A War Like No Other

A WAR LIKE NO OTHER

HOW THE ATHENIANS AND SPARTANS FOUGHT THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

RANDOM HOUSE  2005

Prologue

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

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

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

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

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

• Their twenty-seven year strife, in terms of the percentages of the population who fought and died, was one of the most horrific civil wars in early recorded history – conventional battles, terrorism, revolutions, assassinations, and mass murder all unfolding at once among a baffling array of shifting allies and enemies.
• As Thucydides puts it, sieges, ethnic cleansing, mass killing, battles, droughts, famines, and plague “all fell upon the people simultaneously with this war.”
• This book’s chapters are for the most part organized not by annual events but by the experience of battle: ‘fire’ (the ravaging of the land), ‘disease’ (plague), ‘terror’ (coups and irregular fighting), ‘armor’ (hoplite warfare), ‘walls’ (sieges), ‘horses’ (the Sicilian expedition), and ‘ships’ (trireme fighting).
• These chapter themes are interwoven with a loose ongoing narrative of the war, again with the understanding that each chapter draws on illustrations taken from the entire twenty-seven year conflict.
• No other struggle can provide such military lessons for the present as the Peloponnesian War. Former secretary of state George Marshall, critics of Vietnam, and contemporary opponents and supporters alike of the so-called war on terror have all looked back to find their own Thucydides and learn from the people who fought that most awful war so long ago.

 

Chapter 1: Fear: Why Sparta Fought Athens (480-431)

• The Peloponnesian War is now 2,436 years in the past. Yet Athens and Sparta are still on our minds and will not go away.
• During the weeks after September 11, 2001, Americans suddenly worried about the wartime outbreak of disease in their cities.
• In October and November 2001, five died and some twenty-four others were infected from the apparently deliberate introduction of anthrax spores by unknown terrorists.
• During the spring of 2003, a mysterious infectious respiratory ailment in China threatened to spread world-wide, evoking ancient wartime plagues, such as the mysterious scourge that wiped out thousands at Athens between 430 and 426.
• Sicily, Melos and Mycalessus saw democracy imposed by force, and school children killed by terrorist bands.

 

Chapter 2: Fire: The War Against the Land (431-425)

Chapter 3: Disease: The Ravages of the Plague at Athens (430-426)

Anatomy of an epidemic

• By the second season of the war, the struggle was not to be decided between spearmen or even ravagers and horsemen. It now seemed to hinge on how well, psychologically as well a materially, refugees could ride out a few weeks of enemy occupation.
• Thanks to Pericles’ strategy, for a second spring much of the population – perhaps well over 200,000 – was crammed inside Athens for more than a month. The city of the Parthenon and theater of Dionysus was again to be a fetid refugee camp.
• The prior inaugural year of fighting had proved that such massive evacuation and relocation were practicable. Yet in this second season the city’s luck quite literally ran out.
• The combination of Mediterranean heat, overcrowding, lack of plentiful clean water, shelter, and proper sanitation, and the stress of war and invasion provided a suitable landscape for a mysterious and terribly destructive disease.
• When the epidemic passed, Thucydides would make an astounding summation of conditions in Greece as a whole during the three decades of the war: “What caused the greatest suffering and killed a considerable part of the population was the terrible plague.”
• Modern militaries have concocted devilish brews of supergerms as would-be weapons of mass destruction against enemies because they are lethal, cheap, of small weight and size, and can nullify the effect of conventional weaponry or superior manpower.
• Diseases also instill terror beyond their proven ability to kill, inasmuch as the agents of death are far more indiscriminate, invisible, and, as the poet Hesiod says, silent.
• Disaster was not supposed to strike Athens, at least at the moment. This was a city, after all, that had trumped adversity repeatedly.
• For twenty years Pericles had mobilized 20,000 laborers to create his architectural masterpieces on the Acropolis, the Parthenon and the Propylaea, as well as massive public buildings and fortifications in the agora and the Piraeus.
• Despite all the worries about the supposedly terrible grand army of the Peloponnese, Athens had ridden out the first invasion of 431 well enough, and had watched the enemy trudge back home without a sense of accomplishment.
• The contrast of previous Periclean grandness with the human depravity induced by the plague drew Thucydides’ interest in the disease and prompted his riveting account of the effects of the contagion in the second book of his history:

Some perished in neglect, others despite plentiful attention. No particular treatment was discovered that worked, for what brought improvements in one case, made things worse in another. Both strong and weak constitutions alike proved unable to resist, all alike being taken away, although they were careful to seek treatment with strict attention. By far the worst part of the epidemic was the depression that followed when a victim realized that he was sick. The despair that came with the illness right away destroyed the power of resistance, and it left the sick even more likely to succumb. In addition, there was a terrible scene of citizens dying like sheep after they become ill from trying to help one another. This resulted in the greatest morbidity.

• Himself a survivor of the infection, Thucydides juxtaposed a graphic narrative of the outbreak with Pericles’ solemn funeral oration over the first year’s dead soldiers, an encomium that had reminded Athenians of their city’s eminence.
• After reading Thucydides’ macabre account of the social consequences of the plague, it is unclear, as the historian perhaps intended, whether the Athenians remained the Renaissance men just praised by Pericles in his famous funeral oration or were utter savages who fought with one another over pyres to burn their dead.
• Clearly the few hundred men who fell during the first year of the war in patrolling the countryside and during sea duty off the Peloponnese earned praise and public funerals, while the next year thousands of men, women, and children died miserably in anonymous droves in the street, often rotting without burial or cremation.
• Athens, like Los Angeles, lies in a basin surrounded by three large mountain ranges. The sea lies almost five miles away, and there are only small rivers that flow near the metropolitan area – all of these conditions making it difficult to dump sewage in any nearby moving body of water that could wash effluent out to sea.
• Shanties offered no real relief from the summer heat and stood in stark contrast to the abandoned spacious country homes of the more affluent refugees.
• Much of the turmoil resulted from this radical change in fortune: the wealthy were now on the bottom rail and veritable visitors in their own city – guests of the radical poor, who wanted the war, were losing little in it, and might see profit accrue from nonstop naval service.
• The outbreak of the mystifying disease occurred sometime in late May 430. Athenians started to die mysteriously in droves during the forty days the Spartans ravaged, the longest of all the Peloponnesian invasions, which might have put an even greater stress on the cramped refugees in the city.
• The sojourn of tens of thousands of rural folk inside the city indirectly helped to spread the disease, which in turn had the paradoxical effect of cutting short what must have been planned as the most devastating and comprehensive ravaging campaign of the Archidamian War.
• Less than a month after the disease first touched Athens, it had reached epidemic proportions. Plagues of such virulence were almost unknown in classical Greece, which prompted Athenians to consider almost any explanation to account for such a terrible and rare occurrence.
• In a hot Mediterranean climate, where water was always scarce, enemy pollution of fountains, cisterns, and rivers was a nearly constant threat during times of war. Military handbooks would later recommend such contamination of water supplies as an effective way of stymieing hostile forces by bringing on either illness or thirst.

 

The limitations of medicine

• Today the generic word “plague” conjures up bubonic plague, especially the terrifying epidemics of the Black Death in Medieval Europe and Renaissance Italy, and the images of fleas, rats, and horrific pustules.
• Although Thucydides provides detailed descriptions of an array of terrible symptoms – fever, inflammation, eye problems, sore and bloody throat, sneezing, hoarseness, chest pain, cough, intestinal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, skin eruptions, and ulcers, thirst and dehydration, general weakness and fatigue, gangrene in the extremities, permanent brain damage – it is not easy for modern medical sleuths to connect the precise meaning of his Greek vocabulary with either a formal ancient or contemporary medical lexicon.
• Most diseases in Greek and Roman times arose in the south and usually broke out during the summer, presumably when microbial life best survived outdoors amid stagnant water, foul sewage, active insects, and rotting food.

 

The infected

• Typically, the dreaded signs started with a violent heat in the head, the eyes quickly burning and turning red. Both the throat and tongue appeared bloody and became malodorous. Once the stomach was affected, the sick began vomiting bile of all sorts. At the same time they experienced dry heaves and violent spasms.
• In an age when vaccination has rid us of the worst infectious diseases of our past, it is hard to imagine a worse sort of malady, as if a modern patient experienced the flu, dysentery, measles, and pneumonia all at once.
• The victims were restless and suffered constant insomnia. Yet even at the apex of the affliction, most sufferers did not immediately perish; many endured until the 7^th to 9^th day, when they succumbed to fever and exhaustion.
• For the remainder who held out even after the intestinal attacks, the infection descended into the extremities. Thucydides suggests that the deformed and maimed limped around Athens for decades after the initial outbreak of 430.
• Medicine, clean water, toilets, bedding – all the appurtenances of modern convalescent care – were not available to ailing Athenians. To the terror of enemy soldiers, add the daily trauma from the deaths of children, siblings, and spouses, attributable to a disease of unknown cause, duration, cure, or prophylaxis.
• Amid such calamity, someone must provide food, tend the ill, take away the bodies, and keep the ramparts manned and the sorties sent out.
• How could a city under siege dispose of thousands of corpses within its walls? Recent excavations of a proposed Athenian subway station near the ancient Kerameikos cemetery revealed one such mass grave and over a thousand tombs quite near the surface.
• In some cases dozens of skeletons were found thrown helter-skelter into large shafts, apparently without the normal care and usual offerings accorded the dead.
• The evidence of the hasty group internment suggested to the excavators that the subway engineers had stumbled upon one of the many mass burials necessitated by the epidemic of 430, something apparently not repeated in the subsequent 2,500-year history of the city.
• A similar nightmare of mass burials on a far larger scale in the ancient world occurred during the bubonic plague at Constantinople a millennium later, during the reign of Justinian, in the 6^th century AD.
• There the cemeteries soon filled, causing rotting bodies to pile up in the streets and along the seashore. Even huge pits that were dug with the intention of holding 70,000 corpses soon overflowed, causing the dead to be thrown into towers on the walls.

 

Culture and mass death

• Why did Thucydides devote such a prominent place in a supposedly military history to discussion of the disease, careful to chart in detail the descent into barbarism on the part of the Athenians?
• First as a product of the Athenian enlightenment of the mid-5^th century that sought to explain natural phenomena through scientific rather than religious or folk exegesis, Thucydides wanted to demonstrate to his readers his own faith in the rationalist method of identifying symptoms.
• Thucydides often takes special pains to dismiss false knowledge. He also rejects a supernatural cause for the epidemic. Human activity, not divine dispensation, was the culprit.
• The Thucydidean discourse on the plague becomes a reminder of how close humans always are to savagery – and how precious is their salvation won through law, religion, science, and custom.
• This thin veneer of civilization is a universal constant, one immune to the arrogance of modernism that professes that technology has at last nullified the age-old pathologies of human nature.

The plague infected Athens with utter lawlessness, with what Thucydides called anomia. Men, convinced that the end was near anyway, “showed a more careless daring.” When death hovered over all, most lost the old self-control and instead “turned themselves over to the pleasures of the moment.” They forgot fear of both law and gods, Thucydides adds, because no one could determine whether righteous conduct provideda defense against the disease. But since a horrible death came indiscriminately and without warning, people lived for the day and thus often acted criminally in order to obtain some “pleasure” from life.

• The pandemonium that followed from the plague reminds us that civilization can be lost anywhere and at any time.
• Because the outbreak occurred in the second year of the 27-year-long war, a threshold had been crossed: once the Athenians had been reduced to such straits, it was nearly impossible to recover their moral bearings in subsequent years.
• Criminality and savagery become accustomed, or rather institutionalized, behaviors.
• The death of Pericles during the epidemic is emblematic of the Athenian descent, the perishing of the last singular statesman who might have had the intellect and moral authority to steady the Athenians amid the savagery.
• In a key passage Thucydides says the plague “first” introduced into the city a greater lawlessness. The disease also had a profound effect on the tactics and methods by which Athens conducted the Peloponnesian War.

 

The most deadly enemy

• After another, though less virulent, return of the disease in 427-426, the historian flat out concluded, “Nothing did more damage to Athenian power than the plague”. In relative terms, the plague turned out to be to the Athenians’ ancient equivalent of a Somme or Stalingrad.

 

Chapter 4: Terror: War in the Shadows (431-421)

Chapter 5: Hoplite Pitched Battles (424-418)

Chapter 6: Walls: Sieges (431-415)

Chapter 7: Horses: The Disaster at Sicily (415-413)

Chapter 8: Ships: The War at Sea ((431-404)

Chapter 9: Climax: Trireme Fighting in the Aegean (411-405)

Chapter 10: Ruin? Winners and Losers (404-403)

Appendix I: Glossary of Terms and Places

Appendix II: Key People

Notes. Works Cited. Index