By 415 the war was still stalemated and now in its seventeenth year. During the shaky Peace of Nicias, Athens had lost a rare opportunity to galvanize a democratic revolt of Peloponnesian states against Sparta. The hoplite showdown at Mantinea was a catastrophic missed opportunity, in part as a result of Athens’ meager contribution to the allied army. After Alcibiades’ radical ideas were discredited with defeat of the coalition in 418, the temporizer Nicias—an expert at the half measure and the tactically successful but often strategically insignificant amphibious landing—was now once more ascendant.
Persia was not quite ready to antagonize Athens by committing money to subsidize the creation of a Peloponnesian fleet. Meanwhile, in the Greek Third World the successes of Pylos and other Athenian outposts around the Peloponnese were offset by the defections from the empire caused by Brasidas’ insurrectionary activity in the north around Amphipolis. Athens was still stuck with a two-front war against Thebes and Sparta after its failure at Delium, while the Spartan fleet had performed miserably and seen its efforts to subvert Corcyra fail after a bloody rampage of civil strife.
Many of the war’s leaders and their successors—Archidamus, Brasidas, Pericles, and Cleon—were now dead. Thousands had perished from the plague at Athens, while Sparta hemorrhaged from constant helot flight to Pylos, and yet neither side felt the war was really over. While Spartans contemplated ways of creating a fleet to destroy the Athenian empire, some Athenians were crafting an even wilder plan to gain advantage during these years of respite. What they came up with changed the entire course of the war, although in ways the Athenian assembly never imagined.
Great invasions of faraway places evoke our worst fears. Communications are difficult; by the time most Frenchmen heard Napoleon had taken Moscow, his retreating army was already near ruin in the snows of Russia. Given the great distance, the fragility of logistics, and the danger of extended transport, losses in transit can be as severe as battle casualties. Safety, especially in long-distance amphibious operations, lies in having a way to get back home. And a secure return most often resided, in the age before petroleum, in either ships or horses. After his fleet was sunk at Salamis, Xerxes understandably worried whether his pontoon bridges across the Hellespont were still intact. In contrast, a defiant Cortés burned his ships in the harbor of Veracruz to remind his men that military defeat meant not failure but their own destruction. In such great gambles, victory usually does not hinge merely on success in battle but demands the complete subjugation of the invaded, who in turn are fighting for their survival, not just against conquest.
It is only within this grand and risky context of seeking to conquer a city eight hundred miles away, one as great or greater than Athens itself in population, size, and wealth, that a full appreciation is possible of the disaster of the Sicilian expedition. The trauma to Athens arose not merely from its material and human losses that followed from the defeat; it suffered worse fatalities from the plague and would lose far more in the great sea battles of the Ionian theater to come. Rather, the debacle was spiritual as well, the sheer horror of within just two years tapping the empire to send over 40,000 men so far away either to conquer or to die trying.
Why, in the autumn of 416, well into the sixth year of an armistice with Sparta, did the Athenian assembly vote to attack Syracuse, the capital of Sicily? Classical scholars have collated the ostensible reasons given by Thucydides and other ancient sources. They are legion and remain baffling. First, the Athenians claimed that they were treaty-bound to honor the requests for help from the small Sicilian states of Segesta and Leontini, which were ostensibly threatened with absorption by a growing Syracusan (and Dorian) empire on the island. Both looked desperately for outside succor from an ethnically and politically akin benefactor to preserve their autonomy.
Yet in the realities of war not all promises are always kept, as the poor Melians had learned the year before, when they had put their hope in Spartan aid. The otherwise busy Athenians had reasons other than mere justice and promises to sail so far away.1 Instead, the common people at Athens smelled money in the proposition: profit through promises from the aggrieved states to cover their expenses and greater hopes of plunder once Syracuse itself was conquered. Some Athenian imperialists, Alcibiades most prominently, envisioned Sicily as a stepping-stone to even greater acquisitions in North Africa and Italy. They had already shrugged off the plague, and now saw the beginning of some sort of trans-Mediterranean empire stretching from Asia Minor to Gibraltar, which would have predated the Roman imperium by four centuries. In fact, after the Athenian defeat in Sicily, neutral states breathed a sigh of relief. Most had apparently been convinced that an Athenian victory might have meant that they were next on the long list of targets.2
Meanwhile, the debate over Sicily became the arena for the renewed rivalry between the pro-Spartan Nicias and the imperialist Alcibiades. After the earlier defeat of the pro-Athenian alliance at Mantinea, the elder Nicias’ policy of caution seemed to have eclipsed Alcibiades’ wilder schemes. In response, the Athenians, the imperialists argued, should see victory in Sicily as integral to the current bellum interruptum with Sparta, a way of preempting any Sicilian aid to Sparta at a time of general tension as both sides sought to gain advantage during a phony peace.
Controlling the grain supplies of Sicily—to the modern visitor, the farmland of the island is striking in its clear superiority and size to anything found in southern Greece—might end the Peloponnesian importation of foodstuffs. Contrast the parched Peloponnese or Attica with verdant Sicily, and the additional idea that Athenians were also interested in imported grain for themselves makes good sense. The population and military assets of the island also could come in handy when the war with the Peloponnesians resumed, as it inevitably would in even greater fashion. In any case, the earlier expedition against the island (427–424) had been aimed at denying grain imports to the Peloponnese.3
The renegade Alcibiades, who would betray the Athenian cause a few weeks after arriving in Sicily, was smart enough to understand that when he switched sides in 415 and made his way to Sparta, he had to make some dramatic connection between the survival of Syracuse and the self-interest of his new host city. The best way to enlist Peloponnesians to help defeat his former countrymen at Syracuse was to assure them that the Athenian invasion was really aimed at Sparta. “If this city shall be taken,” Alcibiades told the Spartan assembly, “then all of Sicily is theirs, and immediately Italy as well. And that danger that I just now spoke about from there would in no time fall upon you. Thus, let nobody think that you are deliberating only about Sicily, but also about the Peloponnese.”4
Athens had not been in an active battle with Sparta in six years. The city was starting to recover from the losses of the plague. It was now full of young firebrands who had only a dim childhood memory of either the funeral pyres in the city or Spartan hoplites trampling amid the vineyards of Attica. Athens also had just pulled off a successful siege of a Dorian protectorate of Sparta, the island of Melos, without reigniting the war with Sparta. Steady tribute, the absence of offensive operations for nearly five years, and a restoration of trade had all meant that Athens was almost as well off as during the years before the war. For all these reasons the citizens were once more ready to reassert themselves militarily.5
The campaign was both practicable and mad at the same time: doable in the sense that Athens’ military potential was so great that it had restored sufficient power despite plague and war, while unhinged in the sense that its own subjects, especially in the Thraceward region, were on the verge of revolt, even as Sparta was both unpredictable and unconquered. The pro-Athenian but weak Segesta and Leontini were dubious, if not duplicitous Sicilian allies. The sheer distance and impossibility of easy communications and supply made the operational aspects of the expedition daunting.
Nicias, in overly dramatic fashion, set out all these reasons why Athens should not go to Sicily and achieved the opposite result of inflaming the Athenian citizenry, not unlike the sexagenarian King Archidamus on the eve of the war almost two decades earlier, who had predicted a tough fight only to be disregarded by the Spartan assembly. In the last analysis, one does not defeat the proximate oligarchic enemy by sailing eight hundred miles distant to attack a democratic neutral.
What is striking about the casus belli for the Sicilian expedition was that Syracuse, while Doric and Sicilian, was not oligarchic. Well before the war even broke out, an anonymous conservative observer remarked that anytime Athens did not support democracy abroad, it fared poorly, given its natural affinities for popular governments. The Syracusans may not have been as radically democratic as Athens, but their constitution was liberal in the ancient sense. A sovereign Syracusan popular assembly ensured free give-and-take between the poor and the well-off, meaning that the Sicilian expedition was at the outset a betrayal of professed Athenian values of promoting Panhellenic democratic culture. To the conservative Thucydides the anomaly was not merely that Athens had forsaken its ideological agenda of protecting democracies from reactionaries, but that for the first time in the Greek experience two large maritime democracies were at war. They would bring into the fray all the military assets that such imaginative and resourceful societies characteristically possessed. And these advantages—ships, money, manpower, and popular leadership—were many and not to be lightly dismissed.
Democratic states involved the entire citizenry in their decision making. They did not stake their collective defense on farmland for the sake of a hoplite class. Because such governments empowered the poor, encouraged social mobility and immigration, experienced higher rates of population growth, instilled greater civic discipline (“as is the way of a democracy”), and created capital for both fleets and fortifications, they made war far more formidably than their oligarchic counterparts (dubbed by Thucydides as “slow” and “timid”).
As Thucydides further put it: “Of all the cities that Athens had gone to war against, the Syracusans alone were the most similar to Athens, being democratic like themselves, and strong in ships, horses, and size.” He later concluded, “Because the Syracusans were most similar to the Athenians, they made war against them the most successfully.” Despite the horrors of the plague and over a decade of war, there were thousands of young Athenian men who willingly took up the challenge of sailing dangerous seas to fight mostly unknown fellow Greeks, in a struggle to storm the largest city in the Greek-speaking world. While one may recoil at their madness, their sheer audacity is even more arresting.6
Because Thucydides devoted two entire books of his history to the campaign—25 percent of his entire narrative dealing with just three of the twenty years chronicled—there is a good record of the main events of the disaster. After two acrimonious assemblies, the Athenians voted to send a massive armada to Syracuse in June 415. A troika of generals would command: the reliable veteran Lamachus, the old conservative but timid Nicias, and the ever intriguing Alcibiades. Whereas the initial idea was to send out a moderately sized force of some 60 triremes, about the same number that had sailed years earlier in a fruitless attempt to intimidate Syracuse between 427 and 425, in a subsequent assembly inflated rhetoric and acrimony prompted a complete, and what would prove disastrous, reappraisal.
Unlike the earlier invasions of Sicily, now the Athenians in a moment of zeal mandated an even larger force: 134 ships (100 of them Athenian), including over 90 triremes, and 5,100 Athenian and imperial hoplites. Arrangements were made for an assortment of 480 archers, 700 slingers, 30 horsemen and mounts, and 30 cargo ships.7
In material terms, what had been envisioned as another punitive raid was now redefined as an attempt at conquest and annexation. However overwhelming the ostentatious armada might have appeared on parade in the harbor of the Piraeus as it set sail, the fleet was perhaps rather small to subdue an entire island the size of Sicily, especially if it did not take immediate and decisive action on arrival and thus establish a deterrent presence. Scholars sometimes talk about the oppressive nature of the Athenian empire, but its aggregate force in 415 was somewhat pathetic—the allies of some 200 states contributing only 2,850 of the 5,100 hoplites. The Athenians experienced the false security of all departing armies that judge the extent of their own power by the impression they make upon themselves rather than solely on the enemy.
What was stunning about the Athenian expeditionary force was its initial luck. The fleet enjoyed good weather in transit. It made the tricky voyage across hundreds of miles of sea without losses or delays, and thus there is scant detail in Thucydides’ narrative about what could have been an especially perilous trip. Despite its extravagant and public send-off, the triremes arrived at Sicily to the almost complete surprise of the Syracusans. In contrast, during the next two years, the Peloponnesian reinforcements had far less luck in reaching Syracuse, and were often blown off course, shipwrecked, or delayed by stormy weather. In other words, in this first wave the Athenians had probably transported over 25,000 combatants across the open seas without any real losses and arrived in good shape to the utter astonishment and terror of their enemies. Yet almost immediately tragedy inexplicably began to unfold.
At the very heart of the disaster was the flawed nature of the tripartite command. It was not just that battle responsibility was divided among three generals, rather than the more normal two. The suspicious Athenians, after all, were notorious for sometimes having too many squabbling commanders in the field at once. The problem was that the three were temperamentally so different, and in addition brought considerable political baggage along on the voyage. The senior officer in charge, the naturally cautious Nicias, was in poor health and had been against the expedition from the beginning. Thus for the next two years he fought only haphazardly and always in fear of being charged back home with dereliction. Such was the peculiar nature of Athenian command that sometimes generals who did not approve of expeditions were put in charge of them, on the dubious logic that they would provide a critical accountability both in the field and, later, at home.
Alcibiades was shortly recalled on allegations of sacrilege. On the eve of sailing, dozens of young right-wing firebrands, in a fit of drunkenness and politically inspired audacity, had been accused of public sacrilege that cast ill omens over the expedition’s impending departure. Perhaps their real intention was to spook the superstitious voting poor into rescinding the expedition altogether. Only that way might Athens ensure that an oligarchic Sparta remained neutral and its army thus kept away from the Attic heartland. While Alcibiades may have been involved with the pranks that profaned the secret fertility rites at Eleusis, he probably had nothing to do with the bolder escapade to mutilate the herms, stone totems sacred to Hermes that dotted the Attic landscape to ensure divine protection for travelers and private households. In any case, the fleet left under a cloud, but the irony remained that by charging Alcibiades in absentia with a capital crime and then seeking his recall from Sicily, the outraged Athenians perhaps played right into the hands of the conspirators: the man most responsible for leading the democracy on a vast imperial adventure would be sabotaged by his erstwhile supporters from carrying out their own radical ideas.
Shortly after arriving in Sicily, Alcibiades received the summons to return home. Grasping that extradition was the equivalent of a death sentence, he evaded his jailers and sailed instead to the Peloponnese. There he soon ended up at Sparta, urging it to renew the war both through aid to Sicily and the garrisoning of Attica. Meanwhile, back on Sicily, the no-nonsense Lamachus apparently lacked the political stature or wealth to convince the other two to enact his prescient plans for immediate attack on Syracuse. Within the year he was killed in battle while besieging the city. His impotence and later death were tragic, since under his leadership Athens not only might have shocked an ill-prepared Syracuse into surrender or panic but would have captured a great deal of plunder out in the countryside before it could have been evacuated.
The Athenians almost immediately ignored the cardinal rule of any great invasion: the need for direct action. Upon arrival in enemy territory there is only a finite time for victory, as stalemate weighs in favor of the defenders. Yet the Athenians did not, as Lamachus advised, head straight for Syracuse upon discovery that most of the Sicilians were not so eager to be liberated, that Athens’ few allied states were neither wealthy nor resolute, and that the Syracusans themselves were not shocked and awed as they began to see an impressive fleet more hesitant and dilatory than resolute and aggressive.
Nevertheless, the Athenians fought courageously for the next two years in almost every imaginable fashion, as befitting an ingenious democratic people. But never again after their arrival in late summer 415 would they regain what the American general George S. Patton once called the “unforgiving minute”—that brief window of opportunity when lightning action can stun the enemy, win an entire theater, and bring dramatic results without great carnage. The moment the surprised Syracusans discovered that they were not the immediate object of the Athenian armada, the emboldened citizenry recovered and demanded offensive operations against the Athenians.8
The Athenians did little upon arrival. Instead of attacking Syracuse, after heated debate they sailed to Rhegium. Once there, they got no help. Worse, they soon learned that their purportedly opulent Segestan allies were broke. With neither much allied money nor many troops forthcoming, they now headed for the town of Catana, some fifty miles to the north, to make a base for further operations against Syracuse.
Their first success after months of dawdling was the capture of the small community of Hyccara. After their experiences of nearly two decades of storming small cities from Potidaea to Melos, the Athenians had little trouble in taking the insignificant town. Under the new protocols of war, they sold every inhabitant into slavery. But by now it was nearly autumn and the first four months of the campaign had accomplished almost nothing: Alcibiades had been recalled, escaped, and was advising the enemies of Athens; the slothful Nicias was in virtual command; and the Athenians had yet to attack an ever more confident Syracuse.
Men who knew war well at Athens mostly misjudged the type of forces necessary for victory on Sicily, a distant island whose wide plains and greenery were more like the landscape of Thessaly than that of Attica or the Peloponnese. Intelligence about the nature of Sicilian warfare, the reliability of allies, and the resources of the enemies was either flawed or nonexistent. In perfunctory fashion Nicias had warned the Athenians that they would require mounted troops, but as a traditional soldier he predictably still gave far more attention to the need for hoplites. Even Alcibiades, the experienced cavalryman, had assured the Athenians that they could easily defeat Syracuse precisely because Sicilian states were notoriously weak in infantry! Yet almost immediately upon arrival, the Athenians discovered instead that their thousands of hoplites were mostly irrelevant for victory, and that they lacked the one resource—plentiful horsemen—that might have given them the protection needed for a successful siege. There was little excuse other than hoplite chauvinism to account for such strategic naïveté. After all, the Athenians already knew that more horsemen would have played a critical role at Spartolos (429), and through cavalry they had kept the Spartans under constant attack in Attica—operations that both Nicias and Alcibiades has been integrally involved with.9
Once ensconced at Catana, the Athenians grasped that Sicily was huge and required nearly constant communications with its network of cities. For an invader to have any chance of success against Syracuse, a city-state as large as Athens with hundreds of skilled horsemen, mounted supremacy was critical. Instead, Syracusans routinely rode up to the Athenian base at Catana and insulted the encamped Athenians, deliberately trying to provoke an invader who himself within a few weeks of arrival seemed more like the besieged than the real aggressors. To win this war, Athenian cavalrymen were needed in massive numbers to protect the stonemasons and skirmishers who alone could cut off Syracuse from its hinterlands by fortifications.
If the Syracusans were to emerge for a conventional hoplite battle, Athenian horsemen would be necessary to protect the flanks and conduct pursuit in the plains of Sicily. And when Athenians began to ravage the countryside and deny farmers access to their fields, cavalrymen were again essential. Lamachus, as an old veteran of fighting the Spartans in Attica who knew something about raiding and plundering, believed that upon arrival the Athenians should have immediately scoured the Syracusan countryside to find supplies from the unguarded farms and to shut off the city’s access to its vital hinterlands.
Something drastic had to be done to provide deterrence against what would prove the largest corps of enemy horsemen the Athenians had faced since the Persian invasions over a half century earlier. Yet cavalry was the one asset that the Athenians were woefully short of on Sicily. Either out of fear of the great seas between western Greece and southern Italy, or perhaps realizing the need to keep a cavalry patrol to guard the Attic countryside should the Spartans return in their absence, the Athenians had initially brought along only a single horse transport and 30 riders. Perhaps that was understandable for anyone who has made the voyage from western Greece to Sicily in moderately heavy seas: imagine an armada of 10 or so horse transports—300 ponies on converted triremes with decks a mere few feet above the water—riding the waves that often sicken contemporary tourists on mammoth modern ships. Athens was not likely to risk its entire fleet of horse-transport ships and almost a third of its vital mounted defense force of Attica on the open seas.
After discovering from their base at Catana that their hoplites and skirmishers could not destroy Syracusan agriculture any better than the Spartans had ruined Attica, the Athenians sought to find some way of getting back down to Syracuse without being constantly attacked by horsemen. Finally, through false information they tricked the Syracusans into committing their land forces. Meanwhile, they stealthily sailed down the coast unopposed to Syracuse. There they disembarked in safety before the fooled cavalry could return. Although successful, this stratagem was ominous: a few hundred horsemen had kept tens of thousands of Athenian troops confined to their base. Only by deception could the Athenians even approach the very target of their entire expedition—and they had to sail, not march overland.
Even when the Athenian phalanx assembled in front of the surprised city, it was careful to deploy only on terrain where “the Syracusan cavalry could least of all harm them both in the actual battle and before.” One ancient source believed that the desperate Athenians actually set spiked horse traps on the sides of the army to keep back the dreaded mounted enemy—a humiliating admission that heavy infantrymen no longer fought on the “best and most level ground.” And why not, when the furious deceived Syracusans would ride back in full force, some 1,200 horsemen eager to pick off anyone out of formation? Although in the ensuing actual battle Athens’ hoplites broke the more inexperienced Syracusan infantrymen—who were apparently terrified by the sound of thunder and unused to war on foot—they could not destroy them, given the cover once more of this enormous mob of horsemen. At no time in the Peloponnesian War had the Athenians ever fielded a force of more than 600 cavalry at once. The very idea that 1,200 enemy horsemen would roam the Greek battlefield at will was something beyond their comprehension.
Even this tiny hoplite battle was predicated on the idea that only a trick could allow the Athenians to muster in peace, that only wise use of geography could protect them in battle, and that victory could never be fully exploited as long as a mounted enemy ranged the battlefield. Overnight on Sicily, Hellenic war as the Greeks knew it had changed. The presence of 1,200 Syracusan horsemen salvaged a standoff from an utter rout. Overwhelming numbers of horsemen turned the rearguard action into a victory when the Athenians sailed back to Catana and gave up operations for the winter. Once back at their base, the stunned Athenians made preparations to find as many cavalrymen as quickly as they could.10
The Athenians’ only hope under these surreal conditions of Sicilian warfare was to cobble together an adequate mounted counterforce of their own from their allies or somehow find reinforcements from home. Once the Athenians obtained mounted superiority, they could move, forage, and fortify at will; but should they fail, the besiegers might well be confined to camp and thus become besieged.11
Despite living in makeshift quarters, thousands of Athenians now had to prepare to spend the winter outside Catana, while Nicias made ad hoc arrangements to acquire horses as quickly as possible, and to send out embassies to potential allies. He naively expected that both Sicilians and Carthaginians might aid an invader who had won only a small hoplite battle. In contrast, the Syracusans were hardly depressed by a minor setback, but rather buoyed by the near mastery of the countryside provided by an ever more haughty cavalry. While the Athenians dallied, the Syracusans revamped their command and set to work to reinforce the city’s fortifications for the inevitable siege to come. They sent encouraging news to the distant Spartans, soon to fall under the spell of their newfound advocate Alcibiades, that it was time to restart the war and finish off a now hemorrhaging Athens.
After escaping Athenian custody, Alcibiades had immediately reinvented himself in the Peloponnese into a doughty Laconian and spun fantastic tales that the Athenians had all along sought to renew the war and obtain hegemony over the entire Mediterranean: Sicily first, then Italy, followed by Carthage itself. From Alcibiades’ mind poured out even more yarns: such conquests would win new allies from Iberia, triremes built from the forests of Italy, and money from conquered peoples. Did a Carthaginian expedition exist only in his mind, or was it the logical successor to a Sicilian victory? Answers vary, but surely such visions of Athenian imperial democratic aggrandizement could rile paranoid Spartans to renew the war—and for the moment that was in the exiled Alcibiades’ own interest.
With the zeal of the convert, eager to pay back his countrymen, to save his own skin, and to ingratiate himself with his new hosts, Alcibiades further terrified his stunned Spartan audience with tales of fantastic Athenian plots to surround the Peloponnese by land and sea. He finished his treachery by outlining the only way to destroy his native city, in a manner as sober and judicious as his stories of Athenian imperial aims were probably wild: the Peloponnesians should promptly invade Attica and fortify a base at Decelea, send help to Sicily, and foment insurrection in the Aegean.12
Back in Sicily, when spring arrived the Athenians attempted a few raids. But mostly they were waiting for the requested horsemen from Athens. Eight months at Catana were essentially lost. From Athens at last came 250 experienced riders, 30 mounted archers, and 300 talents to purchase horses from Segesta and Catana. The fact remained that the Athenians had essentially accomplished nothing since the prior summer. Through inaction they had emboldened the Syracusans and very soon also their old Peloponnesian enemies on the Greek mainland. Nevertheless, with the arrival of a few Sicilian horsemen, Nicias had cobbled together a makeshift force of 650 cavalrymen, enough cover to allow his siege engineers to start the assault on Syracuse itself.13
Despite the near-fatal laxity on the part of Nicias, the Athenians still possessed a number of advantages that might well have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. With the departure and treachery of Alcibiades, Lamachus, the always reliable third general, slowly came into his own and was able to galvanize the Athenians to sail back to Syracuse and at last begin the real war that should have been started on the first day of arrival.
There they could use their newfound cavalry to protect besiegers while they started the campaign of building fortifications in earnest to hem in the city. After the Syracusans refused another pro forma offer to meet in hoplite battle, the Athenians suddenly showed signs of their old skills, which had reduced a score of cities from Potidaea to Melos. They almost immediately seized much of the heights of Epipolae, the upper portions of the citadel, and began a sophisticated plan to wall off from above the entire city from its hinterlands. To this end, they quickly built a round fort (“the Circle”), and began to use this nexus as a base from which to send out walls of circumvallation both to the sea at Trogilus and also southward to the Great Harbor of Syracuse, and thus partition off the city proper from infantry or naval reinforcement.
After successfully dealing with five invasions of their own territory, and storming Potidaea, Mytilene, Scione, and Melos, the Athenians had gained a great deal of both offensive and defensive experience in combined land and sea operations. Unlike the city of Athens, Syracuse had neither a well-fortified harbor like the Piraeus, a superior fleet, or anything like the Long Walls. Should the Athenians finish their ramparts around the upper city, patrol the southern walls to the sea, keep their newfound cavalry and hoplites busy in the countryside, and guard the exits from the Great Harbor, Syracuse really could be cut off from both home-grown and imported supplies, and thus the war won.
With at least an adequate supply of horses, the tide of battle slowly began to turn the Athenians’ way as they began freely to roam around the targeted city. Perhaps hunger and plague would soon follow, given that Syracuse would be more easily cut off than was Athens of 430, which had descended into epidemic and chaos. Rumor had it that as the wall inched toward the city, the Syracusans were on the verge of capitulation, ready to concede that the belated Athenian attempt to cut them off from their hinterlands spelled doom for the city.14
What was tragic about the next year of failed Athenian operations was not the combination of stupid mistakes and lost opportunities but, rather, how often Athenian courage and audacity almost nullified the blunders of command and nearly won the day. Nicias had made no effort to stop the Syracusan counterfortifications during the winter of relative inaction. He had allowed the newly arrived Spartan general Gylippus to bring an allied army of relief overland into the city. The Athenians let a Corinthian naval squadron under the Corinthian admiral Gongylus sail into the harbor at Syracuse. They failed to assault the enemy counterwall in its first phases of construction, and then labored on a meticulous double wall of circumvallation rather than immediately cutting off the city first with an ad hoc single fortification. Yet despite all that, the Athenians almost took Syracuse a few weeks after they began serious investment, in spring 414.
Because of some attacks on the Peloponnesian coast, Sparta now had the pretext that the Peace of Nicias was broken. It began freely to organize a steady stream of reinforcements to Sicily as it also prepared to invade Attica for the first time in over a decade. Sparta had agreed to the peace in winter 421 as a demoralized state, full of gloom over Pylos and failures in Attica and the northwest. But after the victory at Mantinea and the growing enemy quagmire in Sicily, it now saw no reason to wait to finish Athens off, especially when a major Athenian defeat might convince Persia to subsidize a Spartan fleet in earnest.15
After finishing their circular fort, Athenian horse and infantry immediately beat off a Syracusan counterassault. With superior infantry discipline and the newfound support of horsemen, the Athenians systematically attacked the Syracusans on the heights of their upper city known as Epipolae, in a tragicomic war of rival fortifications: one side sought desperately to finish its walls over the rocky terrain to the sea, while its enemies threw up perpendicular lines of obstruction. In this odd mix of simultaneous attempts at construction and destruction, Lamachus was killed in a brief skirmish, robbing the Athenians of their sole gifted general.
Worse still, Nicias dawdled at the most critical moments and seemed to underestimate the psychological significance of the arrival of the Peloponnesians. He had no appreciation of the critically brief window of opportunity he had to finish the walls before the despairing Syracusans rallied at the sight of fresh Peloponnesian hoplites and ships. Given that Nicias had perhaps 10,000 laborers available for the task and about five miles of fortification to build on either side of the circular fort, there was no reason why a determined general could not have finished the project before reinforcements from the Peloponnese eroded both his psychological and numerical advantages.
Earlier in the war, the Athenians had built walls far more rapidly at Nisaea, Delium, and Pylos. Even the supposedly slow Spartans had surrounded Plataea with a double wall in less than three months. Almost five centuries later Titus walled off Jerusalem with a fortification of about the same length as the Athenians’ on Epipolae, using not many more men and in just three days. So despite the rough terrain and stubborn resistance, the Athenian line failed to reach the sea mostly because of lackluster leadership.
Nicias continued to dally. The two sides fought over ramparts on the heights. And almost imperceptibly an often idle Athenian navy, the only means of getting back home safely, deteriorated: its waterlogged ships and deserting allied and servile crews meant that the Athenians were no longer capable of either an ironclad blockade or an automatic victory in the Great Harbor should the Syracusans’ fleet and their newfound Corinthian allies finally come out to fight.
The appearance of the Corinthian fleet followed Gylippus’ overland relief march. This sudden arrival of Peloponnese manpower and leadership not only added military resources to the Syracusan cause but also began to win over neutral Sicilian cities. In a matter of days, Syracuse was thus saved from sure defeat. In response, Nicias, ailing from some sort of kidney disease, compounded his already long train of errors at summer’s end by sending home a request to be relieved. Facing the possible choice of dying on Sicily or being executed at home when he returned from a military catastrophe, Nicias sought to shift the responsibility for the campaign’s fate once more back to the Athenian assembly. Thus he advised the Athenians either to recall the entire expedition or to send him massive reinforcements.
In one of the most memorable scenes in his history, Thucydides begins his famous seventh book with the appearance of Peloponnesian succor at the eleventh hour of the siege, just as the Syracusans were on the verge of surrender:
Gylippus happened to have come at the critical moment when the double wall of seven or eight stades [almost a mile] had already been completed by the Athenians down to the Great Harbor—except for a short distance near the sea where they were still building. In regard to the remainder of the encircling wall, for most of the course that ran to Trogilus and the outer sea, stones had already been deposited and some parts were half completed while others were already finished. Thus, so near had the Syracusans come to catastrophe.16
The interruption of the critical final Athenian fortification above Syracuse by the Peloponnesians proved the most important moment of the entire conflict. Both sides now sought to pour additional forces into the confused and often nonstop battle on the heights above the city: the Athenians desperate to finish their double wall to the harbor and their longer rampart on Epipolae, the now energized Syracusans equally anxious to block their progress while they simultaneously harassed the enemy construction crews.
Despite occasional tactical victories, the war of the walls was a struggle that Nicias ultimately lost as Gylippus adroitly barred his path with a series of forts and counterwalls. The Syracusan cavalry on one occasion was instrumental in routing the Athenians. They charged hoplites on rough ground, sending the entire army back behind their unfinished fortifications. Such interruptions essentially ended any chance that the Athenians could ever break through the counterwall and extend the key final segments of their own circuit to the sea on either side.
Nicias alleged a number of reasons for the army’s failure in his interim written account to the Athenian assembly back home, from the lack of sufficient cavalry to the constant wear and tear on ships and crews. But ultimately the problem lay with the thin margin of error allowed by a total force of only 45,000 in both the first and second armadas. The expedition had really always been a great gamble that an Athenian fleet of little more than 200 ships could take out one of the largest cities in the Greek-speaking world some eight hundred miles distant across the seas—one always predicated on audacious and resolute leadership.
True, the careers of both Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar proved that forces of fewer than 50,000 could conquer and occupy successfully huge tracts of enemy land, but such a bold military calculus demanded even bolder commanders who grasped that morale, will, and an offensive spirit alone could nullify an enemy’s numerical superiority. In that regard, Nicias—old, sick, by nature timid, and on record against the entire invasion—was sorely wanting and thus naturally sought ever greater resources to supply an edge that his own leadership could not. Poor generalship is often synonymous with frequent requests for more troops.
Worse folly ensued. The uncharacteristically dense Athenians back home once more misconstrued their general’s cautionary assessment as sober advice about obtaining victory rather than a thinly veiled cry for retreat. They readied a second armada to arrive sometime the next spring. To be fair, the Athenians were on the horns of a dilemma: pulling out would only embolden their enemies, while sending more reinforcements raised the specter of turning a manageable tactical defeat into a military catastrophe.
By early 414 most of the Greek world was slowly learning of the growing quagmire in Sicily and preparing to get in on the kill in a variety of ways. States as diverse as Corinth, Sicyon, and Boeotia were adding their own hoplite contingents to another Spartan expeditionary force slated to sail to Syracuse. A growing Peloponnesian fleet dispatched more ships to Syracuse. Gylippus now found additional surrounding Sicilian states as eager to help Syracuse as they had once been interested in joining the Athenians when the city was on the verge of capitulation. While the Greek world rallied to defeat the Athenian expeditionary fleet, the Peloponnesians prepared to invade Attica and fortify Decelea.17
Athens never flinched. In majestic defiance or folly the Athenian assembly sent Demosthenes—the hero of Pylos, the scapegoat of the Delium campaign, and more or less unheard from for over a decade—with an auxiliary imperial fleet of yet another 65 triremes and 1,200 hoplites, supported by additional allied contingents. And by the time Demosthenes arrived in Sicily, in ostentatious fashion as pipers and coxswains blared out his arrival, his combined forces had grown by over 70 fresh triremes and another 5,000 hoplites, augmented by more light-armed auxiliaries.
Once again the Athenians could hardly afford to bring either horsemen or mounts to replace the exhausted Athenian cavalry, which was increasingly unable to ward off its superior Syracusan counterparts. Altogether, in less than two years Athens had thrown into the fray almost 45,000 men and 216 ships, well over half of all the available military assets of the empire. This madness was at a time when Spartans were camped thirteen miles from the walls of Athens, thousands of slaves were deserting from Attica, and tribute-paying allies from the Hellespont to the southern Aegean were on the verge of revolt.
It was precisely this resiliency that so amazed Thucydides. He repeatedly emphasized the incredible resources of Athens and its ability to carry on the fight despite overwhelming losses and a growing list of adversaries. Moreover, at the very time thousands were besieging Syracuse, Persian satraps were also plotting to finance a new Peloponnesian fleet to tear apart the maritime empire. Thucydides might have been appalled at the foolish logic behind such a grand mistake, but he was also in awe of the democratic spirit that nevertheless went ahead with the gamble, and amazed that Athens could have pulled it all off.18
Demosthenes was as audacious as Nicias was timid. But once the Athenians had mobilized a second relief force and made their way to Sicily, they discovered that things on the island had become even worse than when Nicias had sent the bleak letter home the prior autumn. Frustrated up on Epipolae and unable to break through the counterwalls of the enemy, Nicias had abruptly turned his attention to the sea and plotted a new strategy: the navy would now take the offensive in the Great Harbor of Syracuse while ground troops were stalemated on the heights.
Yet in a series of brutal sea battles in and around the Great Harbor, the Athenian triremes were manhandled by the less skillful Corinthian and Syracusan fleets. The enemy—learning from the battle of Sybota (432), where the Corinthians had found success against the more expert Corcyraeans by turning a fight at sea into a land battle of boarding and head-on attacks—had reinforced their rams and found the confined conditions inside the harbor to their advantage.
Even worse, Nicias had lost a key fort at Labdalum, up on the northern crest of Epipolae, that was critical to supplying forces to protect the ongoing construction of the wall. In response, he had moved his base of operations to Plemmyrium, on the south entrance to the harbor—a nearly indefensible spot that had little water and less fuel. But then Nicias had already given up on sealing off the city. He was more worried about securing a base in which to outfit his triremes for a quick departure home should things get any worse. That poorly selected fort was quickly lost as well, along with most of the rigging and supplies for the fleet.
The Athenians’ earlier efforts to use battering rams to knock down the Syracusan counterwall failed. It was this increasingly bleak scenario that the newcomer Demosthenes immediately surveyed, and it influenced him to make that drastic decision to attack the Syracusan counterfortifications by night. Only for a moment, Demosthenes reasoned, had Athens regained the momentum and perhaps local superiority in manpower, and they could ill afford to throw away this second but fleeting chance at victory.
The attack was a disaster, as one might expect of thousands of heavily armed soldiers marching up unfamiliar rocky heights to fight an unknown enemy in the middle of the night. Demosthenes’ fresh reinforcements soon found themselves in full retreat down the slopes, lost in the darkness, often falling and fighting one another, and eventually butchered by the ever vigilant Syracusan cavalry. Two thousand men may have been killed in just a few hours, nasty deaths for Athenians who a few weeks earlier were strolling in their agora at a time of relative peace.
In one of the most famous pronouncements about the confusing nature of Greek infantry battle, Thucydides concluded of the nocturnal Athenian calamity on Epipolae that “it was not easy to ascertain from either side what precisely had transpired; of course, things are clearer in the daytime, but even then those who are present hardly know everything that goes on—except what each person senses with difficulty in his own vicinity.” Utterly demoralized, Demosthenes now pondered a variety of options before concluding that it was probably wisest to gather both forces up and sail home. The Athenians, he figured, still had ships and a tenuous naval superiority. And the Spartans gathering in Attica, not democratic Syracuse some eight hundred miles distant, posed the greater danger to Athens. The new dilemma was not one of winning or losing but, rather, a choice between defeat and ruin.19
After lengthy debate and needless delay, both sides made ready for a final grand sea battle in the Great Harbor, one even greater than the initial fights a few weeks earlier, which had on occasion involved some 160 ships. The Athenians put to sea everything they had left, some 110 triremes. Thucydides implied that it was the most crowded and desperate battle in the history of Greek naval warfare. He may have been right, since there were well over 20,000 Athenian and imperial sailors on the water, along with missile troops and marines on the decks. Perhaps as many infantrymen and slaves were watching from the shore. But the invaders were already a beaten force well before the battle even started, inasmuch as most enterprises that they had begun on Sicily—the effort to rally the island’s neutral states, the attempt to wall off Syracuse, the sea battles with the enemy fleet, and the political intriguing to win Syracuse by treachery—had already failed. Even occasional victories, whether besieging minor cities or beating Syracusan hoplites in the field, had not led to strategic success.
By day’s end, the Athenians were thoroughly defeated. The last battle in the harbor of Syracuse was an authentic Greek tragedy as the assembled Athenian soldiers watched the two enormous fleets go at it—now swaying and screaming from shore, “We are winning”; now in dejection shouting, “We are losing.” At last, realizing that their own superior seamen could take full advantage neither of their numbers nor of their skills in such confined waters of the harbor, sailors and hoplites alike grasped that their fleet’s defeat was not a setback but a death sentence. Those triremes, after all, were the only way to get back home.20
Nicias and Demosthenes then chose to march their still enormous combined army of 40,000 survivors on a meandering course west and then south across the island in hopes of finding refuge among friendly allies. For all the calamity, Demosthenes and Nicias still commanded more troops than the Peloponnesians and Sicilians combined. True, in two years of attrition, the Athenians had lost many in battle and to disease. Yet the startling fact remained that perhaps four out of five combatants who had arrived at Sicily were still alive and determined to find sanctuary somewhere on Sicily. It was no idle hope: a little over a decade later a far smaller force of 10,000 Greek mercenary hoplites fought their way to safety, against far greater odds, from the middle of Mesopotamia to the Black Sea, despite being outnumbered and constantly attacked by an array of Asiatic horsemen and tribal peoples.
This was still the largest army that Athens had fielded in the entire war. Indeed, it was perhaps the greatest Greek force that had been marched en masse since Archidamus had invaded Attica, almost twenty years earlier. But if alive and mostly well, most soldiers were nevertheless defeated men, demoralized that their once magnificent fleet was gone and, with it, the only way home. The Athenians were in hostile, unfamiliar territory, constantly pursued, and forced to march without easy access to water under the late August sun.
The Syracusan horse rode them down mercilessly. Infantry and light-armed troops harried them without end. The retreat soon became a rout and then a slaughter. Some eight days of marching and twenty-some miles later, they ended up in the riverbed muck of the Assinarus River, thirsty, demoralized, and incapable of going on. How many imperial troops ultimately returned home is unknown. The captured allies and slaves were sold off, while 7,000 Athenians were taken alive and interred in the quarries of Syracuse. Diodorus believed that 18,000 men were killed in just a few hours, a horrific figure that, if true, would represent the greatest single-day fatality rate in the history of classical Greek warfare and, indeed, rank with the Roman nightmares like Trasimene, Cannae, and Carrhae, or even modern bloodbaths like the first days of Antie-tam or the Somme. Both Demosthenes and Nicias surrendered and were executed, and their once grand expeditionary force quite literally ceased to exist, meeting not so much defeat as annihilation. Syracusan demagogues argued that after the Athenian barbarism at Scione and Melos, the captives deserved no clemency for trying to repeat their savagery on Sicily.
An entire mythology at Athens arose in later years surrounding this lost generation. Only a few notices of the dead emerge from extant Athenian casualty lists on stone—less than 200 of the tens of thousands who perished, with names like Nicon, Euages, Blepyrus, or Athemion. One can read of a Phrynus killed and a Carpides dead, but will never know how or where they died.
Yet some diehards purportedly fought on as guerrillas avenging their comrades’ deaths. Others ransomed themselves by reciting verses from Euripides, who was much in vogue among the Syracusans, perhaps because he was seen as an antiwar voice who aroused sympathy for the victims of Athenian aggression. In the most gripping passage in his entire history Thucydides records the last moments of the desperate Athenians struggling to stay alive in the muddy waters of the Assinarus River, as they were picked off by their enemies from the banks above. The force that had left in such celebration at Athens and arrived in equal pomp at Syracuse now met its destruction from drowning, enemy missiles, and one another:
Inasmuch as they were forced to move in a dense mass, they fell on and trampled one another. Some of them immediately were killed by being run through by their own spears and becoming bogged down amid their equipment. Others were swept away by the current. The Syracusans were standing on the opposite steep bank, and hit the Athenians from above with missiles. But they were busy drinking greedily and tangled up in the hollow bed of the river in great confusion. Then the Peloponnesians descended to the water and cut them down, especially those in the river itself. And the water immediately became fouled, but nonetheless was drunk—mixed as it was with mud and dyed red with blood. Indeed, it was fought over by most of them.
In the gore were thousands of men from the far reaches of the Athenian empire and friendly states—Chalcidians, Euboeans, Argives, Aegean Islanders, mercenaries from Crete, Arcadia, and Italy—all of whom, a few months earlier, had had no idea what fate would meet them in far-off Sicily against an enemy they knew very little about. The final destruction of the Greek forces was an eerie spectacle that affected Thucydides as no other battle disaster did. Reading it today reminds us of Plutarch’s gruesome account of the Roman triumvir Crassus’ end at Carrhae in 53 B.C., when nearly the same number of legionaries were surrounded and slaughtered by mounted Parthian archers. History is unfortunately replete with these awful scenarios of veteran infantrymen far from home who are destroyed by mounted enemies whom they cannot draw into pitched battle—a thirsty Crusader army cut apart by Saladin’s 12,000 horsemen at Hattin in July 1187 or Napoleon’s retreat before Russian Cossacks. The Athenians had arrived on the island in late summer 415 only to discover that they needed cavalry, and they had perished in August two years later, still regretting that they lacked enough good horsemen to make good their retreat. The incongruity that so many thousands were reduced to a mob by enemies whom they could not engage not only appalled but saddened Thucydides:
This was the most remarkable occurrence of all those that transpired during the war—indeed as it seems to me of all the Greek events that we know of— one most illustrious for the conquerors and for the defeated most ruinous. As for those defeated utterly and in every respect and meeting with no small setback in any manner—but rather as it is said with an utter destruction—their land forces, fleet, and everything else perished, and few from many came back home. Such were the events that happened in Sicily.21
What did horsemen of the Peloponnesian War look like, these deadly riders who killed hundreds of Athenians and ruined their imperial hopes in Sicily? The typical knight of the later fifth century was hardly a medieval conquistador in full mail or even a raider of the steppes with a string of mounts. Instead, imagine a young aristocrat, with a breastplate, helmet, and high leather boots—young, proud, and privileged, like the stone horsemen captured for eternity on the frieze course of Pericles’ Parthenon. Few carried shields in battle. Such protection might mean an additional weight of fifteen to twenty pounds and could thus unbalance the rider and interfere with the reins.
Riders were not much over five and a half feet tall, 120 pounds. They were perched on ponies about four and a half feet above the ground (13½ hands at the withers). These tiny mounts, mostly stallions, were only partially protected with light cloth padding over the face, thighs, and chest, and harder to ride than geldings. Without the aid of stirrups, riders required strenuous training in how to grip the sides of the animal with their thighs. Most riders carried a short thrusting spear and either one or two auxiliary javelins. For close-order fighting, a small saber proved effective for downward strokes to the heads, necks, and backs of foot soldiers. Mounted bowmen were prized but rare, inasmuch as they drew on the combined skills of both horsemanship and archery.
On vase paintings, horsemen seem to be riding down infantrymen as often as bombarding them from afar with missiles. The disastrous loss of Lamachus on Epipolae reflects what could happen to fleeing or pursuing veteran hoplites should they find themselves out of formation and confronted with even a single horseman. If death by trampling seems unlikely given the small weight and height of the ponies, it is important to remember that infantrymen themselves were about the same size as modern twelve-year-olds rather than contemporary adults, and fought as clumsy hoplites without javelins or bows.22
While in theory cavalry of most Greek city-states were loosely organized into large regiments of 500 or so—and later in Hellenistic times would mass in tactical rhomboid formations of 120 to break light infantry—for most of the Peloponnesian War, smaller subgroups rode out in bands of 30 to 50, often in loose rectangles. True, they were probably deployed in dense formations in pitched battles at Solygia, Delium, and Mantinea; but just as often classical horsemen scattered to attack small pockets of ravagers or skirmishers. Heavy cavalry and lancers charging in concert with infantry were the later achievements of Philip and Alexander, almost a century after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War.
Despite the superior speed of cavalrymen and the ability of mounted armies to travel hundreds of miles at sustained daily clips of over thirty miles, for a variety of reasons prior to the Peloponnesian War horses had, strangely, not mattered much to Greek militaries. Of course, they were always valuable for surveillance and reconnaissance. As ancillaries in hoplite battle, a few horsemen could also protect the unshielded wings and could stab at the backs of fleeing infantrymen during pursuit—places and times when cavalrymen were not confronted with serried ranks of spears. But there was a variety of reasons why the Greek city-state never put much emphasis on mounted forces in the eastern Mediterranean, where wars had traditionally been decided by great chariot collisions in the Middle East or the dreaded charges of Persian horsemen on the vast plains of Asia.23
On the Greek mainland, it made little sense to raise horses in small valleys. Pasturage was rare and rocky hills common. Eating horseflesh was considered wrong, reflected by the general deference for the horse in Greek religion and mythology. Oddly, the auxiliary and subordinate role of horses in Greek society cast an aura of reverential exceptionalism upon them, making their position there different from that on the steppes, where they were seen in more pragmatic and utilitarian ways. Moreover, in an age before sophisticated harnesses, oxen under yokes proved the more reliable and economical draft animals, whether pulling wagons or plows. An acre devoted to wheat, barley, vines, or olives would support a family much better than turning the land over to pasturage for sheep, goats, or cows—much less horses.24
Cost is always mentioned in any discussion of horse rearing, a profession confined to the rich, who, in turn, publicly complained about its ruinous expense. By the end of the war, even an average pony might cost the equivalent of almost a year and a half’s salary for the average unskilled worker. The price of a typical horse might instead support a family of six for almost two years. A mount was clearly a luxury that only a small fraction of the population could afford. The average Athenian who walked into town or plowed with an ox saw a horse not as a critical asset but as a luxury, one that in a radically democratic society perhaps gobbled communal Athenian resources away from the more needy. The simple truth was that there were not thousands of acres of communal grazing land around most city-states on which herds of horses could graze cheaply.
The acquisition cost for some of the better mounts might exceed 1,000 drachmas, illustrating another dilemma for democratic Athens: as the war wore on and horses were proving more critical for collective survival, only the very rich could afford to patrol the homeland. And if the additional costs of feeding the horse are added in—and often a groom, who accompanied the cavalryman on a cheaper mount to carry supplies and equipment—a knight might need almost a drachma a day to buy barley rations. True, the state often provided partial subsidies for horse acquisition and upkeep, but as imperial revenues declined, Athens found itself broke and ever more dependent on private largess to ensure that cavalrymen continued to scour the countryside.
In theory, only a wealthy state like Thessaly or Syracuse, with a surrounding lush countryside, could afford to put into the field a gigantic force of 1,200 horsemen, which represented an initial investment of at least 100 talents, in addition to over 5 talents a month in collective upkeep. For that kind of money, a state might instead field a hoplite army of 20,000 infantrymen for a month, or even outfit a fleet of 100 triremes.25 Cavalry was thus a luxury most states—other than Syracuse, Boeotia, and Thessaly, which all enjoyed wide expanses of pastureland—could not afford. Most generals would reckon that a trireme or 60 suits of heavy bronze armor were far wiser outlays than the equivalent investment in a mere 12 horses.26
Yet what is nearly inexplicable is that under the practices of the typical polis before the Peloponnesian War, hoplite and agrarian snobbery extended to the very wealthy as well, the elite who owned farms of perhaps 100 acres or more and so could manage to own a horse or two. There are few, if any, other ancient societies in which a wealthy citizen could brag to the assembly that he dismounted and chose instead to serve the state as a soldier in the ranks, despite the valuable and privileged role horsemen played in the defense of infantry. At the outbreak of the war Greeks thought that cavalry service was easy and riders were less than resolute compared to hoplites. At Sparta there was essentially no formal cavalry force until the seventh year of the Peloponnesian War. And at Athens, even by the outbreak of fighting in 431, there had only recently been raised about 1,200 horsemen, drawn from less than 3 percent of the voting citizen population.27
For one of the rare moments in history, landholding for the period of the polis was comparably egalitarian. Thus the very wealthy did not enjoy automatic prestige, and certainly were not accorded deference in political and military matters. Their land might have been ten, but surely not one hundred, times the size of the average farm owner’s. This relatively equitable landscape was a vast difference in land tenure from that of the horse lords of Thessaly or the Macedonian princes who raised entire herds on vast estates.
In contrast with the north, even at oligarchic Sparta the state was run by an elite number of Similars. These infantrymen owned often equal shares of land and took up identical slots in the phalanx, the real basis of their prestige. At Athens the landless thetes gradually assumed the predominant role in the politics of the city, a fact that explains everything from Pericles’ massive building program to state subsidies for government service to an enormous fleet and the primacy of the Long Walls. At agrarian Thebes, despite the flat plains and a rich heritage of hippotrophia (horse raising), the real power likewise resided with hoplite farmers, who by the fourth century would become fully democratic and the most dreaded military in Greece.
The two oligarchic revolutions that overthrew Athenian democracy, those of 411 and 404, occurred during and at the close of the war, following the military catastrophes at Sicily and Aegospotami, which were blamed on the radical democrats. In contrast, the so-called knights were the privileged horsemen who had taken on an increasingly vital role in, and paid a high price for, the city’s defense during the struggle, cleaning up, as it were, the mess created by their inferiors. Indeed, in almost every land engagement that Athens fought—Spartolos (429), Solygia (425), Delium (424), Amphipolis (422), Mantinea (418), Syracuse (415–13), Ephesus (409), Abydos (409), and Kerata (409)—the Athenian cavalry had had a critical role and had won a strange sort of admiration from the usually hostile majority of poorer citizens. During most expeditions a tenth of the Athenian aggregate force was made up of cavalrymen.
Besides such political and economic considerations peculiar to Greece, there were other more pragmatic and general military explanations for the inferior role of cavalry. Ubiquitous rocky terrain meant that unshod horses often went lame or were restricted to bottomland. Because Greek horses stood less than five feet off the ground, in an age without saddles, stirrups, or horseshoes, they were not equipped to carry even a small mailed knight at a gallop into shock battle. Whether one turns to jokes in ancient comedy or warnings in equestrian literature, there are frequent references to the dangers of falling off horses, even without the worry of attacking and defending during battle.
Bareback riders can be lethal warriors (witness the Native Americans). But it is still a difficult skill to ride and stab or shoot without a modern saddle and the expertise acquired by years of training of the sort Xenophon outlined in plentiful detail in his treatise on ancient horsemanship. The city-state, unlike a nineteenth-century nation, could not put thousands of raw recruits on ponies and, with standard-issue saddles, stirrups, or horseshoes, then expect them to become serious lancers that could break apart the ranks of hoplite spearmen. Instead, more often the wealthy few alone grew up on horses and learned to throw the javelin, shoot the bow, or stab with a short spear while mounted on a simple blanket—but not, in the later manner of Alexander the Great, to coordinate attacks with fellow infantrymen.28
The Peloponnesian War changed most of this existing equestrian protocol, as military efficacy, not social stereotypes, economic rationalism, or political considerations, determined how men now fought. Horses did not suddenly grow larger. Stirrups were not magically invented, and aristocrats did not gain control of the reins of government. As the war progressed, and traditional strategies from agricultural devastation to hoplite battle were proved wanting, city-states began to learn that horsemen were vital to all sorts of operations that would play major roles in determining the outcome of the war, from riding down fleeing hoplites and light-armed troops to patrolling the countryside and keeping the enemy away from camps, fortifications, and farmland.
Unlike most of the battle experience of the previous decades—the Greeks had won at Salamis and Plataea with ships and hoplites, and fought one another for the next fifty years in classic pitched battles at Sepea, Tanagra, Oinophyta, and Coronea—horsemen appeared everywhere in the Peloponnesian War and killed far more thousands of Greeks than did those in the hoplite phalanx. Typically, cavalry would gallop upon small groups of infantrymen, who were either marching loosely or scattered in twos and threes. They rode up, often at short bursts of speeds of thirty miles per hour, cast a javelin or shot an arrow, and then easily outran pursuit, hoping to tire any infantryman foolish enough to offer chase.
Because the rider was throwing with his arm alone and thus could hardly approximate the two- to three-hundred-foot range of a skilled javelin thrower on foot, he might at most have cast his weapon thirty to forty feet, and then found safety only in retreat given his mobility and speed. When horsemen outnumbered infantry groups—on Sicily this was not uncommon, given the enormous size of the Syracusan mounted contingents—they could ride in formation and spear their inferiors from the back or sides, not unlike German fighter pilots of World War II, who swarmed American B-17s that fell out of protective formation.
Athenian cavalrymen attacked Spartan ravagers in Attica on five separate occasions in the Archidamian War (431–421). They accompanied every Athenian army during the annual invasion of the Megarid, participated in many of the seaborne raids of the Peloponnesian coast, wore out their mounts harassing the Spartan permanent garrison at Decelea, and were active in the last decade of the war in Ionia. During the Megara campaign of 424, 600 horsemen protected thousands of infantry, providing the sort of cover that they would desperately need in Sicily a decade later. In the Megarid they held off the more feared Boeotian cavalry, which likewise appeared 600 strong, as over a thousand mounted troops on both sides battled it out to a draw.29
Thucydides, at least, believed that in a number of instances the presence of Athenian horsemen ensured victory, such as at Solygia in the Corinthian plain during the battle there of 425.30 At Cleon’s final battle at Amphipolis, where both he and Brasidas perished in the summer of 422, at least 300 cavalrymen were present. The value of horsemen in the first decade and a half of the war suggests that the Athenians grasped that they would be critical on Sicily. Still, for some reason, they miscalculated the ease of securing mounts from their allies, and had no real idea of the effectiveness or size of the Syracusan cavalry.
The outcome of entire theaters occasionally hinged on horsemen. For example, at the battle of Delium, Thucydides makes the Athenian general Hippocrates claim that a defeat of the Boeotians would put an end altogether to the Spartan invasion of Attica, inasmuch as the Boeotian cavalry would never again venture into Attica to protect Spartan ravagers. In the battle itself, horsemen were largely responsible for the Boeotian victory. As reserves they surprised the victorious Athenian right wing and collapsed the morale of the entire army. Only the presence of a few hundred Athenian cavalry kept the Athenian flight from becoming a complete disaster as they desperately tried to shield fleeing hoplites from being speared from the rear by mounted pursuers. In the only other major hoplite encounter of the war, that of Mantinea in 418, Thucydides observed that had the Athenian cavalry not been present, the Athenians might have lost more than their 200 dead and 2 generals.31
The enormous force of Sitalces’ that invaded Macedonia with 150,000 troops comprised 50,000 horsemen. In response, the Macedonians fought back with heavy cavalrymen, men with breastplates equipped with stabbing spears and riding horses with body protection. Sitalces’ invasion must have been the greatest cavalry fight of the ancient world in the era before Alexander the Great.
The Athenians had set sail for Sicily in spring 415. Then they were still at peace with Sparta and in the midst of an ongoing recovery from the ravages of the plague and war, as well as buoyed by the recent conquest of tiny Melos. Two years later, between 40,000 and 50,000 Athenians, allies, and slaves were dead, missing, or captured. Some 216 imperial triremes were lost. The Athenian treasury was broke. For the first time in the war, Athens could no longer afford to patrol the coast of the Peloponnese. Its old strategy of proactively hitting the enemy to the rear was now over with. Allies and tributary subjects were talking of revolt at precisely the time Athens needed their money, materials, and imperial crewmen to build an entirely new fleet. After expending well over 3,000 talents in a failed enterprise, Athens earned only a renewed war with an evergrowing Peloponnesian alliance. There was to be a permanent Spartan fort in sight of the walls of Athens, a newly envisioned alliance of Persia, Sparta, and Syracuse, and the specter of a Peloponnesian fleet far larger than its own now augmented with a few Syracusan triremes.
Oddly, Syracuse fared little better. The two-year siege had cost the state almost as much money as it had Athens. Despite enemies on and south of the island, Syracuse was now itself obligated to the Spartans to send troops and ships from its exhausted citizenry eight hundred miles back to the other war in the Aegean. Within five years the Syracusans were faced with a massive Carthaginian invasion, inasmuch as the North Africans had watched the internecine Greek bloodletting with glee.
There was further irony still. The poor in the fleet and among the light-armed felt that they had played an underappreciated role in the victory, one every bit as important as that of the more recognized aristocratic horsemen. In response, in 409 they stripped the moderates of power and altered the conservative Syracusan democracy into something more resembling the radical government of their Athenian oppressors. Hermocrates himself, the astute statesman who had crafted the successful Syracuse defense, was exiled and later killed in domestic unrest.
Yet this more radical Syracusan democracy did not last even four years. In 406, in Syracuse’s moment of crisis against Carthage, only the tyrannical vision of the strongman Dionysius would unite Sicily, saving all but the western part of the island from Carthaginian subjugation. Again, the paradox was had the Athenians pulled off their hegemonic enterprise, Sicily would probably have been united earlier under the very democratic auspices it later welcomed. It would have remained mostly autonomous from Carthage—just as the Peloponnesians probably would have sued to continue the armistice of 421 in fear of this most recent display of Athenian power. The Punic invasion of Sicily following the defeat of Athens was one of the most savage encounters in Greek history, a sort of mini—Peloponnesian War in which at various times the Carthaginians ceremoniously in a few hours executed 3,000 Sicilians, razed Himera and Selinus, butchered tens of thousands of civilians, and then lost half their entire force to the plague.32
There was one final legacy from the Athenian invasion. Once the tyrant Dionysius consolidated his tyranny over the Syracusans, he mustered them en masse in 401 to guarantee that no foreign power would ever be able to wall the city off from Epipolae above—ex post facto perhaps proving that the Athenians had earlier had enough men but had lacked the audacity to do in two years what Dionysius did in less than a month. Some 60,000 Sicilians, along with 6,000 pairs of oxen, built almost four miles of stone fortifications in just twenty days, so traumatic were the lingering effects upon the Syracusans of the Athenian effort to destroy their city from its own heights.33
In theory, the Spartans were the main beneficiaries inasmuch as their small expeditionary contingent under Gylippus had energized a massive response against the Athenians that had caused more enemy losses than any single battle of the war. Yet for all the vaunted size and reputed wealth of the island, the exhausted Syracusans later contributed only 20 ships to the growing but distant Peloponnesian fleet in the Aegean—a commitment that nevertheless strained the fragile political equilibrium and led to the destruction of the oligarchic party, the very stalwarts Sparta had hoped to promote by its intervention. While it might be logical to assume that such a paltry Syracusan role in the renewed Peloponnesian War in hindsight makes the Athenian case for intervention weak, one must remember that Athens’ attack on Sicily took an enormous toll on the enemy, and better explains why Syracuse could contribute so little to finish the Athenians off.
What, then, is one to make of Sicily? The problem was not just the cost. The imperial Athenians had lost as many men and ships before the war, in Egypt—and later would suffer even more casualties in the Ionian War. If the plan to conquer Syracuse was mad, it was nevertheless not intrinsically unfeasible. The island was not easily defensible and was conquered often in history—the Romans in 211 B.C., the Muslims in A.D. 878, followed by a succession of Franks, Spanish, Normans, Italians, and the allies under George Patton and Bernard Montgomery in 1943. Even the nearly suicidal tripartite command structure, the ongoing witch hunt back home, the treachery of Alcibiades, the illness of Nicias, and the renewal of the war with Sparta did not inevitably doom the Athenian plan. The effort, after all, had been a close-run thing, perhaps just days away from success before the unexpected arrival of the Spartans and Corinthians.
As for an ultimate benefit-to-risk analysis, in hindsight the invasion of Sicily seems absurd. True, had the Athenians won they would have acquired enormous prestige, terrified the Spartans, and cut them off from Sicilian trade, and perhaps found some material rewards, additional grain, and more allies. But Sicily was far distant and pushed to the limits any idea of the “indirect approach” of defeating enemies without meeting them head-on in conventional battle. So while there was something to gain in Sicily for the Athenians if everything went right, there was also far more there to lose if anything went wrong in the larger war itself. That ambiguous assessment seems to be Thucydides’ own, when paradoxically he acknowledges that the Athenians might have prevailed, but the way the campaign unfolded nevertheless constituted its greatest mistake of the war.34
What went wrong?
At almost every key juncture the absence of sufficient cavalry ruined the Athenians. While the theater was a multifaceted campaign involving sieges, hoplite battle, agricultural ravaging, terror, and dramatic trireme battles, in the end it was the unheralded cavalry skirmishes that made much of the difference. In the first months of the campaign, the Athenians were stymied by Syracusan horsemen from doing any damage from their base at Catana. Only deception that for a few days fooled the enemy cavalry forces permitted them the safety of even approaching Syracuse; once they were there, an important hoplite victory brought little strategic success, given the presence of 1,200 riders who stopped the minor defeat from becoming a serious rout. These horsemen—we know neither names nor any other details about them—stunned the victors. Coupled with their earlier patrols, they demoralized the Athenians, in large part explaining the virtual cessation of hostilities during the winter of 415, when the Athenians sheepishly kept close to their quarters at Catana.
In contrast, once the Athenians gathered even a small force of 650 horsemen, the pulse of the campaign changed radically. Cavalry allowed the Athenians to ascend Epipolae and begin work on fencing in the city from above. The ensuing yearlong war on the heights was often determined by mounted troops, most notably when the Syracusans beat back Lamachus’ offensive and killed him in the confusion. Gylippus’ overland march from Himera—the real turning point in the war—was safeguarded by cavalry. Had the Athenians had a mounted force the size of the Syracusan cavalry, they might have turned it back and won the war outright with the completion of their fortifications. In any case, Gylippus’ only subsequent setback was due to his foolish decision to attack the Athenians without mounted escorts, a rash mistake that he regretted and did not repeat.
In the final year the Athenian loss of its fortified base at Plemmyrium, on the harbor south of the city, stemmed in large part from the constant raiding of hundreds of Syracusan horsemen, who rode down any Athenian who ventured out of the ramparts for water or firewood. This forfeiture of that naval base and its supplies did much to begin the ruin of the Athenian fleet. And Nicias had turned his attention to blockading the city by sea only because of the prominent role of enemy cavalry around the approaches to Epipolae, which ensured that he could never storm the counterwall that stymied the advance of his own fortifications. Demosthenes’ bold plan to take Epipolae at night was a failure. The deadly nocturnal pursuit of the Syracusan horse turned it into a bloodbath, destroying the morale of the army itself and putting an end to offensive operations by land.
A mere 1,200 Syracusans tipped the balance of the war, and ensured that 45,000 enemy invaders would lose. The experience of horse warfare on Sicily in and of itself did not immediately lead to the integration of cavalry and infantry mastered by Philip and Alexander. Yet despite the peculiar circumstances of Sicilian terrain and culture, the stunning defeat taught the Greeks that the days of hoplite exclusivity were ended. Gone too was the parochial idea that aristocratic knights were to remain prancers on the flanks of the phalanx rather than packs of mounted killers who, if not met by like kind, could limit the operations of even the largest forces—and alter the very course of sieges and naval engagements.35
Alcibiades was thirty-five when the Athenians landed on Sicily. If any single person was responsible for the birth and death of the Sicilian idea, it was surely he. His oratory and demagoguery were instrumental in convincing the volatile mob to sail in the first place. Yet his hope that an entire island could be subdued through intrigue rather than blood and iron proved as catastrophic as the timidity and inaction of Nicias. Ploys and deception were certainly vintage Alcibiades, who earlier at Mantinea had lined up an alliance of democratic states to dethrone Sparta from the hegemony of the Peloponnese—only to fail to galvanize the Athenians themselves to send the necessary force to guarantee victory.
Personal excess, arrogance, licentiousness—call it all what you wish—gave ammunition to his enemies, who recalled him from Syracuse for both good and bad reasons, involving legitimate and trumped-up charges of impiety and indecency. Whether Alcibiades was always lying or disclosed accurate strategic information to the Spartans is not clear, but without his presence in the Peloponnese the Spartans might well have tarried in their aid. Remember, had either Gylippus or Gongylus arrived a few days later, Syracuse would have already been lost.
Despite Alcibiades’ courage at the siege of Potidaea, his service in Attica during the invasions and plague, his heroism at Delium, and his machinations that led to Mantinea and perhaps Melos, the war was turning away from the great personalities and now hinging more on manpower and matériel. Horses would have won Sicily for Athens—and now ships would decide the last phase of the war, a struggle that Alcibiades was to reenter but in a most unexpected and ultimately tragic way.
There is a final, sad epitaph to the Sicilian nightmare. In a fitting tribute to the cavalrymen who had won the war, the Syracusans branded the foreheads of the thousands of Athenian captives they took—by burning into the flesh of each the mark of a horse.
