CHAPTER VI—ATHENS’ FAILURES

§ 1. The “strategy of offence” against Boeotia

IT was not until the year 426 B.C. that Athens first bestirred herself to undertake active operations against Boeotia. With the coming of Cleon there was a new spirit at the War Office. There was also recent provocation by the Boeotians. The revolt of Lesbos in defiance of Athens’ sea-power had infuriated the city, and informers denounced the Boeotians, who were kinsmen of the islanders, as concerting with the rebels. The rising had been subdued in 427 B.C., but only at the cost to Athens of a very unpleasant new property tax on her citizens. There was also the fate of Plataea to annoy her. In the summer of 426 B.C. a considerable effort was made. Nicias, one of the generals, who had been sent with the fleet to harry Melos—a very insignificant affair to all except the Melians—was recalled thence and sailed to Oropus on the northern coast of Attica on the borders of Boeotia. There he disembarked at nightfall and at once with 2000 Athenian hoplites crossed the frontier and marched ten miles inland upon the Boeotian city of Tanagra. The force was joined there next morning by the full Athenian land levy under Eurymedon and Hipponicus of the Alcmaeonid clan,{384} which had marched from Athens by the direct way of Phyle over Mount Parnes. There was no Spartan army in Attica that summer, for earthquakes occurring just as the invaders were assembling at the Isthmus of Corinth had sent these in consternation off home again. Hence it was safe for the Athenian soldier to venture earlier than usual out from his city. The large combined force enjoyed a pleasant day ravaging the fields outside Tanagra’s walls, and spent the night in camp there. But meanwhile a few Thebans had come to the city’s help, and, encouraged by these the citizens took the field and challenged the whole Athenian army to battle. Being heavily outnumbered they were not unnaturally defeated. The victors raised the customary trophy and then promptly departed. If they had hoped to hear of an Athenian army under Demosthenes appearing in the north-west of Boeotia, they were disappointed. The Aetolians had seen to it that Demosthenes did not get through. So the army at Tanagra broke up and marched away, Nicias and his men to the ships, the rest back home to Athens. Nicias did a little further ravaging on the Locrian coast opposite Euboea, and then he too returned to Athens.{385}

It was a petty and somewhat inglorious ending to the “first campaign of offence against Boeotia”. All the glory of the incident rests with Tanagra city herself. She was one of the eleven “units” of the Boeotian Confederacy and contributed therefore just 1000 heavy infantry and 100 cavalry to the League’s army.{386} Even when strengthened and exhilarated by the handful of Thebans this was but a small force to march out so boldly against Nicias and Eurymedon. To so low an ebb had the reputation of the Athenian land army sunk! And though the latter had won the victory, yet their effort was quite enough to exhaust the Athenians’ energy for the time being. Next year they were engrossed in the excitement of events at Pylos and Sphacteria. There was also a Spartan army once again in Attica. But the capture of the Spartan prisoners put an end once and for all to this latter danger, and in the elation of this great success the War Office in 424 B.C. revived its scheme for a concerted assault on Boeotia simultaneously from different quarters.

The Athenian strategy of offence was to divide and conquer. It was embarrassing that the army had not the slightest desire to fight a pitched battle against the united Boeotian forces, even when these latter were left to themselves and had no Peloponnesians to help them. It was also unfortunate that Plataea could no longer serve as one of the projected bases for operation. Others, however, could be devised. If the Thebans could at one and the same time hear of the invasion of Boeotia upon several different and widely separated frontiers, their attention might be so distracted that the whole land might be in a blaze before they had made up their minds which way to march to extinguish the conflagration. Three such frontiers offered possibilities. The eastern frontier was easily reached by way of the land route through Decelea to Oropus, or, as two years earlier, by sea. The southern frontier was equally accessible by sea from Naupactus. On the north-west frontier and the Phocian border there was now no hope of an Athenian army. This scheme had come finally to grief. But there were still Boeotians of democratic favour and, therefore, of Athenian sympathies. Thebes was not too kindly a mistress of the Confederation, and there were cities within it which were believed not to love her overmuch. Thespiae for instance had old ties of friendship with Athens. Orchomenus had been famous long before Thebes had usurped the first place among the cities. Chaeronea was full of democrats. Perhaps they could be induced to rise against Thebes, if well encouraged. The Phocians, too, hated the Locrians, Thebes’ friends, more than they loved the Thebans. Such were the ingredients of the dish. Out of them there was concocted the plan of 424 B.C. The chief credit for its making belongs to a Theban, an exile from his country, one Ptoeodorus by name, and to other democratic malcontents in various cities of Boeotia. The scheme had then been laid before the Athenian military experts Demosthenes and Hippocrates, colleagues this year in command. In its final shape it took the following form. There should be three columns of attack, one on the south-west, one on the north-west, one on the east. On the south-west Demosthenes was to sail from Naupactus with 40 ships and his army to the port of Siphae. This port belonged to Thespiae. It was to be betrayed to him by democratic plotters. On the north-west there was to be a local rising of adherents with Chaeronea on the Phocian border as its centre. This place was in dependence on Orchomenus. There was in the neighbourhood a band of exiles, men of Orchomenus, who kept in their pay a company of Peloponnesian mercenaries. These promised to bring Chaeronea over, and some Phocians also were in the plot. Finally the main Athenian army under Hippocrates was to seize and fortify the Temple of Apollo at Delium, a place on the coast-line north of Oropus, not far from Tanagra. All these three places Siphae, Chaeronea, and Delium were to be taken on one and the same day. This should provoke an immediate democratic rising everywhere in Boeotia—so the schemers hoped. Even if this were delayed, at least there would be three strong positions in the land to serve as rallying points for neighbouring malcontents and as bases for any following military operations. Thebes would be threatened from three sides at once. The enemy’s forces would be divided. Things would go “suitably” enough.{387}

It might seem a pity that a fourth line of attack, that from the north, could not have been added to the three, and Thessalian cavalry have been brought down to aid the enterprise, especially since the Boeotians were strong in this arm. But perhaps the new Spartan fort at Heraclea barred the way,{388} and the strategists rested content with their three frontiers.

Even without this addition it was an elaborate scheme enough. And on one asset the Athenians could certainly count, namely, the isolation of Boeotia. The enemy’s southern allies were far too dispirited and hampered by their prisoners at Athens to intervene. Demosthenes might march up country from Siphae to Thespiae or wherever he pleased without any fear of a Spartan force appearing on his flank from Aegosthena. The threatened Boeotians must work out their own salvation by and for themselves.

One other plea may be entered on the scheme’s behalf. If there was to be any strategy of offence at all against Boeotia, some such plan was not only the most promising, but it was the only possible scheme. The great alternative was to hurl the entire land army straight at Thebes. Sparta would not interfere. Of course diversions by simultaneous risings at places like Chaeronea and Thespiae would have been also useful. But the kernel of this alternative possibility was direct attack on the enemy’s main force. The Athenian land army heavily outnumbered the Boeotian in infantry. But such a strategy was altogether too simple and heroic for the subtle wits and somewhat faint hearts of Athen’s politicians. There was indeed “a marked reluctance to take the bull by the horns”.{389} Far better make use of political motives and democratic tendencies. Moreover, if the men of a single city Tanagra had dared fight the whole land levy because a handful of Thebans had come to help them——!

So the more elaborate strategy was adopted and came to instant and ignominious collapse. There was some miscalculation as to dates. Demosthenes arrived off Siphae too soon. This in itself mattered very little. The whole plot had long since been given away by a local Phocian spy, who disclosed it to the Spartans. These at once sent word of it in every detail to the Boeotians, who promptly called out all their forces. Everything so far was quiet in the direction of Delium. There was no need to keep the army together at Thebes. To this extent the muddle about the day was unfortunate for the conspirators. Garrisons were thrown into Siphae and Chaeronea as soon as Demosthenes’ arrival off the coast was known, if not before. He sailed sadly away. The democrats and exiles in the north-west and elsewhere heard of this failure and dared not stir. The Boeotians withdrew their garrison from Siphae. When, after all this, Hippocrates started out from Athens and on the third day duly arrived with the entire land army of over 17,000 men at Delium and proceeded to fortify the temple there, the whole of the Boeotian forces were free to move against him. Which was precisely what the Athenians had most desired to avoid.{390}

The responsibility for the failure of the whole strategical plan has been fastened on Demosthenes. “In so vital a matter”, it has been said, “he could not even keep count of days.” “Being a genius he despised details and arrived too soon. The courage of the troops at Delium was on a par with the intelligence of the commanders”—and so forth.{391} Neither is a German’s suggestion that Demosthenes “suspected treachery and would not wait” very helpful.{392} For the mistake in the day certainly helped to wreck the scheme. Thucydides himself does not say whether it was Demosthenes or his colleague Hippocrates who blundered. At least his own fellow-citizens, who were so quick to punish in their law courts a general’s failure, whether deservedly or undeservedly, never laid the blame at Demosthenes’ door, and he continued in command.

In reality, betrayal, when so many were in the plot, was almost inevitable from the first, and it was this, and not the miscalculation of time, which proved fatal. But the whole strategical scheme was quite radically unsound. It was to begin with far too complicated, if the three armies engaged in the plan were intended to do more than take and hold three forts and wait to see what happened. The co-operation of armies acting from different bases of supply has been condemned again and again by Napoleon. Simplicity, he declares, is the keynote of success in warlike operations. If this simultaneous attack had been made on the three separate fronts, the Thebans had the entire advantage of “interior lines”, and could have directed their own army upon whichever point of attack they pleased. There is no reason to suppose that they would have lost their heads. Quite a small part of their available troops could have “contained” the democrats at Chaeronea (these being, like coneys, a feeble folk). A second small force could have watched Hippocrates at Delium, whose one and only desire was to fortify the temple. The rest would have come down upon Demosthenes and he would have been lucky to escape to his ships without great scathe. Then it would have been Hippocrates’ turn. If, however, the plan contemplated no actual co-operation in the field, the seizing of the three forts might speedily have brought results more pleasing to the Thebans than to the invaders. The success of the fortification of Pylos seems to have given the Athenians a very exaggerated opinion of the value of such pinpricks. In this whole strategy of offence against Boeotia there was one ultimate and most fatal weakness. The point of a “strategy of division” is to be able to bring to bear at the most decisive point a greater number of men for battle than the enemy’s. In the words of the American Confederate, General Forrest, to “get there fustest with the mostest men” is the aim of the whole. But the Athenians never proposed to “get there” at all. They never intended to fight a battle with the Thebans at the last resort or at any resort. Such a strategy which relies for its success on the politician and not on the soldier is doomed from the outset. It was poetic justice which turned it, sorely against the Athenian general’s will, into a mere affair of tactics, and produced as its fruit the most serious pitched battle that had hitherto been fought.

§ 2. The battle of Delium{393}

Hippocrates arrived at Delium. He spent the best part of three days in constructing elaborate defences round the Temple of Apollo there. Then the light-armed troops, a large, disorganised, and badly armed mob, cheerfully hastened on their way home and the greater number of them disappeared beyond recall. The hoplites, 7000 in number, halted a mile away from the Temple fort, just within the Attic frontier, piled their arms, and proceeded to encamp. The general himself was still in the fort, supervising the final touches of the defensive works and arranging for the posting of its guards. At that moment the whole Boeotian army, 7000 hoplites, 10,000 light-armed, 1000 cavalry, and 500 targeteers (“peltasts”) came marching down upon him from Tanagra, where they had been mustering. Their general was Pagondas, one of the two Theban magistrates of the year. Thespiae and Orchomenus among the other towns had duly sent their contingents, democratic sentiments notwithstanding. So much for political propaganda (in Boeotia at least) in time of war and invasion.

Pagondas was accompanied by other magistrates of the Boeotian Confederacy. These were reluctant to pursue the Athenians. The foe were over the border again. Why not let them go quietly on their way home? But the fiery Theban was of a very different mind. He harangued his army, division by division. Being a good soldier, he would not have them all leave their arms together in the near presence of even an Athenian enemy. His speech was brief, valorous, and to the point. “These Athenians were their immemorial foes wherever they happened to be. They had just dared to construct a fort, and this at least was on Boeotian soil, even if their army had just left it. Fight them they could and would. They had thrashed them in the past at Coronea. They would do so again.” The troops were of the general’s mind. Pagondas moved them swiftly forward. But speeches, though brief, if repeated some few times, take up precious time. It was getting near dusk on a winter afternoon when Pagondas came into actual touch with the enemy. His colleagues’ doubts and his oratory had given the enemy general Hippocrates time to make disposition of his own available troops to meet the coming attack.

Pagondas halted his men at the foot of some rising ground which lay between him and the enemy beyond the ridge. He there formed them into line of battle, the cavalry and light-armed on either wing, the heavy infantry in the centre. The right of the infantry line was composed of his best troops, the Thebans, and these were massed in column, twenty-five deep, a very novel idea, for which, as things turned out, the general deserves the greatest credit.{394} His centre consisted of the contingents from the district of Lake Copais and elsewhere, his left of those of Thespiae, Tanagra, and Orchomenus, 3000 strong. The depth of both his centre and left varied. Beyond the ridge, the Athenians had meanwhile formed up in one long line of battle eight deep, making a battle front of half a mile, with their cavalry and the few light-armed who remained also on either wing. A force of 300 cavalry had been left a mile away in the Temple fort with orders to attack the enemy in the course of the engagement should opportunity occur. Pagondas for his part had detailed a force to keep these under observation, and they took no part in the battle.

 

The Athenian general Hippocrates was proceeding along his line delivering the customary exhortations. He had reached half-way when his oratory was interrupted. The whole Boeotian army appeared on top of the ridge and came shouting down the slope. At Hippocrates’ command the long Athenian line charged at the double up hill against them. This order was perhaps unwise. The two armies were at once hotly engaged in the usual shock-and-thrust tactics of Greek heavy infantry. In this Pagondas had secured at least two notable advantages, the downward slope for his charge and the massed weight of his right wing. In any such encounter of line against line only the first two or three ranks could possibly use their spears, whether the whole line were eight or twenty-five deep. The whole idea was by the very force of the impact to break through the enemy’s opposing line and deal individually afterwards with its broken and panic-stricken fragments. The open order of the famous Roman manipular system was beyond the wit of Greek inventiveness, or relied too much upon the initiative of the company leader and the courage of the individual soldier to be adopted by Greek or Macedonian armies.

It was not, however, the whole length of the line on both sides at the battle of Delium which came into actual conflict with the enemy. The charging lines found on both flanks their way impeded by water-logged gullies at foot of the ridge. Only the infantry closed along the half mile of front between the gullies.

The Athenian right at first did valiantly. They routed the men of Tanagra and Orchomenus, who fled, and closed round encircling the men of Thespiae, who stood their ground bravely and were cut down fighting desperately hand to hand. As the number of hoplites on both sides was much the same, the Athenian right, in view of the great depth of the Theban right, may have outflanked the enemy’s left very considerably from the first, unless wide gaps separated the various Boeotian contingents. Whatever the reason, in this part of the field the Athenians for the time being had the mastery. So dense was the mêlée here that the victors even found themselves smiting their own men. The routed Boeotian left inclined inwards towards their centre, hotly pressed by the Athenians. But meanwhile on the other wing the heavy Theban column had gained ground. By superior weight they drove the Athenian left back step by step. For there was no rout. At this point a master-stroke by Pagondas decided the whole issue. Seeing his own left in dire distress, he sent peremptory orders to two squadrons of his useless cavalry which were in immediate touch with him on his right. They rode round at the foot of the hill under the crest behind them and came down over the ridge like a thunderbolt upon the flank and rear of the Athenian right, as this inclined inwards in pursuit of the Boeotian left. Their coming was utterly unexpected, and, thanks to the hill, unseen. The Athenians in a moment found the troopers among them slashing at their backs and unprotected sides. Taken in utter surprise, and thinking the cavalry the advance guard of yet another army, the Athenian right broke and fled in complete confusion. By this time the Theban wedge had broken into and through the thin opposing line of the Athenian left. The panic and rout became general. Pagondas’ victory was complete. He himself had lost upwards of 500 men. Nearly a thousand of the enemy and Hippocrates himself lay dead upon the field. The rest fled, some to the sea and the Temple fort at Delium, some for Oropus, some to the sheltering wilds of Mount Parnes. The Boeotian cavalry pursued the fugitives with vigour. Some Locrian troops, which had arrived on the scene just as the rout began, joined freshly and gleefully in the chase. But the battle began only in the late afternoon, and kindly night soon put an end to the slaughter. Next day Pagondas marched his army back to Tanagra. The Athenian garrison still retained the fort at Delium, which at the moment Pagondas left alone. And ships took back to Athens the remnants of the army which had fled to the coast.

When the Athenians sent a herald to ask for their dead the Boeotians, accusing the others of sacrilege, bade them evacuate the Temple first. A curious wordy dispute followed in which the Boeotians, the “Dutchmen of Greece”, had by no means the worst of the argument, propounding a dilemma which the sharp-witted Athenians found it quite impossible to rebut. They went without their dead and kept the Temple fort. This atrocious behaviour of the Thebans inspired the Athenian tragic poet, Euripides, to the fury of that one of his ninety-two plays called the Suppliants. As in the legendary days of Adrastus, so now once again the Thebans had “confounded the customs of all Hellas.” Theseus the Athenian hero must to the rescue of the dead. “I will go about this business”, he cries, “and rescue the dead by words persuasive. But if they fail then ‘tis the spear shall forthwith decide this issue, nor will Heaven grudge me this.”{395} Theseus’ descendants found neither persuasive words nor spears to serve their turn. A fortnight later, the Boeotians, reinforced from many quarters, advanced again from Tanagra and took the fort by storm. Then they restored the dead when the herald came again—to his surprise.

Two famous Athenians took part in the battle and retreat of Delium, the philosopher Socrates, then a vigorous managed forty-four, and his brilliant and much-loved pupil Alcibiades, a youth of some twenty-five years of age. Socrates had already saved the lad’s life by gallantry when they were in the army together at the siege of Potidaea eight years earlier and he rescued the wounded boy.{396} It is Alcibiades whom Plato makes tell the poet Aristophanes the story of the flight from the battle-field of Delium.

“Socrates”, he says, “was serving among the heavy armed. I was myself in the cavalry and therefore comparatively out of danger. The troops were in flight when I met him and Laches retreating, and I told them not to be dismayed for I would stay by them. There you might have seen him, Aristophanes, just as you describe him, as if he were in the streets of Athens, ‘with his nose in the air and rolling his eyes about’, stalking along like a pelican, calmly regarding enemies as well as friends, making it very clear to every one, however far away, that if any one attacked him he would put up a stout resistance. This was the way in which he and his comrade escaped. For it is this kind of man who is never touched in war. It is those who run away headlong who are pursued. I noticed particularly how superior in sangfroid he was to Laches.”{397}

“I can tell you”, Plato makes Laches remark elsewhere, “that if others then had only been like Socrates, the honour of our country would have been upheld, and the great defeat would never have occurred.”{398}

So, at Athens, generals and philosophers fought side by side in the ranks.

Of all the land battles of the great war, none, except possibly that of Mantinea six years later, can compete with the battle of Delium in interest. Two of the leading military powers of Greece were matched together in straightforward pitched fighting. In recent years Athens had defeated Thebes and Thebes Athens. Now the matter was put beyond dispute. No Athenian army ever dared cross the border to invade Boeotia again, and the Boeotians ravaged Attica whenever and wherever they pleased. The “strategy of offence against Boeotia” was indeed at an end.

The Theban general Pagondas makes just this one solitary appearance in history. He is never heard of otherwise, whether before or since his victory. But he has earned a foremost place in the whole list of Greek generals. In his determination to fight, in his skilful use of the ground, in his new infantry formation,{399} and in his quick use of his cavalry at the very crisis of the engagement—in all four respects he proved himself a general of a calibre but rarely discoverable in the annals of ancient Greek warfare. Why he is never employed again is one of the puzzles of the war, one of the annoyances which the “silence of Thucydides” sometimes causes.

And the Theban soldier may share in his general’s glory. Before the great war he was known as a stubborn fighter. But of all the armies of Greek states it is the Boeotian army only which comes through that war without defeat and emerges with an enhanced reputation. The Thebans are to be the finest troops of the succeeding century and the Theban Epaminondas the greatest of all warrior generals before Alexander. At Delium coming events cast their shadows before. For all the remaining twenty years of the great war the Boeotians remained the deadliest and the most implacable of all the foes of Athens. Whenever they saw a chance to strike, they struck. Panactum, the Athenian fort near the frontier, was betrayed to them in 422 B.C. and they stoutly refused to give it back when Sparta requested this, its surrender being one of the terms of the Fifty Years’ Peace which she concluded with Athens the next year. When Sparta prayed for Panactum for herself, they bought an alliance with it—which they meant to use in fresh war against Athens—and then razed the fort to the ground before they handed back the site.{400} No Athenian garrison should hold the place again. So the angry Athenians were driven into the Argive alliance which soon led again to war. Nor would the Boeotians ever for their part consent to the Fifty Years’ Peace. At the best they accepted only an armistice with Athens, terminable at ten days’ notice.{401} They sent their troops presently to the Peloponnese to fight at Sparta’s side against the Argives and the Athenians.{402} They sent 300 men to Syracuse in 413 to help this city in her bitter need. It was these soldiers’ stand in that fierce night struggle on Epipolae’s heights which first turned the tide of battle and brought defeat and disaster upon the Athenians.{403} They offered ships to Sparta for the naval war of 412 B.C., and actively promoted Lesbos’ short-lived revolt against Athens in that same year.{404} Boeotian ships fought at Cynossema next year.{405} Boeotian troops helped to garrison Byzantium when the great city revolted from Athens.{406} Meanwhile in the homeland they seized two more forts in Attica by betrayal, Oropus in 412 B.C. and Oenoe in 411 B.C.{407} They joined the men of Chalcis in Euboea on the opposite shore of the Euripus channel in throwing a bridge across from the mainland, so that Euboea was finally relieved of the fear of being cut off by Athens’ fleet and passed completely out of Athenian control.{408} They had helped King Agis to fortify Decelea in 413 B.C., and no men made such profit from this enterprise as did they. They took over all the prisoners and other spoils of war, the results of the garrison’s raiding, at a small price, says a writer, who may be Cratippus, and “carried off to their homes all the building material and the furniture in Attica, beginning with the timber and the tiles of the houses”. The countryside of Attica, he says, was the most lavishly adorned and decorated in the whole of Greece. It had not suffered very much in all the earlier raids. Also it had enjoyed a dozen years of comparative quiet. Now the Boeotians joyfully spoiled it, and most thoroughly. “So Thebes increased ever more greatly in riches and prosperity at Athens’ expense.”{409} And finally it was Thebes who, with Corinth, demanded the utter destruction of her rival, the slaughter and enslavement of her population, when Athens lay at end of the war helpless at her victors’ mercy.{410} Then only Sparta saved Athens from the uttermost penalty which the savage ferocity of Thebes expected to exact.

§ 3. Sicily: the Congress of Gela

At the beginning of the great war the Greek cities of Sicily and lower Italy were as divided in their sympathy between the combatants as was the rest of the Greek world. Corinth and Sparta, however, could count a larger number of adherents in the west than could Athens. Democracy here made a feebler appeal than did race. The “Chalcidian” or Ionian element which favoured Athens was far weaker than the Dorian, and the chief Dorian city, Syracuse, though a democracy, was deeply suspicious of the rival democracy of Athens. Only Camarina allowed her dislike of Syracuse to outweigh her Dorian origin. Syracuse had the not unnatural ambition to control if not to rule every other Sicilian city. In the far west of the great island there were still Phoenician settlements. But Carthage, which might have championed their cause, had been so quiet for nearly half a century that Greeks almost forgot her existence, or, if they remembered her, talked of her slightingly.{411} They had not the least suspicion how terrible the menace was which lurked on the African shore. The native tribes of Sicily who still owned the interior of the island were so ringed round by the Greek cities on the coast that the latter no longer went in the least fear of them, ever since in the middle of the century Syracuse had crushed the native Sicel rising under Ducetius its leader. The barbarian peril was ever present to the Greeks who settled on the coast of Italy. In Sicily it no longer existed. The natives were useful allies in the never-ceasing quarrels between the Greek cities which made a bear garden of Sicily. All that frustrated Syracusan ambitions was the jealous hatred of her fellow-Greeks. These, the “Ionian” element in the island, knowing themselves inferior in strength, looked anxiously abroad for help. So it came to pass that they implored aid from Athens, and that Athens listened eagerly. Every commercial city in antiquity dreamed of a monopoly of markets as the great ideal. Athens could not run the risk of exclusion from every port in the western seas. In lower Italy she had a port of call in Thurii, which, twelve years before the war, Pericles had established on the site of Athens’ old friend and ally Sybaris. But the overland route hence to the small harbours and coasting vessels of the Tuscan sea was not enough, and Dorian Taras (Tarentum) was an uncomfortably close neighbour to Thurii with its mixed population and divided interests. Athens needed safe passage through the straits of Messina for her own ships. And she must encourage her partisans in Sicily as well. So Pericles on one and the same day in 433 B.C. concluded his alliances with Leontini in the east of Sicily, 20 miles only from Syracuse, and with Rhegium on the Italian side of the straits in Messina. The alliance with Corcyra, the half-way house to the west, quickly followed. These alliances helped to precipitate the great war, as has been shown.

During the first four years of the war the Athenians’ attention was engrossed elsewhere. It was not until 427 B.C., when Cleon’s activity at Athens becomes for the first time marked, that an Athenian squadron of 20 ships appeared in Sicilian waters in answer to new appeals from Leontini and Rhegium for help against Syracuse. The Athenian admiral Laches showed little activity and won small successes of no importance. Athens was urged to send a stronger force in aid. Three new generals were chosen for the purpose. The first, Pythodorus, came out beforehand and superseded Laches in the winter of 426 B.C. His two colleagues, Eurymedon and Sophocles, with the bulk of the new fleet, did not reach Sicily until the late summer of 425 B.C. They had been delayed by those events at Pylos and Corcyra which have already been narrated.

There was now the very considerable fleet of 60 Athenian vessels in Sicilian waters. Meanwhile there had been endless fighting among the cities both by sea and land. Every one might well be weary of all this aimless and profitless bloodshed. To Syracuse the arrival of the new Athenian fleet seemed ominous. At this point there comes upon the stage the only striking Sicilian personality of the war in the person of Hermocrates the Syracusan. Hermocrates, statesman, general, and orator, a man of good birth, led the Syracusan democracy, it has been said, much as some Florentine noble the equally suspicious burghers of his Italian city. Too much of a noble to please the Syracusan popolo minuto, the “little folk”, he was to be the saviour of his city in the hour of her extremest peril, and was discarded by his ungrateful citizens when that peril was past. The Syracusan democrats had a greater soldier for their Pericles, and, perhaps for that very reason, trusted him less.{412}

Now in the spring of 424 B.C., before the military or naval operations of the year could begin, at Hermocrates’ instigation in chief, there was held at Gela, on the southern coast of the island, a Congress to which all the Sicilian cities sent representatives to discuss the situation. It is perhaps the first example of a Peace Conference in Greek history. Hermocrates harangued the Congress at some length.{413} The gist of his speech was the advocacy of a special and a novel policy, that of Sicily for the Sicilians. The Oxford historian Freeman most aptly labelled it the “Monroe doctrine of ancient Sicily”.{414} Let all Sicilians agree, Hermocrates urged, to settle their differences for the future by and for themselves, without inviting or permitting any interference from outside from any quarter whatever. Keep the “foreigner” out. At the moment, make peace and bid the Athenians go. The ambition of this restless people was just a curse and a menace to them all. For the future, if disputes again arose—let them bide their time. The future must see to it. At the present, Syracuse herself would make every concession to secure a lasting and an honourable peace. Would not the other cities do the like? Dorians might yield to Dorians, Ionians to Ionians, without disgrace. But there was a broader view than this.

“Let us remember”, the great orator cried, “that we are all inhabitants of one island home, all called by one common name, Sicilians. If need be we will fight—among ourselves: we will make peace again—among ourselves. But we will always, if we be wise, unite as one man against the invader. When a single one of us suffers, all are imperilled. Never again will we call in allies from abroad, no, nor pretended mediators. So we gain for our Sicily at once two great blessings. She will be rid of the Athenians and of civil war. So also for all time to come we shall keep our island free and our own, and who is he who will dare then assail us?”{415}

The orator gained his heart’s desire. His eloquence swept the Congress off its feet. The delegates unanimously decided to make peace, and, moreover, at once arranged its terms. The three Athenian admirals were informed by their erstwhile allies that Athens could be a party to the peace if she liked. The unlucky three had no choice. No possible room was left them for remaining. They accepted the proposal. The peace was made. The Athenians sailed back home, to be greeted at Athens with furious indignation by the people. They must surely have been bribed to betray Athens’ interests in this hopeless fashion. Two of them, Pythodorus and Sophocles, were promptly sent into exile. The third, Eurymedon, escaped with the payment of a fine. He presently was taken back into favour and nine years later died in battle in Syracuse’s Great Harbour. There is a Pythodorus also who is general again later, who may or may not be the same man. Sophocles at least now disappears from the record,{416} to reappear perhaps only as an old grey-haired “Counsellor” in 411 B.C.

The Congress of Gela was the most notable diplomatic victory for Hermocrates. It is just here that on reflection a difficulty arises.

In an unkindly world noble utterances are apt to excite some brutal scepticism. Oratory and sentiment are all very well, both for home and for international consumption. But common sense and self-interest have an unlucky habit of stepping in, crushingly, on top of the “sob-stuff”. “Sicily for the Sicilians!” Cui bono? once again. Who stood to gain by the policy? Clearly, whichever city in Sicily was the most powerful of all. Which city was this? Syracuse, beyond a doubt. What had driven the weaker cities to appeal to Athens in the first instance? The strength of Syracuse. Who was it now recommended the policy? A Syracusan.

Why then did the Ionian cities now agree to it, and politely bow the Athenians out of Sicily?

A second, smaller, but none the less curious difficulty occurs in the story as told by Thucydides.

“The Athenians”, the historian makes Hermocrates declare, “are here with a few ships now. At some future day, when they see that we are exhausted, it is likely that they will come again with a larger armament and try to subdue the whole of Sicily.”{417}

In themselves, 60 ships cannot possibly be described as “few.” What would not Phormio have given for so “few”? This so puzzled ancient commentators that some left the words out.{418} A modern suggests that the words “not a few” should be substituted! The English historian Grote is driven to the opinion that Thucydides is here guilty (or rather makes Hermocrates himself guilty) of what is really a monstrous anachronism. Sixty ships are indeed few in comparison with the Athenian armada which came to Syracuse nine years later. The orator must have the armada in his mind!{419}

Yet to dismiss this difficulty with the reflection that Thucydides is just being wise after the event is a poor tribute to the historian. Another solution has been suggested, that the key to both difficulties, the major and the minor, is to be found not at Gela nor at Syracuse but in Athens: not in Thucydides but in the playwright Aristophanes.

Among the politicians in Athens at this time there was a certain Hyperbolus “the potter” or “the lamp-maker”, who was in notoriety second only to Cleon himself. His pottery consisted of small earthenware lamps, and he was in a small way of business, hawking the goods himself on trays for sale in the streets. But he was a forcible and violent speaker, a Red of the Reds. The writers of comedies one and all attacked him and his mother impetuously, some of them devoting to his person whole plays which now, unhappily, are lost.{420} The grave historian, Thucydides, contents himself with one scathing mention, almost in passing. Though the man had been active in Athenian politics for many a long year before he was in surprising fashion banished from Athens in 417 B.C.,{421} the historian does not deign to take any notice of him until his actual death in the summer of 411 B.C., six years later. Hyperbolus was then still an exile on Samos. A conspiracy was at the time afoot on the island to upset the democracy there. The conspirators began their proceedings by assassinating Hyperbolus. Then, and then only, Thucydides makes mention of him in these terms:

“There was a certain Hyperbolus, a scoundrelly fellow, who had been exiled not for any fear of his power and influence, but for his villainy and because the city was ashamed of him. He was assassinated.”{422}

Thucydides’ long and contemptuous silence about him, and this, the most cruel of all brief epitaphs on a dead man ever written, obscure the fact that Hyperbolus in the earlier years of the war was a recognised leader, a “vile leader” Aristophanes calls him, of the people, a man to whom they delighted to listen.

Now in the month of February of the year 424 B.C., at the spring festival, the poet Aristophanes produced upon the stage one of the most exciting of all his comedies, that of the Knights. In the main, the comedy is a most gorgeous onslaught on the politician Cleon, the hero of the moment (after the triumph of Sphacteria) and the darling of the people. At the last moment before the play was produced, the playwright set to work to change its ending, though with no thought of caution in his mind. Time was running short. A fellow playwright, Eupolis by name, came to his help.{423} Aristophanes and Eupolis are the Beaumont and Fletcher of the Athenian stage, though their collaboration was less close and certainly less friendly than that of the Englishmen. The “conference of triremes” in the Knights is attributed to the pen of Eupolis. Three ships talk together, an old veteran warship, a young maiden galley, and a third, “H.M.S.” Nauphante.

“Recently, ‘tis said, our galleys met their prospects to discuss,

And an old experienced trireme introduced the subject thus;

‘Have ye heard the news, my sisters? ‘tis the talk in every street,

That Hyperbolus the worthless vapid townsman would a fleet

Of one hundred lovely galleys lead to Carthage far away.’

Over every prow there mantled deep resentment and dismay.

Up and spoke a little galley—no man’s boarding yet knew she—

‘Save us! such a scurvy fellow never shall be lord of me.

Here I’d liefer rot and moulder and be eaten up of worms.’

‘Nor Nauphante, Nauson’s daughter, shall he board on any terms;

I like you, can feel the insult; I’m of pine and timber knit.

Wherefore, if the measure passes, I propose we sail and sit

Suppliant at the shrine of Theseus, or the Dead Avenging Powers.

He shall ne’er, as our commander, foot it o’er this land of ours

If he wants a little voyage, let him launch his sale-trays,

those Whereupon he sold his lanterns, steering to the kites and crows.’”{424}

One hundred triremes for Carthage—this is what Hyperbolus proposes, to every one’s excitement, in January of the year 424 B.C. In actual fact the proposal came to nothing, and Thucydides therefore takes no notice of it. Doubtless Athens had ships enough. And Carthage had long been in men’s minds. The gaze of the more adventurous had long embraced the wide seas from Caria to Carthage and continued to indulge in dreams of so rich and easy an adventure.{425} But at the moment, in 424 B.C., Cleon and his party had so many forward schemes on hand that they had, however regretfully, to postpone some. There was Megara now really to be taken, and, later in the year, the great offence against Boeotia to be essayed. These had first claim. For the latter project they needed all their light-armed troops. The navy also had a claim on these to serve as sailors. The men could not be in two places at one and the same time. Surely the 60 ships in Sicilian waters must be enough for the time being. Possibly next year—if all went well. Everything was bound to go well. The Athenians were so elated this year, says Thucydides, that:

“they expected to accomplish everything, possible or impossible, with any force, great or small. In their present prosperity they were indignant at the mere notion of a reverse.”{426}

Therefore Hyperbolus’ scheme was dropped. As things turned out, Syracuse and not Carthage was to be the Constantinople of the great war for Athens.

But the consternation at Gela when the congress met in the following April may be imagined. The news of the scheme had reached the town. It was too early in the year to be certain whether or not the hundred ships would be coming. If they sailed, they must most assuredly come via Sicily. One hundred ships more! Sixty ships were few in comparison indeed to these. One hundred and sixty ships! This was, in blunt language, altogether too much of a good thing even for Athens’ own allies in the island. Everyone did honestly know that Athens was extraordinarily ambitious. No man of sense could really believe she was nobly disinterested. One hundred and sixty ships! Hermocrates offered very fair terms for a lasting peace. Accept them promptly and bid the sixty go!

So the sixty went. The one hundred never came. Not a single Athenian ship was left in Sicilian waters. Sicily was added to Boeotia as a dismal failure for Athens of the year 424 B.C.{427}

Two years later, Phaeax, an Athenian of some small repute, came with two ships cautiously creeping into western seas to encourage the city’s partisans. He found Leontini now a deserted site, Camarina and Acragas friendly, Locri in Italy ready for an alliance with Athens. Then he sailed back home, able at least to report that there were once again adherents in the west.{428} The “Monroe Doctrine of Ancient Sicily” was not provocative of peace.

Silence for seven years settles down on the island. The first Athenian interferences in Sicily had ended in a sore rebuff.

§ 4. Megara: the Athenian capture of Nisaea{429}

To gain Megara and to keep a firm hold over the subjects of the Empire were the two principles of action which Pericles had bequeathed as legacies to his successors. As soon as, in 427 B.C., these had vindicated the second by their crushing of the revolt of Lesbos, they turned their attention to still more devices for pursuing the first. There lay off Nisaea, Megara’s port on the Saronic Gulf, an “island” named Minoa, just at the harbour mouth. So shallow was the water between it and the mainland that a causeway connected the two, just as Holy Island is similarly linked with the Northumbrian coast. Either end of the dyke was protected by a tower. The tiny islet which today is off the coast is too distant from this to suit the historian’s description, and Minoa seems to be what is now the long promontory stretching out east of Nisaea towards Salamis. The examples of the conversion of islands into peninsulae, we are told, are numerous on the coasts of Greece.{430}

The Athenians determined to take Minoa. From it they could see every boat in Nisaea harbour. The night raid hence upon Salamis two years before was not forgotten.{431} An Athenian garrison on the island would prevent any such surprise again. Nicias was despatched in the summer of 427 B.C. upon the task. He had no difficulty in carrying it out in a few days. Having taken both towers and cleared the passage between island and mainland, he built a wall to cut off the approach by the causeway, and, leaving a garrison on the island, sailed off home again.{432}

Megara was now in worse plight than ever. Twice a year, every year, in spring and autumn, her fields were invaded and her crops (if any were planted) were destroyed. Now nothing whatever could creep into Nisaea harbour unobserved. Not even Nisaea was really her own, for Sparta did not trust her and had placed a Peloponnesian garrison in the harbour town. Food could still come in by Pagae. But presently worse still befel. Faction fighting broke out in Megara’s streets. The extremists were driven out by the democrats. The fugitives seized Pagae and carried on a merry course of plundering the country from that port. Life had become intolerable in the city. It was proposed to recall the exiles and have so much peace at least. The leaders of the opposite party took instant alarm, and, as events proved, they had very good reason for going in fear of their lives. They sent secretly to Athens in the summer of 424 B.C. and offered to betray the city. The danger from returning exiles, their own fellow-citizens, was greater than any risk they might run from their own plot.

This was skilfully devised. In the middle of the century the Athenians, then close friends and allies, had built for Megara two parallel long walls connecting the city with Nisaea, at least one mile, possibly three miles, in length.{433} If the Athenians now could send a force to take the walls between city and harbour, the Peloponnesian garrison in the latter would be cut off from interfering, and the conspirators promised then to get Megara’s gates opened to the landing party.

At nightfall upon a day the Athenian generals, Hippocrates and Demosthenes, arrived at Minoa Island. Only the conspirators knew of their coming. Six hundred hoplites and a force of light-armed troops were disembarked upon the island. In the wall nearest the island and close to the sea there was a gate, just outside of which was a small shrine of the War God Ares, and hard by it was the trench from which the clay for the bricks of the wall had originally been dug. The hoplites under Hippocrates lay in ambush actually in the trench. The light-armed under Demosthenes stole right up to the shrine just outside the gate. Inside the gate were the Peloponnesian sentries on guard, belonging to the Nisaea garrison. The situation may be illustrated thus:

 

That same evening, there came a waggon down from Megara between the Long Walls to the gate. On it was a sailing dinghy. For many a night past it had come in this way, and, by leave of the commander of the garrison, had been passed through the gate by the sentries, and trundled down the trench to the slip-way on the shore. There the boat had been launched, the conspirators aboard her, and had sailed out into the dark, returning always just before dawn. It was impossible to keep her in the harbour, the crew explained to the Peloponnesian commander, since she would have been seen at once by the Athenians on Minoa. And so every night she went off, as he supposed, “privateering”.

That same evening the dinghy punctually returned, was hauled up the slip, and placed upon the waiting waggon as usual. Slowly it made its way up the trench to the gate under escort of the crew as dawn was breaking. The gate was opened as usual by the guard within. The waggon began to creak its way through and stopped half way. Demosthenes and his men sprang out of the Temple precinct, and rushed for the gate as the crew fell upon the guard and cut them down. Up came Hippocrates and the hoplites running from the trench beyond. The surprise was complete. The Long Walls were taken. Those of the garrison who had sallied out to the rescue fled back into Nisaea fort. And an Athenian army of no fewer than 4000 hoplites and 600 cavalry had marched by Eleusis over the frontier by night and appeared outside the walls of Megara.

So far everything had prospered. It was a very pretty stratagem of war. Major Dalgetty or My Uncle Toby with Corporal Trim could have dilated upon it at length. But now came a check.

An excited crowd gathered at dawn at Megara’s city gate opening on the Long Walls. The conspirators in the city insisted that it should be opened. Let us go out at once to battle, they demanded, their faces and limbs all glistening with the oil which should make them known as friends to the Athenians waiting outside to rush within. But at this moment one in their own counsels revealed the plot to the other faction. In a compact body these came surging down upon the gate. It should not be opened, they declared. This was far too risky. The city was in peril. Never a hint gave they that they knew the plot. The wisdom of the fast shut gate was surely obvious by itself. But it was they who stayed on guard, and the gate stayed shut.

The Athenians turned their attention for the moment elsewhere. The whole of that day they spent in wall building. The following day drew near its close and the new wall enclosing the whole circuit of Nisaea fort from sea to sea and cutting across the Long Walls was all but finished. The garrison, deprived of their daily food supply from Megara, thinking too that the city itself was in the enemy’s hands, capitulated. The Athenians marched into Nisaea. Only Megara itself now remained.

Upon the Spartan side there is in the entire history of the war just one great soldier hero who outshines the rest, Brasidas, son of Tellis. At Methone in Laconia, on shipboard at the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf and at Corcyra, and in the previous year in his desperate attempt to force a landing in the surf at Pylos, Brasidas in counsel and in action, in enterprise and in personal courage, had done his country noble service. Now he saved Megara.

News of the Athenian capture of the Long Walls reached him when he was between Sicyon and Corinth, some 30 miles away, where he was collecting an army for his expedition to the north, of which the tale will presently be told. On the instant he sent a messenger to the Boeotians bidding them meet him with their army at once at Tripodiscus, seven miles from Megara. To that place he himself hurried with about 3000 troops, and reached it after nightfall of the second day. There the tidings met him that the garrison of Nisaea which he had come to save had surrendered a few hours previously. Without hesitation he pushed on with a picked body of 300 men and was outside the gates of Megara before anyone had heard of his coming. At once he demanded admission.

The Megarians, rent by faction, agreed together on just one point. Most clearly a battle outside their walls was imminent. They would let the victors in. Meanwhile they quite literally sate upon the fence, or rather upon the wall, and peered out cautiously into the dark. Brasidas was baffled. Still in the dead of night, after his march of 30 miles, he returned to his army resting at Tripodiscus. There at dawn a strong Boeotian force of 2200 hoplites and 600 cavalry joined him. They had heard the news before, and were already mustering in great strength at Plataea (for Megara’s danger touched them closely) when his messenger reached them. At once, greatly encouraged, they sent forward their best troops to Tripodiscus as directed. Brasidas now had 6000 good troops under his command.

The Athenian army was in its lines near Nisaea, and its light-armed troops were scattered foraging over the plain when the Boeotian cavalry swept down upon them and chased them helter-skelter to the sea. The Athenian horse, greatly surprised—”for no one had ever before come to the help of Megara”—rode forward to meet the enemy, and there was a short cavalry skirmish. Both cavalries then retired on their infantry. Meanwhile Brasidas had deployed his army in order of battle outside Megara. His cavalry fell back to join him. He waited expectantly.

Hippocrates and Demosthenes were in no mind to fight. In actual numbers they were but a few hundred men weaker than the enemy. In Brasidas’ army there was not one single Spartan soldier, apart from the general himself. But the Athenians judged the odds to be altogether too great, and the risk seemed to them greater than the chance of the prize. Nisaea at least was theirs. They were as complacently satisfied with the partial success which they had gained by treachery as are starlings eating stolen bread and butter among the chimney pots. Brasidas for his part made no attempt to force on an engagement. Perhaps he distrusted the quality of his new levies. More probably he desired to keep his army intact for his main objective, the campaign in the north. If incidentally he could save Megara he would rest content with this. So it befel that neither army advanced to the attack. Presently the Athenians withdrew into Nisaea.

Then Megara opened her gates to Brasidas. The incident was closed. The Athenian army went off home, leaving a garrison in Nisaea. Brasidas returned to Corinth. The wiser of the Megarian conspirators slipped quietly away from the city. The exiles were called back from Pagae under the most solemn pledges of a general amnesty. They came into office and held a review of the Megarian army. Out of the ranks they picked man by man one hundred of their personal enemies and of those reputed to be Athenian partisans. Then they summoned the citizen body, compelled them by open voting to condemn the prisoners to death, slew them, and, closest of close oligarchies, ruled Megara contentedly for a round score of years. In the winter of this year they retook their Long Walls and promptly razed them to the ground.{434} Nisaea itself, however, was not regained until 409 B.C.{435}

Throughout the remainder of the war the Megarians were hostile to Athens at such times as were the Spartans, but the part they played was but a minor one, and ceases to be of any interest. Broken faith between factions involved no nemesis from Heaven.