rather, a humanist and a storyteller who never forgot that people, not inanimate political and economic forces, were the real stuff of his history. This story of how thousands of Greeks fought and died, then, is mostly distilled from and in the spirit of his own history.

  Nevertheless, by describing this war in such a different manner, I have less opportunity for chronological continuity or even to reflect larger ongoing political and strategic thinking behind the war. The Spartans cut down olive trees in the first and last years of the war; Athens was conducting seaborne raids both in 431 and in 405. A siege started the war, and Athens quit under a Spartan blockade. Or as Thucydides put it, sieges, ethnic cleansing, mass killing, battles, droughts, famines, and plague “all fell upon the people simultaneously with this war.”2

  This book’s chapters are for the most part organized not by annual events but by the experience of battle: “fire” (the ravaging of the land), “disease” (plague), “terror” (coups and irregular fighting), “armor” (hoplite warfare), “walls” (sieges), “horses” (the Sicilian expedition), and “ships” (trireme fighting). These chapter themes are also interwoven with a loose ongoing narrative of the war, again with the understanding that each chapter draws on illustrations taken from the entire twenty-seven-year conflict.

  No other struggle can provide such military lessons for the present as the Peloponnesian War. Of course, it was a Balkans-type mess—but also a conflict involving two great superpowers, as well as a war of terror, of dirty fighting in a Hellenic Third World, of forcing democracy down the throats of sometimes unwilling states, and of domestic and cultural upheavals at home brought on by frustrations of fighting abroad. Former secretary of state George Marshall, critics of Vietnam, and contemporary opponents and supporters alike of the so-called war on terror have all looked back to find their own Thucydides and learn from the people who fought that most awful war so long ago.

  At times I have drawn on personal experience both with farming and with the modern Greek landscape, offering as well comparisons with battles of other times and ages, including those from our own era. Such straying from the strict protocols of classical scholarship may bother professional historians, but readers will appreciate these often-brutal reminders that men and women of the past were not so different from us after all. There is a commonality to war, it being entirely human, that transcends time and space. Sometimes we can learn about the distant past by evoking subsequent wars in which soldiers were often confronted with the same fears and motivations, their officers struggling likewise with age-old dilemmas of strategy, logistics, and tactics.

  All dates are understood as B.C. unless otherwise identified. To avoid confusion, common Latinized forms of well-known Greek names and places are used whenever possible. Some other terms are transliterated directly from the Greek when such spellings better reflect how those words were probably pronounced and are now more commonly known to modern English readers.

  References to the history of Thucydides are cited by his book and section number only; ancient historians (such as Diodorus, Herodotus, or Polybius) are referred to by name alone, if they are the authors of only one titled work. Translations from Greek and Latin are my own, though in cases of difficult passages I am also in debt to the work of others. Works listed in the endnotes are found in the Works Cited section as a guide to further studies, and to acknowledge ideas and thoughts drawn from others from over a century of classical scholarship. Glossaries of notable people and terms are provided at the back of the book for easy reference to the baffling array of Greek names and usage. A time line of events of the war concludes the first chapter. Some of the description of the battle of Delium in chapter 5 is adapted from an earlier article I published in the Military History Quarterly.

  Robert Loomis of Random House, along with my literary agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, strongly supported my proposal for a new account of the fighting between Sparta and Athens, and likewise believed that modern readers would still be interested in learning how wars of the distant past were won or lost. I thank all three for the genesis of this book—and again Robert Loomis for a great deal of editing after the manuscript was submitted. My wife, Cara, who read the entire manuscript, and our daughter Pauli helped with the preparation of the text. Cara also c
ompiled a number of statistics about losses in the Ionian War that proved invaluable. Along with William and Susannah, our two other children, they aided with chores on our farm that allowed me to write this book.

  As always, my two close friends Professors John Heath and Bruce Thornton read the manuscript and saved me from a number of errors. Donald Kagan’s various books on ancient war and its influence in the modern world have been a great source of inspiration. I owe gratitude also to Barry Strauss and Paul Cartledge, whose work on the early fourth century remains a foundation for all attempts at assessing postwar Athens. Honora Chapman, my other former colleague in classics at California State University, Fresno, also read a draft in manuscript form and offered additional valuable ideas. Evan Pivonka, a classics graduate of Santa Clara University, helped with cross-checking ancient Greek and Roman citations. Sabina Robinson, a graduate student in classics at Princeton University and the University of Copenhagen, compiled figures on Peloponnesian War battle fatalities from ancient texts. Cynthia Oliphant offered assistance in researching the maps.

  The Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where I am now a senior fellow, provided a grant to help with preparation of the manuscript. I thank its director, John Raisian, for his continued kindness—and especially Martin and Illie Anderson, the Field Foundation, and the Stuart Family Foundation for support that made my appointment at the institution possible. In addition, Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, kindly extended to me a month’s teaching tenure in September 2004, as an annual fellow of the school, and it was in those pleasant circumstances at Hillsdale College where the last page of the book was written.

  VDH

  September 25, 2004

  * All unattributed quotes in the text are from Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War.

  CHAPTER 1

  FEAR

  WHY SPARTA FOUGHT ATHENS (480–431)

  Our Peloponnesian War