A War Like No Other

1. On criticism of the neoconservatives and their purported use of Thucydides to bolster efforts to take America to war in the manner of Periclean imperialism, see Gary North, “It Usually Begins with Thucydides” (http:www.lewrockwell.com/north/197.html) and the critiques from different perspectives by D. Mendelsohn, “Theatres of War: Why the Battles over Ancient Athens Still Rage” (New Yorker, January 12, 2004). Cf. L. Miller, “My Favorite War” (New York Times Book Review, March 21, 2004). For allusions to Clemenceau and Venizélos, see Lebow and Strauss, Hegemonic Rivalry, 2–19.

2. Isocrates, On the Peace, 4, 88, mourned the loss of prominent Athenians over the three-decade course of the war, aristocrats who would have done far better to use their talents against the common Hellenic enemy, imperial Persia. Isocrates’ argument is similar to that of those who now regret the First World War, which is seen as a tragic European suicide that wrecked the imperial mission of a civilizing Britain. See, in general, N. Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York, 2000), 457–62.

3. 1.22.4. This bold assertion is perhaps the most famous phrase in Thucydides’ entire history—one of striking confidence that the historian’s views will live beyond the importance of his own subject matter. Meanwhile, some twenty-five hundred years after he wrote The Peloponnesian War, English translations of Thucydides’ history sell about fifty thousand copies in America each year.

4. See his comments on Pericles: 2.65; Brasidas: 4.81.2; the oligarch revolution of 411: 8.97.2; and Antiphon: 8.68.1–2. Those whom Thucydides appears most impressed with—Pericles, Nicias, and Antiphon—were aristocratic in nature and harbored a distrust of the collective wisdom of the common people as it was manifested on any given day in the assembly.

5. 4.65.3–4. For references to Athens as America, see Sabin, “Athens,” 237–38.

6. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.23. The discussion of Athenian popularity abroad is complex, involving the contrasting views of the poor and the more prosperous inside every city-state and the physical proximity of a particular state to either Athens or Sparta. It would not be too cynical to assume that had Athens won the war, the same Greeks who were gleeful when the Long Walls were torn down would have been equally pleased with a Spartan defeat—as, in fact, they were when Epaminondas’ massive Panhellenic army swept into the Peloponnese three decades later to destroy the Spartan empire. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Origins, 42–44, most famously discusses the popular perceptions of Athens.

7. 2.8.4–5. The goodwill of the Greeks toward the Spartans arose only after the latter gradually withdrew from the alliance with Athens following the Greek victory in the Persian War. The less the Greeks saw of the Spartans, the more they liked them. Indeed, at one time the Ionians and other Greeks “begged” the Athenians to become hegemons to curtail a Spartan presence abroad; cf. 1.95.1–2.

8. See the complaints from the Athenian envoys at Sparta (1.76.4) who remind their opponents that “even our sense of equality has very unfairly subjected us to criticism rather than approval.” The Athenian demagogue Cleon reiterated the same theme in the debate over the hostages at Mytilene (3.37) when he made the eerily modern argument that the liberal Athenians were ill-equipped for the harsh exigencies of empire. In their own domestic comfort and security they apparently wrongly assumed that the world worked according to the same principles out in the Aegean.

9. The famous phrase—a war “like no other” (hoia ouch hetera en isô chronô), from which the title of this book is taken—is found at 1.23.1; cf. 1.1.1. The Greek refers literally to the “sufferings” (pathêmata) from the war, which were unique in Greek history.

10. Whereas the Greeks had always been aware of these differences between strife and war, it was precisely the nightmare of the Peloponnesian War that led philosophers like Plato and Isocrates to draw a distinction between the two phenomena: foreign wars against people like the Persians being sometimes good, internal strife among Greek city-states always being bad. See Plato, Republic, 470B; and the long discussion by Price, Thucydides and the Internal War, 68–73. By the fourth century, the long-distant Persian conflict was the “good war,” the recent Peloponnesian “the bad”—not unlike our present construction of World War II and Vietnam into respective noble and controversial efforts.

11. 1.1.2. The notion of a “shaking up” is an interesting one, implying social unrest, terror, revolution, plague, and a host of other catastrophes that transcend the normal military casualties associated with battles of a conventional war. Thucydides was not a religious man, but his inclusion of earthquake, pestilence, and tidal wave as part of the upheaval lent dramatic effect to his tale of a self-induced Armageddon. At least he was aware that in times of terrible war people would loosely associate a host of natural misfortunes in some way with the human struggle at hand.

12. Attica, her land allies, and the subject states across the Aegean perhaps numbered a million people. For figures on some modern wars, see Keegan, Warfare, 359–61.

13. 1.23.6, 1.86.5, 1.88, and 1.118.2. Note the emphasis on perceptions of power rather than carefully delineated real grievances, and the role honor and status play in the Spartans’ sense of inevitable decline. This feeling of perceived grievance is perhaps greatest in an insular, parochial, and traditional society, in which the views of its elder ruling elite are rarely questioned or exposed to fresh ideas from abroad.

14. Fear of both sides: 1.44, 1.118; Athens’ size: 1.80.3. For the benefits of empire, see [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 2.12. There is a perceptive discussion of the Spartan angst in Cawkwell, Thucydides, 26–39. Popularity was not the only issue that determined the stability of the Athenian empire: in most Greek states for much of the fifth century the poor counted on seeing Athenian triremes in their harbor far more often than the rich could expect a phalanx of Peloponnesian hoplites marching up to the city gate. For the idea that the Spartans were both capriciously cruel and harsh abroad, see, for example, 4.80.4–5 and 4.81.3 (Brasidas as a different sort of Spartan). Dorians fighting for Ionian Athens: 7.57.

15. 3.61.2. Just as globalization is characterized by the spread of the English language, American popular culture, and the U.S. dollar, so too “Atticization” was marked by intrusion into the Aegean of Athenian coinage and the Attic dialect, as well as imperial triremes and knowledge abroad of Athenian tragedy and comedy.

16. [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 3.10–13. The anonymous author of this contemporary treatise on Athenian society displayed a certain ironic approval of the logic of Athenian democracy quite apart from his own oligarchic prejudices, perhaps in the same fashion that an aristocrat might be appalled at Wal-Mart and rap music but at least would concede that such popular institutions and tastes appeal to the material and entertainment needs of the masses far better than do small family shops, museums, and opera.

17. For the innate political differences between Sparta and Athens that led to the war, see 3.39.6, 3.47, and 3.82.I. The Corinthians reprimanded the Spartans for their inability to counter the restless culture of Athens, ending in the famous appraisal of the Athenians as a people who “were born for the purpose of themselves neither having any peace nor allowing other men to enjoy.” Cf. I.70.9, I.76–77, and 4.55.2. For a review of the ancient evidence attesting to Sparta’s fear and Athens’ desire to preempt, see de Ste. Croix, Origins, 64–67.

18. 2.64.3. There is a modern echo of post–Persian Wars Athenian control in the current use of what the former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine called l’hyperpuissance américaine—the overweening influence of the United States that has arisen in the post–Cold War world after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By 431 the Persian Wars were too far distant in Greek memory for much vestigial amity predicated on a former alliance against the common threat—Athens was too powerful and the old enemy was seemingly long gone.

19. The Spartan demands are listed at 1.139.1–4. For the radical transformation of Athens from an agrarian polis to a rich, urban, and imperial powerhouse, see Hanson, Other Greeks, 351–96. The reactionaries longed for a return of the Solonian state, when a century earlier Athens had had no empire and had been run on the basis of a constitution favoring property owners.

20. 7.18.2; cf. 1.33.3, 1.76.2, 1.102.2–3, and 5.20. Regardless of the grievances of each side, in the end it was the Spartans, not the Athenians, who first crossed a rival’s borders.

21. See Kagan, Origins of War, 8–9 and 567–73; he best discusses these primordial emotions and their role in Thucydides’ interpretation of the war’s outbreak.

22. 1.86–87. Note that for all the previous grievances against Athens listed by her enemies, the official Spartan vote hinged on Spartan “honor” and fear of Athens’ “power.”

23. Herman, Idea of Decline, 14–19. For Roman imperial authors such as Petronius, Suetonius, Tacitus, and Juvenal, social “decline” or the natural “aging” of a state is seen as arising from luxury, leisure, and general affluence rather than a result of shaggy barbarians, plague, famine, or invasion.

24. 1.123. There is irony in the Corinthians’ assertion inasmuch as the most luxurious of the Greeks at the outbreak of the war were the Corinthians themselves, the most rugged still the Spartans.

25. For Socrates’ military record at these battles, see Plato, Symposium, 220E, 221A—B; Laches, 181 B; Apology, 28E. His opposition to the Sicilian campaign is found at Plutarch, Nicias, 13.7. Socrates may have fought at three battles and sieges while in his mid-forties. But after 421 we hear of no further service, and should imagine that he spent the last two decades of the war, while in his fifties and sixties, on guard duty with the older hoplites and resident aliens.

26. Plato, Protagoras, 359E. There is little of pacifism in any of Plato’s dialogues, which instead assume that war is a tragic but nonetheless natural event. His criticism of wars per se is pragmatic rather than what we would recognize as moral, and instead arises over particular modes of fighting that involved Greeks being killed by Greeks, or good hoplites brought down by their social inferiors in less than heroic skirmishes and at sea.

27. Cf. 1.44.2 and 1.144.3. Pericles is often and accurately compared to Churchill in that by the end of their long careers, both old aristocratic imperialists had seen too much to have any illusions that the appeasement of a garrison state and its antidemocratic coalition would bring peace.

28. 1.122.1. After the Corinthians berate the Spartans for their backward-looking foreign policy, they advocate an immediate invasion of Attica—advice incumbent on the most reactionary of all strategies, that of agricultural devastation in hopes of prompting hoplite battle. The Spartans had turned back in 446 on their own accord from invading Attica. They were sure that in 431 there was nothing stopping them from entering Athenian soil, as if that fact in and of itself would either precipitate battle or harm Athens to any great degree. Here they wrongly equated the successful tactic of overrunning Attica with the nearly impossible strategy of turning such force dominance in Attica into long-term advantage.

29. An entire subfield of Greek history exists to ascertain why the Peloponnesian War erupted when it did, and which side was at fault for finally breaking the peace. The arguments damning Athens are found in E. Badian, Plataea, 125–62. For the Athenian position, see the famous apology of G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, summarized briefly in Origins, 290–92. Kagan, Outbreak, 345–74, is fair and comprehensive in reviewing a century of scholarly controversy. Nevertheless, he has doubts about Thucydides’ rather deterministic views that the war was inevitable, given Spartan fear of an ever more powerful Athens.

30. 1.68.4. It is hard to discover any Peloponnesian recognition that the rapid growth of the Athenian fleet in the decades before the war demanded a countereffort to match trireme for trireme. The Athenian decision to build 300 warships certainly prompted no arms race like the notorious Anglo-German dreadnought rivalry of the early 1900s, which nearly bankrupted the two empires. In our sources, it is almost as if the Peloponnesians discovered belatedly at the outbreak of the conflict that in this new war ships will be critical—and that they have very few of them.

31. 2.8.1. Thucydides’ assessment of inexperience was true enough for Sparta. But Athens, in fact, had fought almost continuously by land and sea throughout the early and mid-fifth century. For example, in the two decades before the outbreak of the war, Athens had campaigned in Boeotia (447), put down revolts in Euboea and Megara (446), and besieged Samos and Byzantium (440). The idea that the young rashly rush into war without past experience of its horrors is thematic in Thucydides’ history, and explains in part why in 416 an inexperienced generation of youths paired off against its elders in demanding to go to Sicily.

32. 2.65.7; cf. 2.13.2 and 1.144.1. For a critique of Pericles’ strategy, see Kagan, Archidamian War, 352–55. Nowhere in our sources is there any Athenian war plan remotely akin to the daring of the later Epaminondas, who assumed that the only way to beat Sparta was to march into its homeland, dismantle its system of apartheid, and ring its territory with a circle of friendly democratic citadels.

33. 1.10.2. Again, it is notable that in the prewar deliberations, Sparta contemplated organizing a fleet to defeat Athens by ruining its armada and sailing into the Piraeus, while Athens never planned to create a massive army to storm into Laconia.

34. 1.71 and 1.141.3; cf. 1.142.3. At least Pericles’ prewar prognosis of Spartan impotence was mostly correct, and in sharp contrast to the last decade of the war, when Persian money changed the entire complexion of the conflict. On these and other passages, see Hanson, “Hoplite Battle,” 215–16. At the war’s outbreak Sparta had no missile troops, few horsemen, no light-armed contingents, and almost no ships—the very type of contingents that would be necessary for victory.

35. 1.102. The Athenians had come to Sparta’s help thirty years before the outbreak of the war, to put down the helot uprising of 462 on the slopes of Mount Ithome, in Messenia. Both their skill and their revolutionary character frightened the Spartans, who abruptly sent the Athenians home lest they become more of a problem than part of the solution.

36. 1.36.3. It was odd in this war how often the actual fighting belied prewar assumptions, especially how much attention both Sparta and Athens gave to ensuring the goodwill of Corinth and Corcyra, respectively, and how little each side later actually contributed to the eventual outcome of the conflict. Both states were not unlike Mussolini’s prewar Italy, which was thought to be a valuable potential ally by both Churchill and Hitler, but one that proved to offer little military advantage once the war actually started.

37. See 8.2–7 for the efforts of Sparta to create a fleet, and cf. Kagan, Fall, 14–16.

38. Later remarks about mercurial helots: Aristotle, Politics, 1269A; Xenophon, Hellenica, 3.3.6; cf. Thucydides, 1.101–02 and 4.80.3 Most Greeks owned slaves of varying statuses and nationalities. But at Sparta the helots were exclusively a rural people, without exception Greeks, and in the case of the Messenians endowed with a proud national heritage. Thus, while Athenian slaves rowed and carried the baggage of their infantrymen masters, there was far less chance that they would enjoy common affinities with one another that might transcend their servile status and thus lead to rebellion en masse.

39. King Archidamus warns about the demographical advantages that Athens enjoyed: 1.80.3. For the myriad ramifications of helots and demography on Sparta’s ability to wage war against Athens, see Cartledge, Agesilaos, 37–43.

40. Cf. 1.80.3, 1.81.1, 1.114.1, and 1.101.1. Most classical armies took along only three days’ worth of rations, so speed and timing were essential: an army that was waylaid or arrived after the harvests had been evacuated had very little tactical latitude. In some sense, Greek armies before the age of Alexander shared the same vulnerabilities as early escort fighters in World War II, whose dog-fighting over the target was curtailed by limited fuel reserves and thus often lasted for only a fraction of the total time of the mission.

41. Cf. 4.85.2, 5.14.3, and 7.28.3. Aristophanes’ plays (e.g., Acharnians, 182–83, 512) emphasize the shame of Attic farmers impotently watching the enemy ravage their property, and especially their inability to alter the official Periclean policy of restraint.

42. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.1.35. By 411, Sparta had a fleet, capital, and new allies and thus could be assured that it could stay in Attica permanently without much worry that the Athenians, as in the past, could seriously frighten the Peloponnese. A real debate rages over the degree of Athenian self-sufficiency in food. Garnsey (Famine and Food Supply, 105–06) may well be right in his contention that classical Attica could supply almost half the grain needed by the late-fifth-century Athenian state.

43. 1.144.4. The evacuation of the Attic countryside before Xerxes’ onslaught was often evoked as proof of Athenian courage and sacrifice—even as the Athenians made arrangements never to suffer such an indignity again.

44. 1.80.3 and 1.82.2. We owe to the genius of Thucydides this paradoxical portrait of Archidamus, the one astute Spartan who warned against the very strategy he subsequently followed, and who was forever associated with the first decade of the war that he sought to avoid.

45. Long Walls at Argos and Patras: 5.52 and 5.82; cf. 1.93.1. Irony abounds: Nicias (7.77.6) argued that walls did not matter, but rather the men behind them. Yet they did at Syracuse: just a few more thousand feet of fortifications on Epipolae and his now disheartened mob would have cut off the city and been in control. Corinth seems to have used long walls to connect its ports to the city without falling to the democratic virus, but it had a long prior tradition of aristocrats engaging in trans-Isthmus trade and, given its strategic geography, never associated fortification with the deliberate abandonment of farmland.

46. 1.69.1; cf. 1.90–93. Athenian conservatives had always opposed the Long Walls and had hoped that the Spartans would intervene to stop their construction; cf. 1.107.4.

47. For Athenian finances, see 2.13.3–5. It is a testament to the costly nature of the new war—mostly sieges and wages for rowers—that by the fifth or sixth year of the war, Athens was essentially out of money and was seeking new sources of income (as well as reduced expenditures) to avoid capitulation.

48. 1.19.1. For the size of the empire, see Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 24.3, and Cawkwell, Thucydides, 101–02. We can only speculate on the future of Athens had it avoided war in 431 but instead continued to augment its reserves and ensure its tribute—what-ifs similarly entertained by a few British Tories who felt that their empire was lost by a needless internecine struggle with Germany between 1914 and 1918. Alcibiades in extremis outlines all sorts of imperial conspiracies to the Spartans, suggesting a soon-to-be-greater Athenian empire that would shortly absorb Sicily, Italy, and Carthage (e.g., 6.90.2–3)—even after tens of thousands had been lost to the plague and fifteen years of prior war.

49. [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 1.10–12. For Athenian population growth, see Sallares, Ecology, 95–99.

50. 1.81.2; cf. 2.13.6, and [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 2.1–3. Rather than destroy the subject states of the empire, the Spartans eventually realized that ruining Athenian assets might give psychological impetus to local oligarchs, who, in fact, throughout the war caused the Athenians enormous grief at Samos, Lesbos, and Chios. The exact number of Athenian subject states is under dispute, but contemporary Athenians considered the empire huge—so the comic poet Aristophanes (Wasps, 707) offers up the impossible number of one thousand tribute-paying states.

51. Thucydides thought Athenian latitude for unilateralism was a real advantage in the war (e.g., 1.141.6); but it cut both ways. A single setback like the plague or Sicily could induce immediate revolt, inasmuch as subjects felt that they had little responsibility for such poor planning and much to gain by distancing themselves from an apparent loser. On the shortcomings of Athenian strategy, see Henderson, Great War, 47–68.

52. To survive (periesesthai): 1.144.1 and 2.65.7; cf. Lazenby, Peloponnesian War, 32–33. For the Spartan pipe dream at the war’s beginning of creating a huge navy and the allied contributions, see 2.7.2; cf. 1.121 and I.27.2. The thought apparently did not much scare the Athenians (e.g., 1.142.6).

53. The role of the Athenian empire and its popularity as a protector of local democrats against oligarchic exploitation were the focus of the life’s work of the great, though eccentric historian G.E.M. de Ste. Croix. See especially his brilliant, often hyperbolic arguments in Origins, 34–49. For Sparta’s efforts at imposing oligarchy, see 5.81.2. Athens likewise sought to spread democracy by force: 5.82.I—4.

54. See budget figures in Kagan, Peloponnesian War, 62–63; these suggest Athens could not sustain full deployment of its fleet for more than four years.

55. See 5.26.2–5 for Thucydides’ famous defense of the idea that the twenty-seven years were to be seen as a cohesive period of war rather than a series of theater conflicts. The “Ten Years War” was often later known as the Archidamian War (431–421). The Pachean War (431–425), the Peace of Nicias (421–415), and the similarly distinct Mantinean War (419–418) followed that first decade. The intervening Sicilian War (415–413) led to a third phase of the conflict, often in two simultaneous theaters known on land as the Decelean War (413–404) and at sea as the Ionian War (411–404).

1. 3.26.3; cf. Xenophon, Hellenica, 4.5.10 and 5.3.3; Polybius 18.6.4. “Suckering” is an annual job of any tree or vine farmer, who must send crews into the orchards or vineyards each spring to cut off unwanted shoots that spring from the trunk.

2. [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 2.14. Thucydides could have added that the poor also looked to profit in war from state pay for service and opportunistic plunder, perhaps on the expectation that the city itself could survive despite annual attacks on its landowning classes’ exposed cropland.

3. For examples of landlocked states that faced real problems after having their harvests ravaged, see Xenophon, Hellenica, 5.4.50 and 7.2.10. Both sides in the present-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict seem to embrace the importance of olive trees as symbolic capital that has value far beyond producing olives. Throughout the years 2000–2002 the Palestinians cited the Israelis as bulldozing some fifteen thousand of their olive trees—about one hundred acres at normal planting densities—to clear paths along strategic areas to prevent sniper attacks. Yet the Christian Science Monitor (December 8, 2000) reported that both the destroyers and the owners, as traditional Mediterranean peoples, were depressed by the tactic: “We were educated not to uproot a sapling, and for us as Israelis, this has left a bad taste,” remarked Yoni Figel, an Israeli government official. In turn, the Palestinian mayor of Hares lamented, “Olives are like water to us. You cannot imagine a home without olive oil. The olive tree is a symbol of our people, surviving for centuries on these hillsides” (Daily Telegraph, London, November 3, 2000).

4. See, in general, Aristophanes, Peace, 511–80. The hero of both his Acharnians and Peace is the archetypal “little guy” farmer, whose good sense, practicality, and salt-of-the-earth morality are at odds with a new commercial and radically democratic culture.

5. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 6.9–10. In another paradox of the highest order, for the romantic Xenophon the paragons of Hellenic virtue were the Spartans, who themselves did no farmwork at all, while his archenemies were the Thebans, the agrarians par excellence of the Greek world.

6. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 694 ff.; Euripides, Medea, 824. The sense of the sanctity of Attica’s soil was reflected in art as well. On the west pediment of the Parthenon, Poseidon vies with Athena for dominion over Attica, while a sacred olive tree is prominent nearby on the Acropolis.

7. Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum 21 (1966): 644.12–13; Xenophon, Memorabilia, 2.1.13; Plato, Republic, 470A—471B; cf. 5.23.1–2 and 5.47.3–4; Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2.21.8, 3.11.6; Isocrates 14.31. For these and other passages, see discussion of these citations in Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 9–13.

8. 1.121.2–3. The Corinthians apparently had some affinity with Athenian innovation by reason of their own long walls, sizable fleet, and maritime economy. Yet, despite all their natural endowments and prized location, oligarchic government lacked the dynamism of radical democracy, and thus by the fifth century Corinth itself was abjectly weak compared to the Athenian empire. For democracies and oligarchies in war, cf. 1.118.2, 2.39, 4.55.3–4, 6.18.6–7, 6.93.I, 7.55.2, 8.I.4, 8.89.3, and 8.96.5; cf. Herodotus 5.78. On the advantages of ancient democracies in wartime, see the review of ancient citations in Hanson, “Democratic Warfare,” especially 17–24.

9. Short war: 5.14.3 and 7.28.2. It is not clear whether these initial wildly optimistic estimates were based on anticipated starvation accruing from devastation, the exhaustion of Athenian financial reserves, a hoped-for destruction of the Athenian phalanx, or panic and capitulation on the part of the Athenians. For Brasidas, see 4.85.2; cf. 3.79, 5.14.3, and Hornblower, Commentary, 2.38–61.

10. 1.114.1 and 2.21.1. Rumor had it that King Pleistoanax had earlier been bribed by wealthy Athenians to go home, which might explain the later stories that Pericles’ own estates were to be saved in a similar private deal or through collusion with Archidamus. In fact, Pleistoanax had quit at Eleusis because of advance word that the Athenians would grant sizable concessions to Sparta, which explains why King Archidamus tarried in hopes of a similar brokered deal in 431.

11. 1.124.1; cf. 1.121.4. The Corinthians’ confidence was perhaps grounded in their own experience with long walls across the Isthmus, which had a poor record of keeping enemies out of Corinthian territory—an expanse, however, that was far more difficult to fortify and defend than the Athenian-Piraeus corridor.

12. 1.81.6. Whether Archidamus really said that in 431 or whether, years later, after the verdict of the Archidamian War was in, Thucydides put such “prescient” words into the mouth of one of his favorite Spartans we are not sure. But the sentiment was probably widely shared by at least a handful of pessimistic conservative Spartan elites who had gotten word of the growth of both Athenian fortifications and a 300-trireme fleet. See also 2.11.6–8, 2.12.1, and 2.18.5.

13. The reserve fund: 2.24.1; the Spartan sneak attack: 2.93.3. It would have been far cheaper for the Athenians to meet the Spartans in the plain of Attica to wage hoplite battle than to send hundreds of its ships on patrol in the Aegean and around the Peloponnesian coast to monitor the allies and attack enemy villages. Far from being merely passive, Periclean strategy was ambitious and thus enormously expensive.

14. For the promise that a defeat of the Thebans would keep Sparta out of Attica, see 4.95.2. This irony is noted in Krentz, “Strategic Culture”: a Spartan force designed to harass and thus to prompt battle was so formidable that it had precisely the opposite effect of ensuring that no one in his right mind would march out to confront it.

15. See Thorne, “Warfare and Agriculture,” 249–51, which offers interesting though theoretical scenarios on the difficulty facing Athenian farmers evacuating their harvests into Athens. Much of his revisionist work argues that we underestimate the damage that could be caused by torching grain; i.e., that it was not that difficult to time an invasion right at the combustible period of wheat and barley maturity, while much harder for the defenders to harvest it and bring it inside the city in time. These are interesting hypo-theticals, but many of his arguments—e.g., that ravagers in a parched Attic countryside could have poured sufficient amounts of water into grain granaries to spoil stored crops—seem unlikely.

16. Plutarch, Pericles, 33.4; cf. Thucydides 1.143.5. Athens’ youth or, rather, a new generation of inexperienced Athenian hotheads, posed a challenge for Pericles as well: the older hoplites had known conflict in Boeotia and Megara, before the war; but the younger were the most likely to rush out foolishly to fight the Spartans; cf. Diodorus 12.42.6, and de Ste. Croix, Origins, 208–09. For Agis, see Diodorus 13.72–73, who locates the incident in 408.

17. Cf. Diodorus 12.42.7–8. Cf. Thucydides 2.25.1–2, 2.26.1–2, 2.30.1–2, 2.56.1–6, and in general Westlake, “Seaborne Raids.” In terms of destroying large amounts of Spartan war matériel, the raids accomplished little. Yet Peloponnesian farmers were subject to the same fears as their Attic counterparts. Thus, the notion that Athenian seaborne raiders were attacking the rural communities of Peloponnesian ravagers back home was unsettling.

18. 6.105. Thucydides said the ravaging of Laconian soil gave the Spartans a “rather more plausible excuse” (euprophasiston mallon tên aitian), inasmuch as the crop devastation violated the peace treaty in “the most manifest way.”

19. Aristotle, Politics, 1269B. The best account of the Spartan paranoia over the helots, and how that fear played into the hands of its enemies, is still found in Cartledge, Agesilaos, 170–77.

20. 3.18.5; cf. 1.101.2. The Mytileneans could say that in 427, but only in light of four failed Spartan invasions of Attica. Before the war maritime states such as the Corinthians had, in fact, urged an invasion of the Attic hinterlands as a mechanism to relax the Athenian grip on its overseas empire. Cf. 1.122.1.

21. Plutarch, Pericles, 33.4–5. Cf. 1.43.5. We have no information that Pericles ever, in fact, contemplated a scorched-earth policy. Had the Athenians been able to destroy all their crops, the arriving Spartan ravagers were nevertheless just a few miles from the border of the friendly and especially rich heartland of Boeotia.

22. Euripides, Medea, 824; Plutarch, Pericles, 31.1–2. Cf. 3.851; 4.84, 88, 130; 5.84. It was another irony of the war that much of civic-inspired tragedy and comedy inside the walls would have a larger audience in the early years of the war only because of the forced evacuation of thousands from the countryside—and thus for perhaps the first time began to portray rural themes in earnest.

23. For the trauma of the evacuation of Attica, see 2.17 and 2.52.1; Diodorus 12.45.2; and Aristophanes, Knights, 792–93. Thucydides focuses on the emotion and pain of the first withdrawal into the city in 431. But there were four other such evacuations that he does not mention in any such graphic way, and these treks may have been just as difficult. In general, the historian describes fully a “typical” siege, battle, or civil strife, and then assumes that the reader is familiar with the details of subsequent events that are more cursorily noted.

24. 2.54.1. We do not quite know what Pericles meant by such a bleak assessment. Presumably Athenian countermeasures after 430 might have been even more muscular and effective around the shores of the Peloponnese had the state not been so devastated by disease. Plutarch believed that had the plague not hit, Sparta might shortly have given up the idea of defeating Athens altogether (Plutarch, Pericles, 34.2).

25. On Alcibiades’ warning: 8.18.7. There has been a long controversy among scholars about the actual legal basis of Pericles’ enormous power, a debate nicely summarized by Hamel, Athenian Generals, 9–12. One of the indirect means of running Athenian politics was the decision about whether or not to convene the assembly. Obviously, in times of crisis and acrimony a sober general like Pericles would prefer to postpone debate, cool down tempers, and not subject state policy to the collective wisdom of 7,000 or so enraged citizens crammed onto the Pynx.

26. 2.65.9; cf. 2.65.4, 4.83.3, 6.17.2, 6.63, 8.2. Elsewhere Thucydides uses the terms ochlos and homilos in a manner that is not always pejorative but perhaps reflects the potentiality, rather than the inevitability, of the “people” to be fickle and mercurial. Cf. Cawkwell, Thucydides, 7–8.

27. 2.12. Cf. 2.10.1–2. Although Thucydides began the second book of his history with the March 431 Theban attack on Plataea, he apparently felt that the war proper started only with the direct confrontation of Spartan and Athenian troops more than two months later. See Gabriel and Metz, Sumer, 104, for the length of marching armies of about 65,000.

28. 2.8.4. It is also unclear to what degree such anti-Athenian sentiments were based on a cynical assessment of being on the winning side—that Sparta might well either beat or at least humiliate Athens in a brief, cheap, and lucrative campaign. On the farms of Attica, see the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 12.3–5. The anonymous historian suggests that the Athenians themselves may have stocked their farms in part from the plunder and booty from military operations abroad. Cf. Hanson, “Thucydides,” 212–26. What exactly was rural “plunder” in the ancient world? Most likely anything valuable left behind, from household fixtures (furniture, wooden doors, window frames) to roof tiles, wagons, farm implements, and stock animals. On evacuation and the difficulty in burning grain, see Foxhall, “Farming and Fighting,” 140–43.

29. For eleventh-hour discussions at both Athens and Sparta, see Kagan, Outbreak, 310–42.

30. Plutarch, Pericles, 33.3. For the nature of the deme of Acharnae and its relationship to Athens, see Jones, Rural Athens, 92–96. See Foxhall, “Farming and Fighting,” 142–43, for the idea that Archidamus sought to provoke domestic friction and strife by targeting the farms of conservative Athenian hoplites.

31. Plutarch, Pericles, 33.5. There is surely irony here: the angriest of all Athenians, the farmers of Attica, rarely served in the cavalry or the navy, and thus sat tight while others risked their lives to take revenge upon their enemies.

32. An entire corpus of literature has emerged assessing Pericles’ strategy: Was it really all that passive? Was it effective? Did the cavalry and sea patrols constitute an offensive mind-set? See a review of the arguments in Ober, “Thucydides,” 186–89, and Spence, “Perikles,” 106–09, which credit Pericles with a strategy that was more sophisticated than is usually acknowledged. Krentz (“Strategic Culture,” 68–72) believes that the Spartans ironically appeared with such a large force that they precluded any chance of their hoped-for Athenian hoplite response. For Pericles as strategist, see the classic treatment of Delbrück, Warfare in Antiquity, 135–43.

33. Later the Athenian general Hippocrates urged his troops on the eve of the battle of Delium to remember that a victory over the Boeotians might rob Peloponnesians of cavalry support and thus ensure that the enemy would never invade Attica again—an odd statement since by autumn 424 they had not been in Attica for almost a year and a half, and would not return for over a decade. Cf. 4.95.2.

34. Isocrates 7.52; cf. Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 16.5, and Alciphron, Letters, 3.31. We assume that the ubiquitous phrase “the Athenians” included residents of Athens; but, in fact, perhaps two out of every three “Athenians” actually lived in rural Attica, either in small villages or isolated farmhouses outside the walls of the city. These rural folk may have rarely come into Athens at all.

35. 1.82.4. Archidamus’ advice reveals that even after the outbreak of the war, there was something still phony about the conflict. The Spartans believed that there was room for discussions should they not attack the Athenian countryside without restraint.

36. 2.13.1. Thucydides (2.55) and Diodorus (12.45) often talk of “all” the land being ravaged even as they assume that it was not seriously damaged (e.g., 3.26 and 7.27.4). In almost every contemporary comedy of Aristophanes’ there is some reference to the devastation of Attica, an experience that must have traumatized the Athenians for many years. See Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 138–43.

37. 2.14.1–2 and 2.16.2. The problem with the Long Walls was that while they followed the successful Athenian strategy of withdrawal before a superior land army, the sacrifice now fell largely on the country folk, rather than, as before the battle of Salamis, on the urban and rural population alike. On the radical cultural and social changes that came about from the evacuation, see the arguments of Jones, Rural Athens, 195–207. For premonitions of a Spartan invasion, see Lazenby, Peloponnesian War, 23–24.

38. Ravaging tools: Plutarch, Cleomenes, 26.3. For ancient passages about the devastation of Attica: Aristophanes, Acharnians, 232, 509–12; Peace, 319–20. Cf. Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 164. The Persian occupation of Attica left tangible records of destruction, most prominently on the Acropolis and the shrines of Attica that were burned. In comparison, there is almost no archaeological evidence of the five Spartan invasions of the Archidamian War—or, for that matter, from the effect of the near-decade-long occupation of Decelea.

39. Cf. 3.26.3, 7.27.4, and Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 12.4. Of course, it is possible that the anonymous fourth-century B.C. historian was, in fact, drawing on Thucydides himself as a source for marginal damage during the Archidamian War.

40. For Aristophanes, see Acharnians, 1089–93; Peace, 557–63, 573, 1320–25. The nature of the Aristophanic evidence for agricultural damage is discussed at length in Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 138–43. On the indestructibility of the olive tree, see Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 694 ff. “A terror to its enemies” perhaps makes sense to anyone who has started the unenviable task of chopping down or uprooting an olive tree.

41. 2.57.2; cf. 2.65.2. Thucydides seems not terribly interested in these latter four invasions. His description of the plague, the revolution at Corcyra, and the Pylos campaign all merit more attention. Before 425 the Spartan army was used briefly at the siege of Plataea and for combating a few raids in the Peloponnese. But the idea of constant war making during the first seven years is absurd inasmuch as real infantry battle did not start until 425, with the subsequent clashes on Sphacteria, at Delium, and near Amphipolis.

42. See Pericles’ outline of strategy on the eve of the war at 1.141.3–7. Once Sparta failed in Attica, the poverty of its strategic thinking was apparent: besieging the marginal town of Plataea, giving only nominal support to the critical insurrection on Lesbos, and parrying Athenian attacks in the Peloponnese. Not until Brasidas’ long march to the Chalcidice was there anything inspired about Spartan military planning that might change the course of the war.

43. 3.26.1–4. For the Spartan anger over the fact that Athenians were down in the Peloponnese while they were up in Attica, see Diodorus 12.61.3.

44. 3.15.2–16. One of the common themes of Aristophanes’ contemporary comedies is the Panhellenic revulsion for the destruction of property and crops. In both his Acharnians and Lysistrata, Greeks flock together from the countryside to protest the stupidity of destroying property.

45. Other than Acanthus, it is hard to cite any city that simply capitulated in fear of losing its crops. On Sicily, the Athenians, we are told, “burned the grain” of some of the nearby allied towns of the Syracusans, but such ravaging seems to have had no effect in either drawing hoplites outside their walls or in inducing starvation. In general, see 4.84.1–2 and 4.88.1–2; for the luxuriousness of the Sicilian countryside and the systematic efforts to evacuate it during times of invasion, see Diodorus 13.81. And cf. Herodotus 5.34.1, 6.101.2.

46. 4.66.1–3, 2.31.2; for the proverbial sufferings of the Megarians, cf. Aristophanes, Acharnians, 535; Peace, 246–50. The passes over Megara were always a source of contention, as the Athenians realized that their occupation meant that a Peloponnesian army might be preempted or even stopped before arriving in Attica. See de Ste. Croix, Origins, 190–95.

47. Decelea clearly fascinated Thucydides, who makes much of the strategy of epiteichismos inside Attica (1.122, 6.91.6–7, 7.18.1). For the effects of Decelea, see Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 153–73. Most famously, more than 20,000 slaves were said to have left Attica for Decelea, the majority of them probably from the countryside of Attica. See Hanson, “Thucydides,” 225–28. Agis arrived in Attica “earlier than ever before” (7.19.1), inasmuch as he was building a permanent fort, not engaging in seasonal devastation.

48. For this repeated theme of “fear,” see 1.236; cf. 1.881, 1.118.2, and 1.75.3. Cf. Van Wees, Greek Warfare, 258n4. Donald Kagan has often emphasized the accuracy of Thucydides’ assessment; see Origins, 8–9, 71–74. And for a spirited defense of Pericles’ strategic thought, see Delbrück, Warfare in Antiquity, 135–39, and, in general, his Die Strategie des Pericles Erläutert durch die Strategie Friedrichs des Grossen (Berlin, 1890). Emotions, not reason, are often cited for the motivations of states; cf. 1.75.3 for the Athenians’ own excuse for empire: “Fear was our motive, afterward honor and finally self-interest.” See also 1.76.2 for the importance of honor (timê), fear (deos), and advantage (ôphelia).

49. 1.121. For the table of Athenian expenditures, see Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, 437. Money seems to have been thematic in all early discussions of the war, and the asymmetrical nature of the two adversaries’ reserves became a primary reason for Pericles’ antebellum optimism. For this new idea that money, not courage, numbers, or traditional warfare, was the arbiter of military success, see Kallet, Money and Corrosion, 285–94.

50. Alcibiades and the ephebic oath: Plutarch, Alcibiades, 15.1; Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 5. For information about the property, family, and early life of Alcibiades, see Davies, Athenian Propertied Families, 20–21. In Thucydides’ account (6.91.6), Alcibiades is one of the strategic architects of the Decelea operation. Perhaps as an earlier cavalryman he understood how difficult it might have been to stop Spartan ravagers had they stayed on in permanent fortifications.

Chapter 3

1. 1.23.3. Thucydides’ statement on the plague is quite astonishing; what he implies is that the disease was the greatest disaster to befall the Greeks during the war—worse than Sicily, the chaos at Corcyra, the carnage of the Ionian War, and a variety of other catastrophes from Decelea to Melos. Perhaps the reason why we find that generalization hard to believe is that the plague broke out in the second year of a conflict that, nevertheless, went on for another quarter century.

2.Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 12.3. It is surprising that Thebes experienced a growth of refugees, given the rarity of Athenian attacks across the border. There was plenty of raiding across the highlands of Mount Parnes, but most of the aggression came from the Thebans. Athenian-inspired attacks on Mycalessus and Tanagra were mere excursions. The only sizable invasion—that of Demosthenes and Hippocrates, culminating at Delium—was an abject failure.

3. For the Long Walls, see 2.13.8; cf. 1.89.3, 1.93.8, 1.107.1, 1.108.3, and Gomme, Commentary, 2.39–40. Although the line of twin fortifications stretched over four miles, they were completed in just a fraction of the fifteen years devoted to the construction of the Parthenon. Together with earlier municipal walls, they formed a network of fortifications found almost nowhere else in fifth-century Greece.

4. See 2.51.2–5. Diodorus (12.45) has a few wrinkles in his description of the outbreak, stressing the role of overcrowding.

5. Thucydides on the social consequences of the plague: 2.53. For the contrast of accommodations before and after the evacuation, see 2.17, 2.52; cf. Diodorus 12.45.2–3. On the number of Athenians working on municipal projects, see Aristophanes, Wasps, 709, and Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 24.3.

6. Wasps, 792–93; on two houses, see Plato, Laws, 5.745B, and Aristotle, Politics, 6.1330a14–18. On evacuation in general, see Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 112–21. Many argue that the refugees gave city folk their first real intimacy with the rustics of Attica, a rather different picture from the usual view that ancient Greek cities drew little distinction between city and country, rural and urban citizens. For the controversy, see Jones, Rural Athens, 204–07.

7. 2.54. In part, Thucydides gave a great deal of detail about the evacuation of 431 because it was prior to the plague and seemed the most extensive. On areas of Attica that were never evacuated during the war, see again Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 151, 161–66.

8. Plutarch, Pericles, 35.3. Apparently, the Greeks understood that the disease could be spread by infected carriers, even by those who had yet shown no real symptoms of the malady.

9. On Solon’s purported use of chemical warfare, see Pausanias 10.37.7; cf. also Aeneas Tacticus 8.4. Mayor, Greek Fire, 99–118, has an interesting discussion of the classical equivalents of biological warfare, citing a number of ancient passages to show how diabolical the Greeks were in an age well before our modern notion of weapons of mass destruction.

10. For the plague and the Peloponnesians, see Pausanias 8.41.7–9 and 10.11.5; for the oracles at Athens, see Thucydides 2.54.3; cf. 2.54.4. For the general ancient consensus that population density and cramped quarters resulted in the disease, see Diodorus 12.45.2–4; cf. Mayor, Greek Fire, 126–27, for ancient plagues in the context of war.

11. A good review of the history of the debate and the issues involved is found at Sallares, Ecology, 244–62, and Gomme, Commentary, 2.145–62.

12. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.10–11. Did the fear of another outbreak influence the survivors, now crammed into Athens once again, to be terrified about a new round of pestilence and thus more ready to capitulate in a way not true three decades earlier?

13. 2.51. Two critical aspects of the infection—contagion and acquired immunity—seem to have been widely recognized very quickly. On various aspects of the plague, with close attention to Thucydides’ vocabulary, see again Gomme, Commentary, 2.150–61.

14. Initial mention can be found in the brief summaries in Parlama et al., City, 272–74. Full discussions of these salvage operations await further scholarly publication.

15. John of Ephesus, fragment II E—G; Procopius, Persian Wars, 11.23. Constantinople, like Athens, was a great port and thus visited by traders from three continents who traversed the Mediterranean.

16. Resentment against the new arrivals: Plutarch, Pericles, 34.4. For the various reasons why the Spartans stayed home or left Attica early, cf. 2.71.1, 3.89.1, 4.61, and Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 135–37.

17. On the unburied dead, see Euripides, Suppliant Women, 16–17, 168–69, 308–11, and 531–36. For the bones of fallen Syracusans during the Carthaginian War, see Diodorus 13.75.2–3.

18. 2.48.2. In this sense, his analysis of the plague also serves as a blueprint for the narrative of the Peloponnesian War itself, which was no accident but a chronic malady that had prior clear symptoms, allowing a diagnosis and demanding a prognosis.

19. 2.52–53; cf. 2.53.4. We do not know quite how long the rampant rate of death from the disease lasted, but in Thucydides’ description the resulting social pathologies seem to have followed from the outbreak almost immediately—and lasted well beyond the cessation of the mass infection.

20. 2.53.1. We sometimes forget that the Athenian assembly that voted to execute about i,000 Mytileneans in 427 had themselves seen far more death and destruction than that which they were going to sanction on Lesbos. It may well be that in some terribly ironic fashion the plague also accounts for the destruction of Plataea, in that had it not broken out, Sparta would have gone to Attica in 428 and bypassed Plataea, which apparently could not be stormed or starved out through the Thebans’ efforts alone. Had the disease broken out in the last, rather than the second, year of the war, and had 80,000 Athenians perished in 404 rather than in 430, the nature of Athenian conduct in the conflict might have been far different.

21. 3.87. After the less virulent second outbreak of 426, we are never told precisely when the plague left for good.

22. 3.87.3; cf. Diodorus 12.58.2. Also see Strauss, Athens After, 75–78; he discusses at length the effects of the plague on the manpower reserves of the Athenian military.

23. 2.49.8. Although Thucydides says that the survivors were often left maimed, we do not hear anecdotal reports in later literature about those who were disabled. Cf. Pausanias 3.9.2.

24. 3.3.1. In his funeral oration (cf. 2.35–41), Pericles had bragged about the Athenians in Kennedyesque terms, saying that they would pay any price and meet any danger to respond to the needs of their national security. But by 428 Thucydides could remark, “The Athenians, inasmuch as they were suffering both from the plague and the war that had recently broken out and was now at its height, considered it to be serious business to make an enemy out of the island of Lesbos. It had had a fleet and unimpaired power, and so at first they would not give credence to the charges [that some of the Lesbians were fomenting rebellion], instead attributing more weight to the desire that they might not be true” (3.3.1).

25. 6.26.2. Despite the use of the Greek adverb “just” (arti), a major outbreak had not hit the city for at least a decade.

26. See variously at 2.31.2, 2.61.3, and 3.13.3–4. Just five years into the war, the Mytileneans could make the public argument that Athens was ruined (ephtharatai)—an odd description for a still powerful state that would soon savagely put down the rebellion on the other side of the Aegean and execute over i,000 ringleaders.

27. Plutarch, Pericles, 36.4. From Plutarch we learn that Pericles perished after a drawn-out bout of disease, which slowly tapped his formidable powers of resistance, the force multiplier to a rash of miseries in his last years, which had seen the death of his legitimate sons, sister, relatives, and close friends to the disease, as well as an earlier divorce and later estrangement from his eldest son, Xanthippus. He perished before seeing his last illegitimate son executed in the hysteria following the victory at Arginusae: Plutarch, Pericles, 36.7.

28. Pericles: 2.65.10. We must remember that the initial Athenian strategy of withdrawal behind the Long Walls was the logical result of nearly three decades of Periclean leadership that had sought to systematize and institutionalize Themistocles’ earlier ad hoc idea of abandoning the Attic countryside and avoiding pitched infantry battle. Thus, Pericles’ death early on in the war meant that some thirty years of military policy ended with him, to be replaced by uncertain strategies that had not previously been a part of the decision to build fortifications, create the empire, invest in the fleet, and shy away from hoplite battle.

29. Diogenes Laertius 26; Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, 15.20.6; cf. Plutarch, Aristides, 27. Most of the evidence comes from later derivative sources that in some cases could have confused remarrying after the death of a spouse with polygamy—or seek in gossipy fashion to suggest extramarital relationships among prominent Athenians.

30. Plutarch, Pericles, 37.4–5. In some sense, this exemption was all for naught: after sharing in the successful command at the climactic naval victory of Arginusae, the younger Pericles was summarily executed on the insane charge that along with the other generals he had been derelict in retrieving the corpses of Athenian sailors. His illustrious pedigree won him no leniency from the mob—some twenty-three years after his father had fallen to the plague.

31. Diodorus 12.45. Ancient observers were fascinated by the plague precisely because of the relative rarity of such mass death in classical Greece.

32. Plutarch, Pericles, 38.2–3. Anyone who has suffered a chronic and debilitating disease will not be surprised by how quickly the confidence in rational medicine fades and one enters the realm of faith, superstition, and speculative treatment in search of relief.

33. Diodorus 12.58.6; cf. Thucydides 3.104. We should not be surprised at the return of such traditional palliatives. After the initial outbreak of 431–430, the disease waned until a second, but weaker flare-up in 426, before gradually going dormant and disappearing. And despite the crowded conditions brought on by Decelea (413–404) and the final blockade of the city by Lysander (405–404), Athens never again experienced anything like the annus horribilis of 429—ongoing proof enough for most surviving Athenians that such piety and cults had paid off handsomely.

34. Plutarch, Pericles, 37.1–2. For all the obvious pathologies of Alcibiades, our contemporary sources—Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Xenophon—agree on his remarkable unconquerable spirit. Fed by both ego and natural talent, Alcibiades quite literally never gave up: despite personal exile, treason, scandal, financial ruin, and military defeat, he fought to the very end amid a host of enemies.

35. For the farms of Alcibiades’ family, see Davies, Athenian Propertied Families, 20. Everything he owned—and his real and movable property was worth perhaps 100 talents (in today’s dollars about $48 million!)—was confiscated after his exile in 415 and perhaps largely returned when his sentence was lifted in 407, before being lost again when Alcibiades left in the last years of the war.

36. Socrates did not get the plague: cf., e.g., Diogenes Laertius, 2.25, and Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, 2.1.4–5, who also wrongly claims that the philosopher was the only one who did not succumb—impossible when we remember that the second outbreak of 426 was especially virulent and that prior exposure had given thousands of earlier survivors immunity from reinfection.

37. 5.41.2. The proposed treaty—never enacted—is interesting in that it suggests substituting a single pitched battle in lieu of an open-ended conflict to adjudicate potential disputes. The Spartans, hoplites par excellence, at first labeled the idea moronic (môria) before promising to discuss it further. The nature of the first decade of the Peloponnesian War, coupled with news of the horrific plague at Athens, had apparently prompted nostalgia for the old Hellenic idea of such simple solutions.

38. For a description of these later great plagues, see Lucretius, On the Nature of the Gods, 6.1138–1286; Virgil, Georgics, 3.478; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 7.523; and Pro-copius, History of the Wars, 2.23.1.

Chapter 4

1. Plutarch, Pericles, 34.1–2. In the first year of the war (431) Pericles personally commanded the massive expedition against Megara (“the greatest Athenian army that had ever been assembled in one body,” 2.31.2). And in the next season, even before the Spartans had left Attica and while the plague raged inside the city, Pericles led a formidable force of 100 ships, 400 hoplites, and 300 cavalrymen on a punitive expedition against the Peloponnese—all this from a man sixty-four years old and with a mere year to live.

2. See P. Krentz, “Deception,” 186–91; Pritchett, Greek State, 2.163–70. We must be careful in making such generalizations given the nature of our incomplete sources; that being said, in the fifty years following the Persian War, Krentz counts only ten instances of such unconventional tactics, which might suggest that the Peloponnesian War really was a watershed event in the history of Hellenic military practice.

3. 4.93.3 to 4.94.1. See also Rawlings, “Alternative Agonies,” 234–49, for the use of hoplites in the Peloponnesian War well apart from the phalanx. After the terrible hoplite defeat at Delium in 424 (cf. the context of Thucydides’ remark that Athens had no properly organized light-armed corps), Athens never again invaded Boeotia—except in 415 to dispatch the infamous Thracian peltasts under Diitrephes, who slaughtered the poor schoolboys at Mycalessus (7.29).

4. 4.28.4, 4.111.1; Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.2.1. “Peltast” originally denoted a Thracian light-armed warrior who carried on the forearm the crescent-shaped hide shield (peltê); but later it seems almost to have meant any light-armed soldier, without specific reference to either Thrace or the nature of his shield.

5. 6.43.2; cf. 2.81.8, 4.100.1. See Pritchett, Greek State, 5.7–10, for a list of stone throwers and slingers in the Peloponnesian War.

6. 4.55.2. Cf. Bugh, Horsemen, 94–95. The Spartans, remember, were not exactly unacquainted with diverse enemies. Their hoplites had fought and defeated Persian cavalry and archers at the battle of Plataea (479) and for some fifty years hence put down helot insurrectionists. The inadequate nature of the Spartan cavalry would be a chief complaint in the fourth century; cf. Xenophon, Hellenica, 6.4.10–11.

7. For laments about the new warfare, see the ancient citations in Hanson, “Hoplite Battle,” 204–06. Agrarian warfare prior to the Peloponnesian War assumed that a state would not bring to bear all its potential resources to conflict but fight in accordance with reigning cultural, political, and social protocols. Archers were objects of universal disdain in Greek literature; see the discussion of such passages in Hanson, Western Way of War, 15–16.

8. Controversy surrounds Periclean strategy: his defenders claim it was not defeatist or passive but, in fact, entailed a variety of offensive measures, such as these raids. Its chief supporter was Hans Delbrück (Warfare in Antiquity, 135–43), who, disillusioned over the carnage of World War I, saw Pericles as the progenitor of the strategy of “exhaustion” or “attrition” (Ermattungsstrategie), which was far preferable to the waste of “annihilation” (Niederwerfungsstrategie). Thus, a wealthy empire like Athens could win by not losing, tying the Spartans down in a variety of distant and diverse theaters while avoiding a knockout blow from their vaunted phalanx. On Tolmides, see Diodorus 11.84.3.

9. 2.25–32; Diodorus 12.42. For a modern catalog of these raids, see Westlake, “Seaborne Raids,” and Grundy, Thucydides, 346–59. For their expense, see Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, 436–37. Occasional resistance to Athenian raiding could be stiff. In Elis, for example, during the second reprisal of 430, the Athenians ravaged and besieged small towns with impunity, until the Eleans at last came out en masse to offer hoplite battle and thus quickly drove the Athenians back to their ships; cf. Diodorus 12.44.

10. The various elements of the Athenians’ first seaborne response are found at 2.23, 2.25, 2.26–27, 2.31. For the expense of Greek temples, see Gomme, Commentary, 2.22–25, which weighs ancient evidence that the Acropolis buildings may have cost more than 1,000 talents each, before concluding that they probably did not.

11. 3.95.2. For the attack on Thyraea, see Diodorus 12.65.8–9; on the Aetolians, cf. 3.98.2–5. There were about 300 hoplite marines committed to the campaign; so the butchery of the 120 meant losses in infantry alone of some 40 percent. There is uncertainty whether hoplites who embarked on triremes (epibatai) were from the hoplite (middle-class) census, or drawn from the ranks of the poorer (thetes).

12. 3.111–13. The irony of it all is that Athenians were bushwhacked in Aetolia by native light-armed troops and then a few months later themselves did the same to the Peloponnesians with the help of similar native tribes in Amphilochia. To those who were cut down in the mud and grime of these hilly backwaters, oligarchy versus democracy meant little, if anything.

13. Plato, Laws, 4.706 B—D. We must remember that Plato was talking mostly about Athens and drawing on the strong memories of youthful acquaintance with Socrates for the dramatic landscape of his dialogues. In Plato’s middle age, there were a number of fourth-century hoplite battles—Coronea, Nemea, Leuctra, second Mantinea—that belie his pessimism that the Greeks either could not or no longer would fight a “fair fight.”

14. 2.67, 2.90.5, 2.92; cf. Herodotus 7.137. Throughout the war there were Peloponnesian ships off the Megarian coast, enormous plunder taken around Pylos and Decelea, and constant Boeotian raids across the Attic border. At various times these zones of chaos were something altogether different from either war or peace—but apparently the domain of thieves, exiles, and killers; e.g., 3.51.2, 5.115.2, and Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, 12.4–5. The anonymous Oxyrhynchus historian reminds us that the Boeotians carted off goods from Attic farms that the Athenians themselves had plundered from others.

15. 3.32; cf. 2.67.4. In one of the great understatements voiced during the war, some Samian envoys visited Alcidas when he harbored at Ephesus and remonstrated with him that his policy of executing innocents who were probably unwilling subjects of Athens “was not a very good way of freeing Greece.” For the butchery of Alcidas and other examples of murdering during the Peloponnesian War, see Pritchett, Greek State, 5.212–15.

16. 3.34.2–4; 3.36. Behind the butchery of the two fleets was a larger strategic question. After four invasions of the Attic countryside and the loss of a quarter of the population to the plague, was there still the material strength and willpower to retain the empire—or could local oligarchs and a few Spartan ships cause widespread revolt that would soon stop money and food from entering the Piraeus?

18. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.1.30–32, 2.2.3–4. At war’s end in 404 there was at least some cooling of barbarous passions, in the sense that the Spartans themselves did not engage in wholesale executions of the captured populations, nor did the Athenian democrats who returned to power within the year mete out death sentences to the failed oligarchs associated with the Thirty Tyrants. Cf. Plutarch, Lysander, 9.5–7 and Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.1.31–2; we are not quite sure whether the decision was to cut off hands (to prevent rowing entirely) or merely thumbs (to guarantee no captive could ever again wield the spear). Cf. also Hamel, Athenian Generals, 51–52.

19. 4.80. Cf. Diodorus 12.67.3–5, which relates that the most prominent Spartans were entrusted with the grisly business of liquidating the 2,000. The tally of corpses is no guide to what captured the attention of ancient historians. Thus, the fate of these 2,000 helots merits a fraction of the narrative of the few hundred who died at Plataea or the long account of the 1,000 Mytilean rebels who were executed by Paches. See Cawkwell, Thucydides, 9. The mysterious massacre of somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 Polish officers in April 1940 by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk was part of a larger bloodbath that saw the Soviets eventually murder over another 20,000 Poles, whom they’d captured after dividing up the country with Hitler in autumn 1939. The Russians blamed the Nazis for the atrocity—at first a seemingly credible charge, given that they shot the officers with German bullets—and did not accept responsibility until the Gorbachev era.

20. 4.48; Although it was far more difficult to kill thousands with iron-edged weapons, we should not thereby think it taxed the ingenuity of the Greeks—after all, a less sophisticated Aztec priestly caste may have murdered over 80,000 in a mere four days with obsidian blades, exceeding the daily carnage of industrial murder at Auschwitz centuries later. The Aztec king Ahuitzotl inaugurated the Great Temple to Huitzilopochtli in Tenochtitlán by using four convex stone tables and rotations of fresh executioners to kill some fourteen victims a minute for some ninety-six hours. Cf. Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 194–95.

21. For a variety of statistics relating to the practice of insurrection and the use of traitors by both sides, see Losada, Fifth Column, 16–29.

22. Athenian subject states were prone to revolt after the Sicilian disaster, and in turn Spartans worried about their own allies after a series of reversals such as Sphacteria, Cyzicus, and Arginusae. A cynic might conclude that most Greeks had no strong political prejudices toward either democracy or moderate oligarchy but simply preferred to live under the political system that offered the greatest hope of peace and tranquillity, and thus made the appropriate corrections to match the ebb and flow of the war. For Thucydides’ famous metaphor of war as a “harsh schoolmaster” (biaios didaskalos), see 3.82.2.

23. On the slogans of revolutions and the role of intervening outside powers, see, in general, 3.82, and especially Lintott, Violence, 94–103. The nature of the mesoi is discussed in Hanson, Other Greeks, 179–218. For the class alliances of the hoplites at Athens, see Hanson, “Hoplites into Democrats,” 289–93.

24. See Plato, Seventh Letter, 322B–C. Part of the strange attraction of Athenian conservatives for Sparta was the notion that it embodied something like Athens’ prior rural past before the advent of empire. Thus, it is natural that part of the Spartan demands at war’s end was to force the Athenians to accept the “ancestral constitution” (patrios politeia) that had existed in the sixth century before the rise of the democracy. Cf. Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 34.3, and Diodorus 14.3.2.

25. 3.36.4. See the long, depressing account at 3.25–50. Cleon’s fingerprints seem to have been on a number of both audacious and bloodthirsty Athenian actions, from success on Sphacteria to failure at Amphipolis. Indeed, he may well have been behind the Athenian proposal in 430 to execute the Peloponnesian ambassadors captured in Thrace; cf. Gomme, Commentary, 2.201.

26. 3.75.3–5. The idea that there was now an enemy within remained constant throughout the rest of the war. In 411 the Athenian fleet off Samos was paralyzed for a time, unsure of the loyalty of crews after the political upheaval on the island (8.63.2).

27. 3.81.5. In the end, Corcyra remained an ally of Athens, and the thousands who died had no strategic effect on the outcome of the war. See a modern discussion by Price, Thucydides, 34–5, 274–77. The Spartan strategy in detaching from Athens important naval allies and subjects such as Mytilene and Corcyra was aimed at reducing the numerical superiority of the imperial fleet but also reflected that, for much of the first decade of the war, the Peloponnesians simply had no real idea of how to counter the military resources of Athens.

28. For surmises about numbers of those killed, see Lintott, Violence, 109; later violence on Corcyra and a long account of why stasis plagued the Greek world are discussed at Diodorus 13.48.

29. For the calamities on Chios and the executions at Samos, see 8.21, 8.24, 8.38, 8.40, 8.56, and 8.73–75. Chios, Lesbos, and Samos were among the most important subject states of the Athenian empire. The calamity on Sicily (wrongly) convinced them that, unlike earlier miscalculations during the plague years, Athens now really was weakened to such a degree as to be unable to patrol the Aegean with any real force.

30. Cf. 2.27.1–2, 5.1, 5.116 and Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.9. The war, of course, had begun with the effort to take Plataea, which upon surrender was cleansed of Plataeans and the land handed over to Boeotian opportunists.

31. For Sitalces’ war with Macedonia: 2.98; Messana: 4.1, 4.24; Epidaurus: 5.54.3–4, 5.55.2–4; Carthaginians and Sicily: Diodorus 13.44–115.

32. 4.2.4. “If he wished” (ên boulêtai). Usually the Athenian assembly exercised ironclad control over their generals in the field, who understood that failure, as Thucydides himself could attest, meant exile at best, with a death sentence not all that uncommon. Demosthenes seems not to have been an elected general at the time of Pylos.

33. 4.28.5. See Kagan, Archidamian War, 322–33, for a proper appraisal of Cleon’s military talents, which apparently were considerable despite the character assassination so prominent in both Thucydides’ history and Aristophanes’ early comedies. Cleon may have been one of the prominent demagogues responsible for Thucydides’ exile during the Amphipolis campaign a few years later.

34. For Thucydides’ various quotes, see 4.32.4, 4.34, 4.40.1–2. Thucydides often places great weight on morale and reputation. While the Pylos campaign made sense strategically (and should have led to even more helot defections), the real importance was more intangible, involving the ability of a successful power to transmit fear and win respect.

35. See Diodorus 11.72 (Sicily); Herodotus 5.31 (Naxos); Thucydides 8.40 (Chios) and 7.27.5 (more than 20,000 Attic slaves that fled to Decelea). On the fall of Pylos in 409, see Diodorus 13.64.6.

36. For a sampling of Spartan paranoia, see 4.41.3, 4.55.1, 4.80.2–3, 4.108.7, 4.117.1–2, 5.14.3, 5.15.1, and 5.34.2. For the number of slaves involved in the fighting on both sides and their strategic importance during the war, see Hunt, Slaves, 56–101. Cf. Thucydides 4.41. Kagan, Archidamian War, 248–51, has a good analysis of how the psychological trauma of the Spartan loss translated into immediate Athenian strategic advantage.

37. 4.55.3–4. To fathom the Peloponnesian War it is crucial to understand that the capture of 120 Spartiates affected the Spartans as much as the plague and the Sicilian expedition (an aggregate 120,000 or so dead) did the Athenians. Spartans were just as resolute as Athenians, but there were simply not many of their elite left when the war broke out in 431.

38. For Thucydides’ observations about the effects of the new Athenian confidence in raiding, fortifying, and plundering the Peloponnese, cf. 4.45, 4.53, 4.55.3–4, and 4.80.1.

39. On Brasidas’ various successes in northern Greece, see 4.85–87; 4.105, 4.110–13, and 4.120–35; many of these events are discussed later under sieges. For his career, see Cartledge, Spartans, 185–97. And for his corps of former helots, see Hunt, Slaves, 58–60, 116–17.

40. 3.114, 4.118, 5.18, 5.23, 5.77, and 5.79; cf. 8.18. Formal treaties inscribed on stone (as reported by historians)—as state documents rather than private narratives—are good indicators that once atypical conduct in war had now become enshrined as part of contemporary Hellenic custom and practice.

41. 5.84, 6.61, 8.65.2, 8.90. On Alcibiades’ more nefarious schemes in general during the war, see Ellis, Alcibiades, 72–97, and Henderson, Great War, 291–97.

Chapter 5

1. Herodotus 7.9; Plutarch, Pericles, 33.4. Herodotus finished his Persian War histories perhaps in the first decade of the Peloponnesian War, at a time when the general course and duration of the conflict were still unclear. True, Pericles may well have actually said what Plutarch wrote; but the biographer compiled his biography in the Roman era almost five hundred years later, with knowledge of the Athenian hoplite disaster at Delium and the alliance’s failure at Mantinea.

2. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.1.33; Diodorus 13.72.3 From Diodorus’ account the Spartans went to absurd lengths to draw the Athenians out from their walls by setting up a victory trophy in front of the Academy and challenging the Athenians to ease their humiliation by coming out and contesting the monument in open phalanx battle. But shame as a catalyst to battle had been discredited since 431.

3. 3.91. In some ways, such small successes misled the Athenians terribly about the quality of leadership needed for the Sicilian expedition of 415–413. The general Nicias had a fine record at Solygia and Tanagra, both brief, small amphibious operations of limited scope. The problem was that these mostly inconsequential victories were sometimes equated with strategic wisdom and thus served as models for future operations—with disastrous consequences, as Delium and Sicily both showed. By the same token, Demosthenes’ own setbacks in Aetolia and Boeotia might have warned the Athenians that his impetuousness did not always lead to triumphs like Amphilochia or Pylos—and thus that he really was a questionable figure to lead the second armada to save the first in Sicily.

4. Diodorus 12.69.2. Perhaps due to the modern fascination with special operations (as, for example, in the various Israeli counterinsurgency and rescue missions) or the mystique of intelligence (as in the case of the ULTRA intercepts of German intentions in World War II), we tend to see Demosthenes as a visionary who sought to avoid simplistic hoplite battles or conventional sea fights. In fact, most of his campaigns were poorly thought out, and when they went awry led not to stalemate but to retreat, if not abject defeat. See the sober assessment of Roisman, General Demosthenes, 73–74.

5. 5.14.1. We must be careful here in downplaying entirely the role of hoplite battle based on the evidence of its relative infrequency during the war. Given the clarity and hallowed tradition of such fighting, it retained a psychological importance that went well beyond the numbers who died in any one encounter. Had the Athenians won at Delium or their allies at Mantinea, in a few hours they could quite literally have changed the course of the war. By the same token, the key figures that did alter late-fifth-century and fourth-century Greek history—Brasidas, Cleon, Lysander, Cleombrotus, Pelopidas, and Epaminondas—all died in hoplite armor on the battlefield.

6. The battle is described at 4.93–96; cf. 5.72–73 for the battle of Mantinea. Diodorus 12.69–71 adds some valuable details on Delium omitted by Thucydides, such as the postwar establishment of a Delia, a commemorative Theban festival funded by the spoils of the battle. For a modern account of the engagement, see Hanson, Ripples of Battle, 171–243. For the details of the Athenian objectives in the campaign, see Roisman, General Demosthenes, 33–41.

7. 4.96.3–6. Accidental killing would occur again during the Athenian night attack on the heights above Syracuse (7.44.1), but unfamiliarity with the rough terrain and darkness explains most of the confusion. Here we are reminded how dust, the density of formations, and the heavy infantry helmet could impair vision—or was it also in part not the senses per se but the sheer panic and fright of such close fighting that instead account for the irrational behavior? For the passages in ancient literature attesting to the common disorientation inherent in ancient hoplite battles, see Hanson, Western Way of War, 185–93.

8. See Thucydides 7.44.1, remarking on the disastrous night attack above Syracuse.

9. 1.15.2. Plato, Republic, 2.373E. On the historical importance of hoplite ideology, and scholarly controversy as to its origins and in Greek culture and society, see the review of the arguments in Hanson, “Hoplite Battle,” 230–32; cf. 213–15, 221. Occasional exceptions and alternatives to hoplite battle, which were usually lamented as such by the Greeks, are more likely to prove rather than refute the idea that the preferred and idealized way of settling disputes until the fifth century remained decisive fighting between phalanxes.

10. Aristotle, Politics, 4.1297b16; Herodotus, 9.7.2; cf. 1.82; Strabo, 10.1.12; Polybius, 13.3–6; Demosthenes, Third Philippic, 48–50. The changing attitudes toward hoplite warfare from the sixth to fourth centuries are reviewed, with discussion of ancient passages, in Hanson, Other Greeks, 321–49.

11. 1.106.2, 4.133.1–2, 4.40.2. “Best” and the “flower” are often the terms used by Thucydides to suggest that a dead hoplite, especially if killed by a semibarbarian, light-armed skirmisher, or someone poorer, was a far more grievous loss than a sailor, javelin thrower, or archer. For hoplite chauvinism, see Aristophanes, Peace, 1208–64, 1214–17, 1260–63, and Euripides, Phoenician Women, 1095–96.

12. 5.75.3. Thucydides implies not so much that the victory at Mantinea proved that the Spartans were always invincible in war or that their trust in the supremacy in hoplite battle was sound. Rather, he means that through the trauma they inflicted on other Greeks in such a visible way at Mantinea, they made the rest of Greece realize that their own previous setbacks were due to bad luck rather than a fatal lapse in the old Spartan courage—and that such popular conceptions were vital in winning a war in which hundreds of Greek city-states had no real discernible ideology other than ensuring that they ended up on the winning side.

13. “A thing of fear”: Pindar, fragment 120.5; cf. Thucydides 5.70. Lazenby, Spartan Army, 42–44, 125–34, is exhaustive in his collation of ancient sources to support his reconstruction of the battle, one prompted by his own undeniable admiration for the men of the Spartan phalanx. For a philological discussion of Thucydides’ battle description of Mantinea, see Gomme et al., Commentary, 5.89–130. There are imaginative illustrations of Spartan hoplites in Sekunda and Hook, Spartan Army, 33–44. See also Thucydides 6.16.6; cf. 5.74.1.

14. 4.126. In general, the Greeks had a variety of strange ideas about what constituted a “civilized” society and what in turn relegated a people to the loose category of “barbarians.” Among the diverse criteria were things such as speaking fluent Greek; living in centralized autonomous city-states; farming trees, vines, and grain rather than herding; eating familiar Mediterranean foods (i.e., neither feasting on exotic animals nor drinking milk); and fighting as hoplites in the disciplined ranks of the phalanx.

15. For various passages illustrating the nature of Greek generalship, see 4.44.2, 4.101.2, 5.60.6, 5.74.3, 7.5.2–3, and 7.8.2. Cf. also Hanson, Western Way of War, 107–16. Hamel has a valuable discussion of the short leash given to Athenian commanders by a mercurial Athenian assembly: Athenian Generals, 44–74; on fatalities, see 204–09.

16. 4.93.4; 5.7l3. Most scholars see real tactical innovations in hoplite battle emerging only with the career of Epaminondas at Leuctra. For a different view that Greeks as early as the Peloponnesian War massed in depth beyond eight shields, sometimes used cavalry and reserves with hoplites, and in various contexts put their best troops on the left, see in general the summation of arguments in Hanson, “Epaminondas,” 205–07.

17. Lysias, 14.7, 14.10–15; cf. Plato, Republic, 8.556D. Perhaps we see the social divide best in the careers of the aristocratic and mounted estate-owning Alcibiades and his poorer stone-mason mentor, Socrates, who fought on foot at two battles and a siege. For a long list of ancient passages that privilege hoplite over cavalry service, see Spence, Cavalry, 168–72.

18. 4.96.3–6; 7.44.7–8. It was worse than that: not only did some armies lack distinctive letters or insignia on their shields, but inasmuch as most phalanxes used about the same type of equipment, it was nearly impossible, even without the normal dust, to distinguish friend from foe by appearance.

19. 5.11, 5.74, 6.71.1; cf. 4.97.1, 4.134.2. Lest we think hoplite battle is a sidelight of Greek culture and marginal to the more heralded legacy of Hellenic civilization, we should remember that our modern “trophy” is simply a transliteration of tropê (“a turning”)—the ceremonial spot where the enemy phalanx gave way and victory was thus assured.

20. 5.73.4. Perhaps the Spartan disdain for pursuit reflects not merely the practical difficulties of running in full armor after the defeated or the heralded Spartan restraint regarding killing in less than a fair fight but, rather, inborn Laconian arrogance: why chase the defeated when one can easily defeat them on any occasion should they foolishly attempt to hazard their luck again? In contrast, the Boeotians, for example, at Delium chased the Athenians for miles to the Oropus and over Mount Parnes—a retreat that quickly turned into a mythic collective nightmare for the next few decades.

21. The aftershocks of Delium are discussed in Hanson, Ripples, 199–212. For a Greek, at least before the later years of the Peloponnesian War, a man delighted or ruined his family not so much by dying as by doing so either heroically or shamefully. For the ridicule of Cleonymus at Delium, see Aristophanes, Peace, 446, 672, 1295; and cf. Birds, 289, 1475. For the noble aspidephoros: Birds, 1095–96.

22. Strauss offers conjectures about the total number of Athenian hoplite and thetic dead in the war (Athens After, 80–81). We have few reliable figures for how many Spartans died during the war but must keep in mind Thucydides’ warning about Mantinea, that when dealing with Spartan disclosures about casualties “it is difficult to know the truth” (5.74.3; cf. 5.68.2). For the percentages of those killed in hoplite battle, see the study by Krentz, “Casualties.”

23. 6.17.5–6. Alcibiades also claimed that states had trouble getting hoplites—implying that they wanted such assets but found the old agrarian classes who made up the ranks of the phalanx too few and far between in a new-style war that ranged from Sicily to Asia Minor. I am not so sure he is correct; in the war’s aftermath there were plenty of hoplite mercenaries to join the Ten Thousand in Asia Minor, most from Arcadia and Achaea, areas mostly untouched by the war, while hardly any came from Attica, which had been ravaged extensively; cf. Garlan, War, 102–03.

24. See Plato, Laws, 4.707C—E. For “moronic,” cf. 5.41.2. George S. Patton was said to have wished to fight Rommel tank to tank, his Sherman against the panzer leader’s Panther. And in the heated rhetoric leading up to the Iraq War of spring 2003, Saddam Hussein was reported to have challenged George W. Bush to a personal duel to decide the fate of his Baathist regime.

25. 1.141.5. Whereas the Athenian land army would have met defeat in any battle with the Spartan phalanx, it is still not clear whether such a significant home force of 30,000 infantrymen was all that outnumbered or outmanned by the Peloponnesian forces during the later annual invasions.

26. 4.34.1. We receive some of the idea of the psychological element central to hoplite battle when Thucydides here remarks that the Athenians “were suffering greatly” from the very thought of fighting Spartans.

27. Eighty-three battles: Paul, “Two Battles,” 308. There is a plethora of evidence in Thucydides on the pivotal role of skirmishers and light-armed troops and the vulnerability of hoplites to such forces. In general, see the surprising variety of scenarios where light-armed troops were used effectively: 2.29.5, 2.31.2–3, 2.79.4, 2.100, 3.1.2, 3.98, 3.107–08, 4.34.1–2, 4.44.1, 4.123.4, 5.10.9, 6.21, 6.70.2–3, 7.4.6, 7.6.2–3, 7.81–82.

28. 4.40.2, 4.73.2–4. It is not clear whether by the time of the outbreak of the war the soldiers of the phalanx were still largely farmers, who as in the past had earned such prestigious hoplite service by owning enough land (about ten acres) to meet the requisite census rubric, or those who now had enough money to buy the arms and armor, or the poorer who were simply drafted and armed by the state.

29. Untraditional battle: 5.56.4–5; Aristophanes, Clouds, 987–90; cf. Plato, Laws, 4.706A—B. Symmetrical warfare—fighting in similar fashions and landscapes between two evenly matched powers—can, of course, lead to atrocious casualties if both sides follow the deadly protocols of Western warfare. Wars from the Roman Civil Wars to Verdun prove that well enough.

30. 4.42–44. Indeed, a symptom of the malaise of Greek society during the Peloponnesian War was the steady erosion in the treatment of the dead, brought about by the sheer frequency of killing and dying, and the growing hatred between Greeks, as we see from the rotting bodies at plague-ridden Athens, the exposure of corpses after Delium, the abandonment of those wounded and the remains of the killed amid the waves after Arginusae, and the apparently common practice of throwing captured crews overboard on the high seas. See, for example, Pritchett, Greek State, 4.235–41.

31. See 4.134 and 3.91. Thucydides’ genius was that he saw that all of the Greeks’ secondary fighting for some three decades was in some way caught up with the Spartan-Athenian death struggle, tangential though these border skirmishes might have been to the larger outcome of that war.

32. 5.10–12. On the rare parataxis of the Peloponnesian War, see Pritchett, Greek State, 4.45–51.

33. 4.55.4, 4.56.1. We are not sure whether Thucydides made these characteristically sweeping appraisals as events transpired or inserted such summations in his final draft after the war was completed and with the benefit of hindsight. That ambiguity may explain his peculiar redundancy in announcing a series of critical turning points—the plague, Mantinea, Sphacteria, Sicily—that all supposedly changed the course of the war, but then failing to distinguish which of these, in fact, were the more important of the landmark events.

34. On Agis’ army, see 5.60.3. For Thucydides’ various pronouncements about the importance of Argos’ new independent stance and the ultimate significance of Mantinea, see 5.29.1–3, 5.66.2–3; cf. 1.141.2.

35. See, for example, 5.71–72; Xenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, 11; Herodotus 9.53–55; Plutarch, Moralia, 241F.

36. For inscriptions that may record the dead from the 418 battle, see the arguments in Pritchett, Topography, 2.50–52; cf. also his War, 4.143–44; his identification of the Mantinean dead of 418 with the inscription remains tentative.

37. Again, see 5.68.2; cf. 5.74.2. Mantinea was Thucydides’ model battle, and from it we are to surmise what the fighting was probably like earlier at Delium and Solygia, or later at Syracuse as well. For an analysis of the fighting, see J. Lazenby, Spartan Army, 125–34, and Peloponnesian War, 121–29. Lazenby’s careful reconstruction is augmented by Kagan, Peace, 107–35; Grote, Greece, 7.75–93; and Gomme, Commentary, 3.89–127.

38. Diodorus 12.79.6. There is some disagreement over this notion of “collusion.” Kagan, Peace, 131–33, has a brief discussion of Spartan motivations. For the larger question of to what degree armies predicated their tactics on the precise nature of the enemy across the battle line, see Hanson, “Hoplite Obliteration,” 206–07, for instances in Greek history where hoplite armies seem to be especially cognizant of the quality of troops directly opposite them on the battlefield—and sometimes made critical political decisions in response.

39. On the Thespians’ postbellum fate, cf. 4.133 and Hanson, “Hoplite Obliteration,” 208–14.

40. 6.69–71. The nature of the Syracusan campaign reflects the logistical problems with hoplite warfare once it was asked to transcend the three-day-march radius of normal operations. To transport an army of some 5,100 hoplites—about the number in the first armada sent to Sicily—not only were a large number of ships needed but accommodations had to be made for some two hundred tons of bronze, iron, and wooden panoplies along with personal servants to carry such appurtenances. Thus, even if the hoplites could double as rowers—and more often they did not, but rather were auxiliary marines in numbers ranging from 10 to 30 per ship—a fleet of perhaps some 60 ships was needed to transport soldiers, servants, and equipment.

Chapter 6

1. The siege is infamous largely because of Thucydides’ long description of the lengthy ordeal (2.3–4, 2.71–78, 3.20–24, 3.52–53, 3.68). Certainly, there were other, much larger states that were sacked or captured during the war—Potidaea, Mytilene, Melos—about whose death throes we learn little. Plataea’s proximity to Athens and the assault’s role in starting the conflagration gave it an importance not commensurate with its small size or strategic worth. In addition, because it was the first siege of the war, and a complex one at that, Thucydides uses it as a template of sorts that allows abbreviated mention of later assaults in his history. In general, cf. Hornblower, Commentary, 1.236–42; Kern, Siege Warfare, 97–108.

2. See Pritchett, Greek State, 5.218–19, for a list of such mini-holocausts, which suggests the greater frequency of sieges that explains the rise of mass killing.

3. 3.68.4. But nothing was quite “the end” when it was a matter of the internecine fighting of the Greek city-states. Plataea was resettled after the war—and renewed its time-honored hatred of the Thebans.

4. Thucydides (1.11)believed that the earlier Greeks simply lacked the capital to carry on sieges of any magnitude. In addition, before the rise of maritime powers like Corinth, Athens, and Syracuse, most city-states were agrarian in nature, their citizens farmers who could ill afford months away from their crops to invade or besiege a foreign city.

5. 1.102.2. See Herodotus 9.70.2 and 9.102.2–4, for the idea that the Athenians’ reputation for skill in taking fortifications predated the Persian War. Athenian democrats saw no problem in helping Spartans put down restive helots—an enslaved people whose liberation would have to wait for the great emancipator Epaminondas and his famous invasion of 369.

6. 5.91.1–2, 5.111.1–2. The key qualifier here was “due to the fear.” In fact, the Athenians abandoned a disastrous siege in Egypt in 454, and a few months after this exchange with the Melians would suffer mayhem in Sicily—but only after sustaining horrendous losses before quitting.

7. 4.51; cf. 4.133. Walls seem to have induced a fear at Athens as much as the chimera of weapons of mass destruction did to the American government after September II.

8. 1.29.5; 1.98.4. For a narrative of these brutal sieges, see Meiggs, Athenian Empire, 68–174. We sometimes forget that while Aeschylus and Sophocles presented their tragedies and Pericles began to envision a majestic Acropolis, the Athenian empire grew through the bloody subjugation of autonomous states that by their dogged resistance apparently wanted little part of such a renaissance. For most Greek communities local autonomy could be a more powerful desire than even enforced democracy.

9. Aristotle, Politics, 1255A; cf. Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 7.5.73, and Euripides, Hecuba, 808–12. We do not know how most were reduced to slave status in the Greek world, but other than being born to servile parents or falling victim to kidnapping, the aftermath of sieges seems to have been the most common avenue of enslavement.

10. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.12–15. Within a decade after Athens’ defeat, the Athenians began to grow more hostile to Thebes than to Sparta. Athenians and Spartans later served side by side as mercenaries in the march with Cyrus the Younger (401), and joined to fight Epaminondas at the second battle of Mantinea (362).

11. On enslavement, see Pritchett, Greek State, 5.227–30. Most often we are told that “all” or “not a few” were enslaved, rather than given specific figures.

12. 4.115.1–3, 4.116.1–2; cf. 5.83.2. Brasidas is clearly one of Thucydides’ favorites, given the former’s brilliant strategy to hit the Athenian empire far to the north, and to do so largely with land forces acting independently, far from home, and without supply lines, in a manner reminiscent of the 1864–65 long marches of William Tecumseh Sherman through Georgia and the Carolinas, where he likewise lived off the land and sought to bring the war home behind traditional lines.

13. On the fate of the generals, see Hamel, Athenian Generals, 43–44. Usually, the assembly exercised almost complete control of the conduct of armies in the field, any independent-thinking generals knowing quite well that at the end of the campaign they would have to face a moody Athenian citizenry that through a simple majority vote might well exile, fine, or execute any commanders whom they felt to have been nonaggressive.

14. 5.111.1, 5.113.1; cf. Grote, Greece, 7.114. In one of the great ironies in Thucydides’ history, the Athenians are made to mock the Melians’ solace in “hope” (“hope—danger’s comforter,” 5.103.1)—that perhaps succor might still come yet from Sparta. Yet less than three years later Nicias would offer an almost identical Melian argument to his own trapped and about to be extinguished army of some 40,000, reminding them not to quit but to remember that “it is necessary to have hope.” Cf. 7.77.I.

15. Euripides, Hecuba, 132–33, 454–57; Trojan Women, 95–98; Phoenician Women, 1195, 884; cf. 882. To the degree that we can detect a consistent ideology about the war, it is more likely that Euripides objected to the needless slaughter of civilians and neutrals, which, in his view, could only weaken the Athenian effort to win Hellenic “hearts and minds.”

16. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.3–4; cf. Hellenica, 2.1.15. What saved the Athenians from suffering the fate that they had so often meted out to others? Perhaps three considerations: Athens was an enormous city of some 100,000 urban residents with a preeminent reputation for cultural achievement; a right-wing cabal was in the process of creating a government sympathetic to Sparta; and the Spartans themselves were already growing suspicious of their onetime allies the Thebans, who had suffered and contributed relatively little during the war, argued over the booty collected from Attica, and were soon to challenge Sparta itself for the hegemony of Greece.

17. 7.29.4–5. In Thucydides’ narrative the fact that the peltasts are Thracian is presented to explain their brutality and gratuitous killing of animals and children; but given the random slaughter of civilians at Corcyra, it is hard to see how the Thracians were any more callous or cowardly than the Greeks on occasion.

18. Cannibalism: 2.70.1. Centuries later, during Sulla’s siege of Athens (87–86), cannibalism was reported to be widespread; when his legionaries entered the city they found preparations of human flesh in many of the kitchens (Appian, Mithridatic War, 38).

19. On various forms of bloodletting, see 2.5.7, 2.67.4, 3.32.1, 3.50, 3,81,2, 4.57.3–4, 4.80, 5.83.2, 5.116, 7.29.5, 8.21, 8.38.3, and Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.19–20. Compare these slaughters with the two hoplite battles of Delium and Mantinea to appreciate either how war itself had changed or that the Peloponnesian “War” was not so much an interstate conflict as a messy civil war between landed pro-Spartan oligarchs and poorer pro-Athenian democrats. For captives, see Pritchett, War, 1.78–79. His figures include only those instances where a specific number of prisoners is provided; the real tally was far higher.

20. Aeneas Tacticus, 1.1.2. Aeneas wrote in the mid-fourth century at a time when city-states sought to invest in fortifications as never before—perhaps in response to the carnage of the Peloponnesian War. While the technology of hoplite battle continued to remain static after 404, the arts of siegecraft—artillery, rams, masonry, and architecture—were transformed and refined following the fall of Athens.

21. Minoa: 3.51; Lecythus: 4.115.3. It is hard to know whether innovative siege techniques—the mound at Plataea, the tower at Lecythus, or the fire cannon at Delium—were ad hoc affairs or reflections of incipient breakthroughs in the art of siegecraft. For the difficulty of old-style hoplites mounting ramparts, see Ober, “Hoplites,” 180–88.

22. Samos: Diodorus 12.28; Plutarch, Pericles, 27; cf. 7.43.1. For the elaborate preparations at Potidaea and the machines, see Diodorus 12.45. “Rams” is a vague term; it could cover anything from ad hoc timber and ropes to sophisticated metal-plated sheds on wheels that protected bronze-tipped rams.

23. 4.88.1. Why did Acanthus surrender on the arrival of enemy ravagers when, for example, Athens did not? From Thucydides’ description it seems that Acanthus was entirely dependent on income from its vintage, and may well have had little grain stored, much less a protected port and superiority at sea, which could ensure a steady supply of imported food.

24. See Ducrey, Warfart, 166–68. The great exception, of course, was Syracuse, which was neither stormed nor handed over through negotiations—the one great failure that destroyed the supposed vaunted reputation of Athenian siege engineers.

25. Spartan claims about the need for an unwalled Greece: 1.90.2, 1.91.7.

26. Plato, Laws, 778D—779A. For the general philosophical sentiment against walls, see Ober, Fortress Attica, 50–63, which notes a difference in attitudes emerging during the post—Peloponnesian War fourth century, when the populace no longer believed that either urban fortifications or the martial prowess of their armies were sufficient to protect the entire citizenry. Cf. Thucydides 1.5.1 on the unfortified nature of the early Greek city-state; and for a history of the rise of wall building among the Greek city-states in the aftermath of the Persian Wars, see Winter, Greek Fortifications, 300–08. For the Athenian promotion of fortifications at Argos and Patras cf. 5.82.

27. After the calamity of 413, about the only other city that Athens sought to besiege was Chios, where a civil war threatened to lead to mass rebellion in the empire (e.g., 8.55–56).

Chapter 7

1. The various reasons why the Athenians thought it necessary to go to Sicily—treaties, empire, pride, profit, and advantage against Sparta—are discussed by both Thucydides (6.15–18) and Plutarch (Nicias, 12.4). Thucydides has Alcibiades provide the Athenians with a variety of antebellum reasons to sail, and then ex post facto explain to the Spartans the true Athenian intent of the expeditions, leaving us in somewhat of a quandary as to when, where—and if—Alcibiades was telling the truth.

2. 8.2.I. The expedition of 427: 3.86.4. Opportunistic neutrals were also wrong in their predictions that Athens would shortly capitulate after the debacle on Sicily. As a general rule throughout the war, observers usually overestimated Athenian power in the wake of its successes and underrated its resiliency after abject defeats, failing to understand that Athens was by far the most powerful polis, and yet not so strong in and of itself to master or even unite the other fifteen hundred states of the Greek world.

3. For grain and the strategy to go to Sicily, see Diodorus 12.54.23. Peter Green’s account of the invasion is predicated on the idea that food was the primary motive for the Athenian invasion; see Armada, 16–19. True, his book was written prior to more sophisticated comparative studies of the food-producing capacity of Attica, which tend to downplay the poverty of Athenian domestic grain resources. But Green pays close attention to our literary sources and is right in arguing that at least the Greeks themselves felt that Attica needed imported food and that Sicily was a good place to get it. On the idea of stopping potential Sicilian aid to the Peloponnesians, cf. 6.6.2 and 6.10.4.

4. 6.91.3–4. As in all of Alcibiades’ reported speeches, the problem is not just that he distorted facts and analyses for his own personal interest but that so often his assessments were nevertheless astute, if for entirely different reasons from those he intended. After all, after Athens was defeated on Sicily, the security of the Peloponnese was remarkably enhanced and that of Athens herself almost irreparably harmed. Thucydides said that “the truest pretext” was the Athenian desire to add all of Sicily to its empire (e.g., 6.6.1).

5. Kagan, Peace, 159–91, reviews the various pretexts for the invasion. Thucydides’ particulars of the great debate to go to Sicily are found variously at 6.8–25. Until Thucydides grasped that the Sicilian campaign and what followed was a continuum from the Archidamian War, most contemporary Greeks may well have seen them as two separate wars: an initial conflict with Sparta that ended in stalemate in 421, and then an entirely separate Sicilian War that broke out in 415 and ended in Athens’ defeat by Syracuse two years later—which led to a second, distinct round of the old hostilities with Sparta that dragged on until 404–403, until the ultimate defeat and occupation of Athens. Athens’ finances: Andocides 3.8; Thucydides 6.26.2.

6. 7.55.2, 8.1.4, 8.96.5. Most inhabitants of Sicily were Greek speakers from the time of the colonizing movements of centuries earlier. For the logic of Athens defending the poor abroad, see Xenophon, Constitution of the Athenians, 3.10–12. See also Thucydides’ equally well-known encomia to the resiliency of Athens in the face of overwhelming odds at 2.65 and 7.27–28. On these inherent advantages of ancient democracies at war, cf. Hanson, “Democratic Warfare,” 24–26; Carnage and Culture, 27–59.

7. 6.43–44. Diodorus (13.2.5) gives even higher numbers. If we think that 10,000 Athenian hoplites and perhaps as many as 600 cavalry marched out yearly (or perhaps even twice annually) to plunder and ravage Megarid (and yet could not take the nearby city), it is difficult to believe that not more than 5,000 hoplites, essentially without mounted escort, could do much against a city and its countryside with a resident population of about 250,000 and with numerous allies and subject states spanning a far distant island of some 10,000 square miles.

8. For the importance of presenting an image of strength upon arrival, see variously 6.11.4, 6.18, and 6.44.8–9. If Alcibiades thought political alliances with Sicilian states might defeat Syracuse, and Nicias counted on betrayal and treachery to deliver Syracuse, Lamachus at least grasped that only hard, prompt fighting could win the war.

9. See 2.79. There is a sort of hoplite mania in the speeches leading up to the voyage: Alcibiades claims that the Syracusan rabble are hardly the sort of people who can field an army of hoplites (6.17.4–5). In turn, Nicias, although giving passing mention to the light-armed, missile, and mounted troops that must counteract Syracusan cavalry, harps that “it seems to me that it is necessary for us to take along lots of hoplites, both our own and those of the allies, and in addition any we are able to get from the Peloponnese either through pay or persuasion” (6.21.2). Yet hoplites would play almost no role in preventing Athenian defeat or ensuring Syracusan victory—in fact, after 418 they would be irrelevant in deciding the Peloponnesian War.

10. Diodorus 13.7.5–6. Both the ease with which the Athenians had defeated the hoplite army of Syracuse and their abject failure to follow up the victory made a profound impression on the generals, who belatedly realized that they had sorely miscalculated the type of forces necessary to take the city.

11. For the details of the campaign, see 6.64–82. Cf. Polyaenus, Stratagems, 1.39.2, on horse traps. Despite the rout and flight, only 260 Syracusans were killed, a fraction of the city’s available forces. “The cavalrymen of the Syracusans, being numerous and undefeated in the battle, checked them—and if they spied any of the hoplites running ahead in pursuit they fell upon them and drove them away” (6.70.3).

12. Note that Alcibiades’ tale of his proposed combined land and sea operations against the Peloponnesians actually offered Athens the only real hope of defeating Sparta—an irony when such an insightful strategy seems to have been aired only to enemies and under circumstances of dubious veracity. On purported Athenian imperial ambitions, see 6.90. Cf. Plutarch, Pericles, 20.3–4, for the idea that the Athenians wished to expand their empire to include Egypt as well.

13. 6.95–98. Diodorus claimed that they were able to assemble 800 horsemen. Because of the poor state of Greek siegecraft, both Alcibiades before his recall and Nicias more likely expected to take Syracuse through a variety of political machinations and intrigue, when the best hope was always to have sailed directly to Syracuse and either defeated a reckless enemy in a massive hoplite battle or begun immediate circumvallation by land and blockade by sea—as was more or less advanced by Lamachus on arrival in summer 415.

14. Syracusan despair: 6.103.3. The entire idea of sending thousands of precious sailors and infantrymen abroad while thousands of enemies invaded Attica underscores the irony of the Sicilian expedition. By the same token, disease played a pivotal role in the campaign, but mostly by enervating the Athenians, who had unwisely encamped in the low-lying marshes around the harbor. The relative vulnerability of Syracuse to circumvallation and maritime blockade, coupled with an unhealthy climate in much of its environs, made it susceptible to plague during a time of siege. But lethal disease struck not in 414, during the Athenian siege, but in 406, when the Carthaginians sought to cut off the city—and it had the desirable effect of sending the invaders back to North Africa with thousands dead rather than reducing the city (Diodorus 13.114).

15. One of the keys to the Spartans’ successful siege of Plataea was that well before building their elaborate double wall of circumvallation, they had first constructed a rough ad hoc rampart around the city, to start the clock of famine and isolation as soon as possible. Had the Athenians upon arrival thrown up a makeshift wall, and then gradually replaced it with a permanent double rampart, Syracuse might have been near capitulation by spring of the next year. But such audacity required a confident general and horsemen to ward off mounted counterattacks. Cf. 5.28 for Spartan depression on the eve of the peace of 421, and for the peace in general, see Lazenby, Peloponnesian War, 106–10.

16. 7.2.4. During the subsequent brutal tyranny of Dionysius I (405–367), the entire upper city was brought into the city’s fortification to prevent just the type of siege that the Athenians had attempted in 414. For Titus’ siege of Jerusalem (seventeen days spent on earthen work, three days to wall around the city), see Josephus, Jewish War, 5.502, 509; cf. 5.46.

17. A cynic might read the sudden desire of Greek states—on Sicily, the mainland, and among the islands—to help Syracuse as confirmation of sorts that many nations can entertain little ideology other than ending up on the winning side; cf. 7.18, 19, 21 for a list of the new diverse allies of a Syracuse on the rebound.

18. See the historian’s famous remarks at 7.42, where he states that the Syracusans were “stunned” at the appearance of Demosthenes’ relief forces, wondering “whether there would ever be any relief from their danger”—inasmuch as “despite the fortification of Decelea, an army, equal or almost equal to the first one, had now reinforced it, and that the power of Athens seemed to be considerable in almost every place.” Earlier he concluded that despite the antebellum prognosis that Athens would not last more than three years, they had not only held their own against the Peloponnesians for seventeen but had now undertaken a distant additional conflict in no way inferior to the first. In Thucydides’ judgment all this was nearly unfathomable; cf. 7.27.

19. 7.44.1. Even during the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks rarely fought at night—except to make an approach on a city’s walls in hopes of finding the ramparts unguarded, as happened in the Theban assault on Plataea and a later attempt from Decelea by King Agis to catch the Athenians napping (Diodorus 13.72–73).

20. 7.69–73. Or as Diodorus reports the Athenians exclaiming, “Do you think we can return home by land?”

21. 7.87.6; cf. Diodorus, 13.19.2, 13.21.1, and 13.30.3–7, for discussion over the fate of the captives, and for the figure of 18,000 killed at the Assinarus and 7,000 captured, in total more than 40,000 lost in all who were sent to Sicily. For controversy over the number who actually perished in the last days of the campaign, see Gomme et al., Commentary, 4.452; Green, Armada, 352–53, and 340–44, for a few names of the dead. A decade later a speaker in the Athenian assembly could brag that as a cavalryman he had persisted in raids on the Syracusans from Catana, and gathered plunder to ransom prisoners from the quarries; cf. Lysias 20.24. By way of modern analogy, in 1955 there were still 2,000 German prisoners in Soviet hands—out of an original 120,000 captives—who had survived the Stalingrad disaster, and who were released twelve years after the battle through the intervention of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s visit to Moscow. Cf. Antony Beevor, Stalingrad, 430–31.

22. From both vase paintings and literary evidence we know quite a lot above the nature of both ancient riders and their mounts. For the pragmatics of classical Greek cavalry and horses, see the relevant discussions in four recent standard works: I. Spence, Cavalry, 35–120; Gaebel, Cavalry Operations, 19–31; Bugh, Horsemen, 20–35; Worley, Hippeis, 83–122.

23. Perhaps the Greek disdain for horses was best exemplified by the defiant quip made by Xenophon (who wrote handbooks on the proper command of cavalry and the art of horsemanship) that unlike infantrymen, mounted troops had to fear falling as well as fighting enemy hoplites (Anabasis, 3.2.19). In fact, there is an entire corpus of passages in Greek literature that reflect the chauvinism of the hoplite in regards to the horseman. Cf. Hanson, Other Greeks, 247–48.

24. A great deal of research has emphasized the uneconomical nature of horse raising. See especially the arguments of Sallares, Ecology, 311: “The useless animal par excellence in ancient Greece was the horse.”

25. The costs for buying and maintaining horses are known mostly from inscriptions on stone from Athens, and discussed in association with surviving literary evidence by Spence, Cavalry, 272–86.

26. The central theme of Hanson, Other Greeks (cf. especially 179–218), is the importance of this new agrarian class that created the institutions of the citystate, many of which were challenged by radical Athenian democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries. For the effect of Athenian literature, art, and rhetoric elevating the hoplite over light-armed fighters, missile troops, and horsemen, see Pritchard, “The Fractured Imagery,” 44–49; Hanson, “Hoplites into Democrats,” 289–310; and Lissarrague, “World of the Warrior,” 39–45.

27. The wealthy Athenian Mantitheos, for example, boasted that in an early-fourth-century battle he faced danger as a hoplite rather than serve “in safety” as a horseman (Lysias 16.13). References to the disdain for horsemen are found at Plato, Symposium, 221b, and Aristophanes, Knights, 1369–71. Mantitheos knew well the general prejudice against cavalrymen—made worse by a perception that aristocratic, pro-Spartan knights had played an instrumental role in the failed revolutions of both 411 and 404, which sought to replace the democracy with oligarchies of varying degrees. See Bugh, Horsemen, 116–53.

28. Much is made of the cavalry breakthroughs of Philip and Alexander, who formed corps of lancers whose long spears, along with armor for both horse and rider, made them true shock forces. But we forget that only at the battle of Chaeronea (338) did the Macedonians face a uniform hoplite enemy, and won there largely due not just to greater shock but to Athenian lack of discipline that opened gaps in the Greek line. Otherwise Alexander’s horsemen battered mounted Persians or inferior infantry that lacked the Greek bronze panoply, closed ranks, and serried spears. After Alexander’s death, the Hellenistic craze for elephants arose in part from a need to break apart the columns of phalangites that still were mostly invulnerable to charges of even heavy cavalry.

29. 4.68.5; cf. 4.72.3. For the extent of Athenian cavalry operations, see Bugh, Horsemen, 79–119; his catalog of deployments during the war demonstrates a frequency of usage unmatched by hoplites.

30. 4.42.1 to 4.44.1. The critical role of the Athenian horsemen at the battle, and the dramatic nature of their appearance by maritime transport, quickly became a source of Athenian pride. Cf., e.g., Aristophanes, Knights, 565–80, 595–610.

31. 5.73.1, 4.95.2; cf. 4.89. The alarmist logic of Hippocrates is puzzling, inasmuch as the year before, the Athenians had taken the Spartan captives from Sphacteria and threatened to kill them all should Sparta ever again invade. And between 425 and the construction of Decelea in 413 there was no Spartan invasion at all—despite the Spartans’ ability to call on the Boeotian cavalry at almost any time they wished.

32. See the gory account in Diodorus (13.44–115), a native of Sicily, of the unsuccessful Carthaginian operations between 410 and 405 to take the island, an especially brutal conflict that may have cost more lives than were lost in the main theaters of the contemporaneous Peloponnesian War, and in part explains why the victorious Syracusans in 413 were in no position to aid Sparta in finishing off Athens.

33. For the confusing array of postbellum events, see Finley, Sicily, 68–73, and especially Lintott, Violence, 191–96. The amazing effort in creating fortifications on Syracuse is told by Diodorus 14.18.1–6.

34. For the famous assessment of Thucydides, see 2.65.11, which most scholars believe was one of his latest in the history and written in light of the end of the war. See Hornblower, Commentary, 1.347–48, and Gomme, Commentary, 1.194–96.

35. Cf. Gaebel, Cavalry Operations, 100–09. The cardinal rule of Greek warfare—cavalry could never charge the unbroken spears of the hoplite phalanx—remained unchallenged. But the Peloponnesian War proved that Greek fighting need not any longer be decided solely in small enclosed plains, between neighbors no more than a two- or three-day march away.

1. See Diodorus 13.37–8, and the famous description in Thucydides (8.2) of the city-states of the entire Greek world stirring at the news, preparing to shed their neutrality and actively support the Spartan cause, with the subjects of the Athenian empire ready to revolt “beyond their ability” to do so.

2. Aristophanes, Frogs, 1074. Comedy and literature in general attest to blistered hands and rumps, exhausted crews, dire thirst and cold, all suggesting that trireme service was as unpleasant as it was dangerous. See Morrison, Oared Warships, 324–40, for the difficulties of the crew and the calculus of trireme oarage.

3. For crews, see Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.16. Given the apparent uniformity of the ranks of the phalanx and rowers in a trireme, it is hard to tell whether ancient commanders went through their call-up rosters to find hoplites or oarsmen with exceptional records of excellence. In preparation for Sicily, Thucydides says that the trierarchs gave bounties to the thranite rowers, and the generals tried to cull through the hoplite rosters to find the best oarsmen (6.31.3).

4. There is a fine description, replete with ancient references, to a trireme’s striking appearance in Amit, Athens and the Sea, 12–13; cf. Torr, Ancient Ships, 66–69. On the magnificent return of the Athenian fleet in 408, see Diodorus 13.68.2–5.

5. On the sights, sounds, and impressions of contemporary triremes, see ancient observations at Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 8.8; Aristophanes, Knights, 546; Aristotle, History of Animals, 4.8.533B6; and Thucydides 4.10.5.

6. In theory, sailors could hear as well as infantrymen; apparently the roar of oars hitting the water would have been no more noisy than the clattering of hoplite bronze and wood as thousands marched forward. For the war cry and other songs, see Aristophanes, Frogs, 1073; cf. Wasps, 909. Cf. Thucydides 1.50.5; Diodorus 13.15.31 and 99.1; and Pritchett, Greek States, 1.105–08.

7. 2.89.9. Far more important than numbers per se was seamanship. In most battles victory hinged on the ability of triremes to launch quickly, get into close formation and stay there in the face of variable winds, and ram enemies heading their way.

8. Ships getting rammed: Diodorus 13.16.1–5; one hit sinking a trireme: Diodorus 13.98.3; importance of formation: Thucydides 4.13.4; stone throwing in sea battles: Diodorus 13.10.4–6; cf. Thucydides 2.92.3–4. In general, we have more graphic accounts of sea fighting than hoplite warfare. But then the former was far more common than the latter in the Peloponnesian War. And perhaps there was something about the added danger of drowning and the more frequent horror of unrecovered bodies that incited a morbid curiosity among observers.

9. 2.92.3–4. The most notable military figures in the war—Pericles, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Nicias, Lysander—at one time or another found themselves at sea in command of a fleet. Ostensibly, there was not much divide between land and naval service: Pericles both organized a seaborne attack on the coast of the Peloponnese and invaded Megara with hoplites. Lysander, the architect of the final successful Spartan naval strategy, died at Haliartus in a hoplite skirmish nine years after the war’s close.

10. 1.49. Thucydides’ full description of the sea fight goes on to chronicle the familiar confusion and killing of sailors in the water.

11. For various accounts of trireme fighting, see the descriptions in Thucydides at 7.23.3, 7.40.5, and 7.67.2. For problems with the current, see Diodorus 13.39–40. We should remember that the historian was both a sailor and, as an admiral, a firsthand observer of trireme warfare.

12. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.19–20. The ships could be propelled in some fashion by half the crew. In fact, it is uncertain to what degree all 170 rowers always manned a trireme, or the tactical calculus involved in preferring fewer fully manned triremes to more numerous (and slower, less maneuverable) ships with partial crews.

13. The desperate fighting in the harbor at Syracuse is the locus classicus of naval warfare, inasmuch as Thucydides’ account captures the desperation of the Athenians and emphasizes the enormous aggregate size of the two fleets, cf. 7.25, 7.41.3–4.

14. See 7.41.2; Aristophanes, Knights, 764; Diodorus 13.78.4. The tactics are the maritime equivalent of the besieged Plataeans’ efforts to drop weights on the battering rams of the Peloponnesians.

15. For various aspects of trireme fighting, see 2.90.6 and 8.105.1; cf. 1.50.2 and 7.23.4. On the numbers of crewmen who went down with their ships, see the rare details of the Spartan losses at Mount Athos provided by Diodorus 13.41.2–3. On Notium, see Diodorus 13.71.3–5, and for the massive losses at Arginusae, 13.100.3–5. Reinforcements: Diodorus 13.46.

16. Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 34.1; cf. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.7.35. The Thebans’ refusal to give back the 1,000 dead hoplites after Delium—they lay exposed for days in the autumn sun—similarly sparked outrage and may have prompted Euripides to produce his Suppliant Women, a tragedy in which Athens under the mythological Theseus defeats the Thebans for their outrageous treatment of the corpses of the Seven Against Thebes. See Hanson, Ripples, 187–88.

17. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.1.31–2. Plutarch (Alcibiades, 37.3) says that 3,000 were executed, while Pausanias (9.32.9) records 4,000. Well before 404 Lysander was one of the more brutal Spartan generals. Earlier at Miletus he was indirectly responsible for the murder of 340 Milesians in efforts to undermine the democracy there (Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.12; Plutarch, Lysander, 8). For the execution of prisoners shown on vase paintings, see Van Wees, Greek Warfare, 216–17.

18. On Lysander’s action after Aegospotami, see Plutarch, Lysander, 14. By 404 the Spartans were convinced of their victory and saw no reason not to give in to vengeance, given the utter destruction of the Athenian fleet and a litany of past wrongs committed by the Athenians.

19. 1.50.1, 2.90.5–6. Trireme warfare was often not so much a naval encounter as a land and sea operation, with infantry fighting over the proximate shores in expectation that there would be plenty of ships floundering in the surf—the crews almost defenseless and easy to harvest by waiting hoplites.

20. See Strauss, “Perspectives,” 275–76, for a fascinating account about why Athenian dead sailors were not usually accorded the same degree of honorific civic attention as fallen hoplites, the causes involving not just the difficulties involving in retrieving bodies and of accurate fatality accounts at sea but a general prejudice against the lower classes who more often made up the crews of the imperial fleet. On an example of a sea fight where most on deck died under a hail of stones, see Diodorus 13.78.3–5.

21. Cf. 2.24.2. The paranoia that followed the breakout of the German battleship Bismarck in 1941 and the fear of Japanese capital ships in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor in 1941 were logical following such initial one-sided victories at sea: once a fleet established its credentials in sinking easily enemy ships, the mobility on the seas and the lack of credible deterrence guaranteed that it could do pretty much what it pleased until stopped.

22. For Phormio’s success, cf. 2.87.3–4; for Hermocrates: 4.63.1. Athenian superiority was developed over the half century between Salamis and the outbreak of the war, when the Athenian fleet had been in near nonstop service acquiring and enlarging the empire in the Aegean and off Ionia.

23. For Thucydides’ remarks about Phormio and the change of perception toward the Athenian fleet, see variously at 2.88.3 and 2.89.5–11; cf. 8.106.1–4.

24. Strauss, Athens After, 78–81. He goes on to suggest that the oligarchic revolution of 404, and the relative impotence of the dêmos in the postwar years, might well be a result of the staggering losses of poorer Athenian sailors, who were actually outnumbered by hoplites by war’s end.

25. 6.31. Cf. 3.17 (the fleet on active duty in 428 of 250 ships). Thucydides has a good description of the rivalry among trierarchs as the Athenian fleet assembled to depart for Sicily (cf. especially 6.31.2–3). In general, the complex nature of the strange workings of the trierarchy is discussed in detail by Gabrielsen, Athenian Fleet, 105–45, and Jordan, Athenian Navy, 61—111—a system that was nearly ruined by the horrendous costs and losses of the Peloponnesian War and thus radically restructured in the fourth century.

26. Morrison, Coates, and Rankov (Athenian Trireme, 179–230, 115–17) discuss a number of passages in ancient texts that reveal just how difficult trireme service was—and how navies took extraordinary steps to ensure that their crews were experienced and in shape.

27. Aeschylus, Persians, 396. For passages in Thucydides attesting to the value of expertise and the Athenian prewar monopoly on such skill, see, e.g., 1.31.1, 1.35.3, 1.80.4, 1.142.6–9, and 3.115.4. On Athenian excellence, see [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 1.19–20.

28. “Mills”: Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1411124. Naming of triremes: Jordan, Athenian Navy, 277; Strauss, “Trireme,” 318–19. Many scholars have seen the close synchronization among the oarsmen, themselves mostly landless and poor, as a valuable civic experience that lent unity and political cohesiveness to the underclass at Athens. The discipline of rowing together may well have empowered the solidarity of the “naval mob” in the assembly—or vice versa. On the ideological nature of naval service, see, for example, Strauss, “Trireme,” 319–22. One wonders whether solidarity of trireme service had any empowering effect at all on the poor in oligarchic Corinth or in the Peloponnesian fleet. For sedition in the Peloponnesian fleet, cf. 8.78–80.

29. See the famous speech of the Athenian admiral Phormio, who outlined the basics of trireme tactics: 2.89.8–9. Often fighting between scores of marines on deck is referred to as battle in the “ancient fashion” (e.g., 1.49.1), which suggests that real maritime expertise was a relatively recent and largely Athenian phenomenon, one that stressed ramming and mobility and sought to evolve beyond ships merely pulling up alongside one another to board. Athenian superiority in ramming: Diodorus 13.40.

30. On breaking oars, see Diodorus 13.78; 13.99.3–4, and on the physics involved in such an intricate tactic, see Morrison, Oared Warships, 368–69.

31. Grappling irons were often known as “iron hands,” and are ubiquitous in descriptions of fighting. For their use at some naval fights, see Diodorus 13.67.2–3 and 13.78.1. On close-in fighting on triremes, see Diodorus 13.45–6.

32. For the graphic fighting on Sicily, see 7.70–2 and especially Diodorus 13.9.3. “Amazing”: Diodorus 13.45.8. The fact that such a large Athenian fleet—heretofore mostly undefeated—fought so close to shore in view of tens of thousands, and for the salvation of 40,000 men some 800 miles from home, made it a favorite topic for historians and perhaps the most famous and detailed sea battle recorded in all of ancient literature. The aftermath of battle: Diodorus 13.100.

33. “Good triremes” (which apparently meant both crews and construction): Aristophanes, Birds, 108. [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 1.19, grudgingly offers respect for Athenian seamanship. For various passages in Thucydides, including Brasidas’ remarks, that reflect differences between Spartan and Athenian naval strategy, and the parameters under which both fleets operated, see 2.87.5–7; cf. 2.83.3, 2.94, 3.13.73; and 3.32.3; cf. 4.25.2–6.

34. 7.34.4–8 and 7.36.5. This same notion of a tie as victory was also true in land battles involving the Spartans. At Sphacteria they were outnumbered by many thousands, but still the surrender of a mere few hundred Spartiates shocked the Greek world and was a blow not remedied until the victory at Mantinea over six years later.

35. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.33. There seems to be no major land battle of the classical age recorded in which a general survived when his army was defeated. Yet there were numerous occasions in the Peloponnesian War of defeated admirals sailing away despite the wreckage of their fleet. Demosthenes, Nicias, and Conon at times all survived catastrophic naval losses. Cf. Diodorus 13.77 for Conon’s preparations.

36. For information on crews and the quality of rowers, see various quotes in Thucydides at 7.14.1–2 and 7.31.5; cf. 7.18.3 and 7.19.3.

37. Calm waters: Vitruvius 4.43; Thucydides’ description of the Gulf of Corinth fighting: 2.84.3–4. See Diodorus 13.46.4–6 for rough waters at the Hellespont. The great Athenian victory at Salamis (480) was probably a result of ramming Persian ships more quickly and efficiently than Xerxes’ crews in turn could grapple and board Greek triremes. Thus, the victory lent a sense of confidence in the efficacy of mobility and ramming to the Athenian fleet that was not always salutary during the Peloponnesian War.

38. On modern calculations concerning factors that eroded trireme performance, see Morrison, Oared Warships, 326–27.

39. Fatigue: 7.40.4–5; provisioning: 7.4.6; Aegospotami: Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.1.15–28. In sum, given the context of modern naval warfare, it is difficult for us moderns to appreciate fully how ancient fighting at sea was so closely integrated with land warfare—from the need to find water and beach ships at night to the reliance on infantrymen on board and friendly troops on nearby shores. For the need for bases, see the evidence cited in Amit, Athens and the Sea, 53–54.

40. See Casson, Ships and Seafaring, 70–73, on the problems of provisioning a fleet of triremes in transit. For the fate of Lamachus’ fleet in the river Cales, see Diodorus, 12.72.5.

41. The hulls themselves were also in constant need of repair and thus scraped and patched; e.g., Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.5.10–11.

42. E.g., 7.1.1 and 7.39.2. It was precisely this age-old fear of dependence upon friendly markets and harbors that explains the ultimate evolution in the fighting ship: the nuclear-powered carrier or submarine, which in theory rarely needs to come to shore, given that its fuel is nearly inextinguishable, its drinking and bathing water are by-products of its propulsion, and food can be ferried out to sea by auxiliary cargo ships.

43. On the look about the Piraeus, see Plutarch, Themistocles, 2.6. Nicias’ lament: 7.12.5. For the move to build a 300-ship navy, see Andocides, Peace, 7; Aeschines, Embassy, 174. Amit, Athens and the Sea, 27–28, discusses the Athenian law decreeing construction of 20 triremes per year and also the wear and tear of the hulls.

44. On the famous voyage of the “second” trireme, which rowed without a break to overturn the death sentence carried by the first, see 3.49; cf., too, 8.101. For exhausted crews, see Diodorus 13.77.3–5.

45. See the famous passage in Plutarch’s Themistocles (4.3) with reference to Plato (Laws 4.706B–C). Cf. Jordan, Athenian Navy, 18–20.

46. On maintenance, see 2.94.3–4. See Morrison, Coates, and Rankov, Athenian Trireme, 179–230, for acknowledgment of the intricacies and fragility of a modern trireme replica, and 102–06 for a good discussion of potential trireme speeds.

47. For an ancient conservative’s grudging acknowledgment of the advantages that accrued to maritime states, see [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 2.2–4. In general, the shipping of goods by sea in the ancient world entailed about a tenth of the cost of land transport.

48. 2.94.1. Apparently the idea that a relatively small Peloponnesian raiding force might steal into the Piraeus, destroy triremes, and stay long enough to block the entry of merchant vessels scared the Athenians as much as the approach of 60,000 Peloponnesians into Attica.

49. Aristophanes Acharnians, 544–54; [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 1.2–3. This anonymous curmudgeon systematically lists the ways in which maritime states of the “worse” people enjoy advantages: sea powers can govern the importation of products of other states; they can raid and then leave far more easily than infantry forces and have considerable more range in operations; their fleets guarantee more commerce; and they are familiar with a far greater diversity of peoples. For the complex nature of the revolution of 411 at Athens, start with Lintott, Violence, 135–55.

50. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.14–15. After the war, the walls, once leveled, were not only resurrected, but auxiliary efforts were made at border fortification, perhaps to enhance the idea of refusing hoplite battle without necessarily sacrificing all the cropland to enemy invaders. See Ober, Fortress Attica, 551–66, for the general idea of a fourth-century defensive mentality born out of the Athenian disappointments of the Peloponnesian War.

51. See Thucydides on naval costs and the remarks of Pericles 2.62.2–2. Perhaps it was no surprise that throughout the Cold War, the United States, with its superior fleet, found it far easier to project power and intervene along the borders of the Soviet Union, whether in Korea, Vietnam, or the Middle East, than the Russians could carve out client states in Latin America and expand their outpost in Cuba.

52. Meiggs, Athenian Empire, 104–08, reviews the low figure of 50 ships and the high of 200, concluding that Thucydides’ inference that 200 triremes were lost in Egypt may be correct—if we understand that perhaps only 10,000 of the 40,000 lost imperial crewmen were Athenian citizens.

53. For a sampling of the litany of this antinaval sentiment, see 6.24.3; [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 1.2 and 1.10–12; Plato, Laws, 704D, 705A, 706B, 707A; Aristotle, Politics, 1327A10–1327B6. One of the few classical authors who can express heartfelt empathy for the later-fifth-century rowers at Athens is Aristophanes (e.g., Knights, 545–610; Frogs, 687–705; Acharnians, 677–78).

54. On the financial squeeze at Athens, see Meiggs, Athenian Empire, 320–39. As was always true of the genius of Athenian democracy, there was a paradox at the heart of the system: rich people at Athens who hated the poor gained prestige by outfitting ships to employ them, while the wealthier abroad were taxed in tribute to man a fleet that would usually prevent them from ever gaining control of their respective local city-states.

Chapter 9

1. Sometimes the increase of a mere obol paid per crewman, from the normal three to four in daily wages, might make a vast difference in the size of the respective Athenian and Spartan fleets. The Athenians purportedly kept the wages of rowers rather low at three obols, rather than the optimum one drachma, in the odd belief that prosperity among the rowing classes might make it impossible for them to continue to work under such demanding conditions. On naval pay in general, see Morrison, Coates, and Rankov, Athenian Trireme, 118–22.

2. No money: 8.1.2. Diodorus (13.37.1) claims the war did not end in 413 because of the recall of Alcibiades and his efforts at tampering with Persian aid to the Spartans. Thucydides believed that the Athenians were fearful that the Syracusans might have sailed directly from their success in the Great Harbor into the Piraeus. But nothing in the Syracusans’ recent naval past suggested that they were up for an eight-hundred-mile voyage in force—on the chances of suffering the disaster in the harbor of Athens that they had recently inflicted in their own. In fact, the Sicilians were soon racked by civil dissension at home and fearful of Carthaginian attack and in no mood to send precious resources half a world away.

3. 2.65.11–12. During the Archidamian War, the Athenian fleet operated mostly in enemy waters around the Peloponnese and the Corinthian Gulf, where setbacks endangered only further offensive operations. The Ionian War was an altogether different theater, where a single major defeat threatened Attica’s grain, commerce, and imperial income.

4. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.1.25–26. Xenophon presents the stereotypical view of Persians as believing that wars are won only through material advantages, which was as unrealistic a position as the old Spartan canard that courage and discipline alone would provide victory.

5. 7.39.2. Diodorus (13.10.1–3) assumes that Ariston realized that in the relatively confined waters of the harbor the disadvantage that stubby, lower rams might impair speed and mobility was more than offset by the chance that they could sink enemy ships with a single hit and often head-on.

6. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.3–4. The inept Peloponnesian response after Sicily and the failure to capitalize on the setback, juxtaposed with the amazing Athenian recovery, was proof to Thucydides that democratic governments could get themselves into and out of disasters in a way unthinkable among oligarchies. 8.i.3–4; cf. 7.28 and 8.96.4–5.

7. Xenophon, Anabasis, 1.2.9. The flotsam and jetsam of this last dirty decade of the long war washed up as mercenaries in the huge bought army of Cyrus the Younger, himself an active participant in the Ionian War. The Panhellenic nature of the Ten Thousand, and their expectation of high wages, reflected the nature of the last few years of the Peloponnesian War, in which thousands of Greeks sailed east to garner rich Persian wages in service to the Spartan fleet.

8. On these various sea battles, see 8.10, 8.41–42, 8.61, and 8.95. Once more, as after the loss at Sicily, the Athenians were paranoid that the Peloponnesians would head straight for the Piraeus—a constant fear never realized until the final disaster after Aegospotami. Cf. 8.96.2–3.

9. 8.104–6; Diodorus 13.39–40. For a description of the battle, see the discussion in Morrison, Coates, and Rankov, Athenian Trireme, 81–84. It was likely that in these far distant last battles of the Ionian War, the number of fatalities at sea rose (e.g., Thucydides 8.95), inasmuch as both sides were now less likely to take prisoners, the nearby shores were often without friendly troops, and the finite pool of skilled Athenian rowers became a matter of real concern: killing captured or wounded sailors was now seen as part of the larger strategy of the Peloponnesian War.

10. 8.106.2. There were some general truisms about the aftermath of major Athenian battles: sudden optimism or dejection not always commensurate with the actual situation on the battlefield; abrupt change of government (the so-called Four Hundred, the Five Thousand, and the Thirty all emerged in the wake of Athenian setbacks); and sudden fury or praise unleashed at generals, as the checkered careers of Cleon, Demosthenes, Alcibiades, and Thrasybulus attest.

11. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.1.14. For Thrasybulus, see Cornelius Nepos, Thrasybulus, 1.3. In theory, a land power without money could still fight for a while, given the fact that hoplites owned their own armor, might forage off the countryside, and perhaps would serve without pay given their selfish interest in protecting local croplands. But triremes were state property; and if expensive to build, they were far more costly to man and maintain.

12. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.5.5–9. Soon Athenian subjects began to revolt in earnest throughout the Aegean, for example at Andros; cf. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.4.21.

13. Hippocrates’ brief dispatch is a far cry from Nicias’ long letter explaining the Athenian plight on Sicily. Unlike Nicias, the Spartan offers no real assessment and gives no advice. Cf. Xenophon, Hellenica, i.i.24. The message is supposed to reflect the “Laconic” style: in this case, even under the most traumatic circumstances, emotion and elaboration do not creep into the official communication home. In general, see Diodorus 13.50–3 for the battle and the Spartan peace offers following the defeat of the Peloponnesian fleet; and for the circumstances surrounding Cyzicus, cf. Lazenby, Peloponnesian War, 198–204.

14. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.5.11–14; Diodorus 13.71; Plutarch, Alcibiades, 35. A great deal of the problem was that the Spartans now had a general every bit as wily as Alcibiades and far more skilled in playing the Persian card for all it was worth. And once Alcibiades had triangulated with both Sparta and Persia, there was no real place to go other than exile—and such a lack of options was never a good position to be in with the Athenian assembly. It is no accident that ambitious Spartans like Lysander, Callicratidas, and Gylippus were not really Spartiates but probably mothakes, or born to non-Spartiate mothers and raised by wealthy benefactors—their talent in war spurring them on, with no expectation that their commonplace background during peace would bring them anything special.

15. On the manpower crisis at Athens, the defeat of Conon at Mytilene, and the rise of the Spartan fleet, see Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.15–18 and 1.6.24–25; cf. Diodorus 13.77–79. For the problems of Arginusae, see Lazenby, Peloponnesian War, 229–34.

16. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.26–34; Diodorus 13.97–99.

17. See Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 34.1, for the Spartan offer of peace after Arginusae. Presumably, once more Cleophon persuaded the Athenians to spurn the peace feelers, demanding a return of all the cities that Athens had once held.

18. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.1.28. If Spartan triremes were improving at sea, their infantry was still unquestioned. Thus, if it was unwise for the Athenians to drag their ships onto an unprotected shore and without fortifications encamp so far distant from provisions at Aegospotami, it was suicidal to find themselves pitting sailors against Spartans in a land battle beside beached and idle triremes.

19. For the executions, see Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.1.28; Diodorus 13.106.6–8; Plutarch, Lysander, 10–11. Because the triremes captured from the Athenian imperial fleet may have numbered 160, there should have been over 30,000 prisoners. How many slaves and allies were let go, or how many simply were Athenians executed before surrendering, is unknown.

20. For the battle, see Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.1.18–28, and Diodorus 13.105–6. In the most critical naval fight since Salamis, the seafaring Athenians essentially lost it on land and before the engagement had even started.

21. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.2.13. Thus, one cousin proved traitor once and perished, and the other was a traitor three times, to Athens, Sparta, and Persia, respectively—and yet survived the war.

22. See Plutarch, Alcibiades, 38.1–2. After the war, the second exile of Alcibiades was acknowledged by the Athenians as “the greatest folly of all their blunders and stupidity.”

23. For the detail of the last years of his life, see Ellis, Alcibiades, 93–98; Plutarch, Alcibiades, 38.

24. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.3. What was the exact state of the Athenian fleet after Aegospotami? There were probably fewer than 20 triremes scattered around the Aegean or rotting in the ship sheds at the Piraeus. And the absence of both money and raw materials meant that the Athenians this time were in no shape to build yet a fourth fleet ex nihilo.

25. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.19; Plutarch, Lysander, 15.2; Pausanias 10.9.9. Turning a land into a mêloboton (“sheep walk”) was a proverbial rhetorical threat of ultimate retribution; cf. Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 10. For a brief discussion of the Morgenthau plan, which is often caricatured and not properly understood, see Weinberg, World at Arms, 794–98. Churchill also proposed that postwar Germany “be primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.”

Chapter 10

1. See Henderson, Great War, 489–90; Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, 432.

2. See Ober, Fortress Attica, 209–13, for discussion of changed strategic thinking at Athens, and cf. Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 174–84, for the mostly prosperous nature of Attic agriculture in the postbellum years. In general, Cartledge, “Effects,” 114–17, summarizes well the consensus that the war’s effects were more subtle and enervating than catastrophic and immediate.

3. The argument not only for the positive role of the Athenian empire but also for its popularity among the grass roots of its subject peoples became the life work of G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, whose spirited and often wildly wrong invective is as engaging as his prodigious scholarship is impressive. Brief summations of his journal articles can be found in his Origins of the Peloponnesian War, 289–93, and Class Struggle, 1–49.

4. 1.23. Cities like Colophon, Mycalessus, Plataea, and Thyrea were the scenes of abject slaughter, while Sollium, Potidaea, Anactorium, Scione, and Melos were ethnically cleansed and resettled by new populations.

5. Isocrates, On the Peace, 86–87. Isocrates’ numbers are perhaps suspect, inasmuch as Diodorus (13.21) says 200 ships were lost in Sicily and 180 at Aegospotami. But in the general Athenian collective memory, there must have been some notion that around 400 imperial triremes were lost in those two terrible defeats, a number that was pretty much within a reasonable margin of error. For Isocrates’ claim about the loss of the great families of Athens, see too Diodorus 13.4, 13.88.

6. Cf. the astute observations of Cartledge, “Effects,” 106–09, and Strauss, “Problem,” 170–75.

7. For 22 generals, see Paul, “Two Battles,” 308, and Strauss, Athens After, 70–86 and 172–74. It is Strauss’ argument, in addition, that disproportionate losses to the thetic class during the war explain somewhat the rise of oligarchic governments in 411 and 404, as if for a while the attenuated ranks of the poorer and more radical lost influence in the democratic politics of the time.

8. Almost immediately after the war, Thebes provided sanctuary for exiled Athenian democrats. The Peloponnesian War thus ended with Athenian democrats seeking asylum in a state that had started the war by sending oligarchic radicals against democratic Plataea, emphasizing once again that ideology was so often trumped by realpolitik and the desire to balance power among the squabbling city-states. For the maze of postwar interests, see Buckler, Aegean Greece, 3–6.

9. Hellenica Oxyrhynchia 12.3, and the sources cited in Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture, 153–73.

10. See, for example, Davies, Propertied Families: e.g., 44 (Archedamos lost his property after being taken prisoner); 61 (Kritodemos killed at Aegospotami, leaving three orphans); 93 (Amytheon killed at Sicily, leaving three sons); 152 (Diodotus killed at Ephesus, leaving three children); 347 (Lykomedes killed in 424, leaving behind a son, Kleomedes, one of the generals at Melos); 404 (Eukrates killed by the Thirty Tyrants, leaving behind two sons); 467 (Polystratos lost land after Decelea, was wounded, and had three sons in the Athenian military).

11. For postwar problems in Sparta, see the ancient evidence discussed in Cartledge, Agesilaos, 34–54 and, especially, Lewis, Cambridge, 16–32. “Eat even raw”: Xenophon, Hellenica, 3.3.7.

12. Laws of war: Ober, “Classical Greek Times,” 24–26. It seems methodologically unsound to question the antebellum protocols surrounding Greek warfare by pointing out occasional exceptions, such as attacks on civilian centers or desecration of shrines—as if contemporary historians might doubt the very existence of both speed laws and the public’s tendency to obey them, by evidence of law enforcement’s common ticketing of speeders. But for a different view, see, for example, again Krentz, “Strategic Culture,” 65–72, and “Fighting,” 36–37.

13. Demosthenes, Third Philippic, 48–52. For this and other reactionary nostalgia about the old simple war, see the ancient literature cited in Hanson, “Hoplite Battle,” 202–06.

14. 5.41.3; cf. Herodotus 7.9.2. It is a general law that an escalation of violence and an erosion of restraint are in direct proportion to the length of a struggle. Andersonville or the March to the Sea was in no one’s mind in early 1861. Nor did anyone envision in 1914 that in a mere three years either side in the Great War would or could blanket the other with poisonous gas; in the same fashion, the invasion of Poland by conventional German troops did not presage Hiroshima.

15. There is an enormous bibliography of the earlier “rules of war” and their violation during the Peloponnesian War, with importance for subsequent conflicts—with ample documentation from contemporary sources. See, for example, Hanson, Other Greeks, 317–49; Ober, Fortress Attica, 32–50; and, especially, Krentz, “Invention,” 25–35, for a review of the ancient and modern sources.

16. For the ramifications of eroding the census class in detail, see Hanson, “Democratic Warfare,” 16–17. By the end of the war many “hoplites” probably did not even own property (Lysias, 34.4; cf. Thucydides 6.43.1); wealthy horsemen bragged that they had served on foot (Lysias, 16.13); and some rowers were hoplite farmers (Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.24–25).

17. To the modern reader, Plato’s numerous blasts against the new warfare appear not only strident but nearly treasonous. See especially Laws, 4.707C; cf. 706B. In some sense, his criticism is analogous to the stereotypical agrarian conservatives in Roman, British, and American times who see the acquisition of empire as a destabilizing influence on existing norms—too many foreigners, too much new money, and too many obligations ruining the old landed hierarchies of the past.

18. See the famous passage on the rise of the polis in Aristotle’s Politics, 4.1297B16–24. We should remember that the city-state—the embodiment of the beginning of Western civilization—did not start out so much to guarantee personal freedom for all residents as to ensure the protection of property for a new meritocratic middling class of landowners.

19. See Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.31, for the purportedly better Peloponnesian crews. Hunt (Slaves, 83–101) presents a good argument about why the mass use of slaves at Arginusae may not have been all that unusual but, rather, the culmination of a long practice of using servile rowers in the navies on all sides during the Peloponnesian War. By the end of the war there may well have been 500 Athenian, allied, Peloponnesian, and Sicilian triremes on the Aegean at any one time—requiring a pool of some 100,000 oarsmen who could not have all been free citizens, given infantry requirements and the need to produce food.

20. For the paradox of increased military efficacy at the price of the old agrarian exclusivity of the city-state, see the long discussion, with a list of citations to classical sources, in Hanson, Other Greeks, 351–96.

21. 1.83.2; cf. 1.80.3–4 and 2.24.1.2. A good rhetorical lamentation about the role of money in war is found at Isocrates, On the Peace, 8.48.

22. The fury of Athenian philosophers at the new war is best captured at Plato, Laws, 4.706B—C, and Aristotle, Politics, 8.1326A. In general, see Kallet-Marx, Money and Naval Power, 201–06, and Kallet, Money and Corrosion, 227–84, for the role of money and capital in the Peloponnesian War and the break that such financial sophistication marked with warfare of the past.

23. 4.40.2. There is an entire corpus of reactionary thought in Greek literature that protests loudly against missiles, archery, and artillery as somehow unfair or immoral. See a discussion in Hanson, Other Greeks, 338–49.

24. On the military revolution in the various arts of siegecraft immediately following the Peloponnesian War, see Winter, Greek Fortifications, 310–24; Kern, Ancient Siege Warfare, 163–93; and the debate between Ober, Fortress Attica, 197–207 (arguing for a postbellum new defensive policy of rural fortification in the fourth century) and Munn, Defense of Attica, 15–25 (maintaining that there was no attempt to ensure real border defense by new bases and forts in the Attic countryside).

25. Archilochus, fragment 114. For the idea in Greek literature of the general as a common man, see Hanson, “Greek Warrior,” 112–13. For a different view, cf. Wheeler, “General,” 140–49.

26. For ancient encomia about the two men, see 4.81.1–3 and 4.108.2–3; and cf. Plutarch, Lysander, 30.

27. There is a new notion in literature of the post–Peloponnesian War era concerning the proper tactical role—intellectual or moral?—of the general in the early fourth century. For a discussion of the ancient sources, see Hanson, Other Greeks, 258–61, 308–10, and Wheeler, “General,” 145–53.

28. Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.1.1; Xenophon, Anabasis, 2.1.7; cf. Plato, Laws, 828E—834A. For the new type of military commanders who appeared after the Peloponnesian War and engaged in plundering and raiding to pay the cost of their operations, see Pritchett, Greek State, 2.59–117.

29. In similar fashion, most in 1861 felt that the Confederacy, given the region’s reputation for chivalry and excellence in arms, would produce superior military leadership in the American Civil War. But for all the tactical excellence of a Lee or Jackson, the South simply did not produce many military minds quite like Grant, Sherman, or Sheridan, who grasped the rare interplay of tactics, strategy, morale, and economic power in choosing where and how to fight.

30. Powell, Athens and Sparta, 200–01, is quite good in collating passages from Thucydides that reflect the historian’s belief that Athens lost rather than Sparta won.

31. For these examples of fear and panic adjudicating state policy, see 2.21 (Athenian empty hopes that the Spartans might turn back and not really ravage Attica as they had threatened) and 4.40–42 (the Spartans worry that after their defeat at Sphacteria, enemies would sense their weakness); cf. 5.102–03 (the Melian reliance on empty hopes that the danger might be still averted). For a list of examples of opportunism during the war and the dangers of perceived weakness, see Powell, Athens and Sparta, 144–47.

32. Pindar on war: fragment 120.5. On the attitudes of old and young about war, see, for example, 1.72.1, 2.8, and 6.24. See also Astymachus and Lacon (3.52–53); Saugenês (see his grave stele in R. Higgins, Tanagra and the Figurines [Princeton, 1986], 52–53); Scirphondas (7.30.3); and Xenares (5.51.2).

NOTES

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2