A Naval History of the Peloponnesian War

Ships, Men and Money in the War at Sea, 431-404 BC

Marc G. de Santis

• Éditeur: Pen & Sword Military
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473861602
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Military & Maritime History

Naval power played a vital role in the Peloponnesian War. The conflict pitted Athens against a powerful coalition including the preeminent land power of the day, Sparta. Only Athens superior fleet, her wooden walls, by protecting her vital supply routes allowed her to survive. It also allowed the strategic freedom of movement to strike back where she chose, most famously at Sphacteria, where a Spartan force was cut off and forced to surrender.Athens initial tactical superiority was demonstrated at the Battle of Chalcis, where her ships literally ran rings round the opposition but this gap closed as her enemies adapted. The great amphibious expedition to Sicily was a watershed, a strategic blunder compounded by tactical errors which brought defeat and irreplaceable losses. Although Athens continued to win victories at sea, at Arginusae for example, her naval strength had been severely weakened while the Spartans built up their fleets with Persian subsidies. It was another naval defeat, at Aegispotomi (405 BC) that finally sealed Athens fate. Marc De Santis narrates these stirring events while analyzing the technical, tactical and strategic aspects of the war at sea.

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

The Athenian historian Thucydides set himself a lofty goal in writing his history of the Peloponnesian War of 431–404 BC. His work was not to be a means of entertainment. ‘This is a possession for all time,’ he wrote, ‘rather than a prize piece that is read and then forgotten.’ Of the war’s origin between Athens and Sparta, the two great powers of the Greek world, which Thucydides traced in great detail, he said: ‘The real cause, however, I consider to be the one which was formerly most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta.’1

The war would be one of contradictions. It was fought to the point of exhaustion between Greece’s two most powerful states, but the decisive contribution would be made by a non-Greek actor, Persia. It was a war fought mainly at sea and along the coastal territories of Greece and Asia Minor, but would be won by Sparta, the great land power, against Athens, which had long reigned supreme at sea before it began. It was fought for political dominance in Greece, but perhaps its most notable event would occur far away, in Sicily. The decisive, final battle of the war, a naval one, was not a proper sea battle at all, but one in which the Athenian fleet would find itself caught unprepared ashore and captured almost in its entirety.

The war itself was ruinously expensive, lasting twenty-seven years, with each state making little or no progress against the other for long periods while enduring many setbacks. Yet the combatants would find the means to continue the fighting long past the point where it would have been sensible to make peace. When a peace was made in 421 BC, it proved illusory and fighting resumed in earnest within a few years.

The extreme length and high cost of the war also made it more than just a contest between fleets and armies. It was also a contest between the resources that both coalitions were able to bring to bear to pay for their soldiers and ships. While there was room for outstanding generals to make their mark, national leaders to make ghastly errors of judgment and fine soldiers to win battles against the odds, in the end, money mattered more than any other factor.

At the beginning of the war, and for long afterward, democratic Athens was by far the richer power, the head of an alliance of mostly maritime states clustered around the Aegean. Her seaborne trade flourished, and her culture along with it. With her money she financed a massive navy that protected her trade. Sparta, by contrast, the head of the Peloponnesian League, was a dour military state, oligarchical, parochial, deeply conservative and agrarian. Her citizens engaged in only one occupation, that of the soldier, and money was difficult to come by.

Yet Sparta emerged triumphant at the end of the bloody struggle. Sparta received immense financial aid from Persia that enabled her to overcome the resources deficit she had with Athens and outlast her initially wealthier rival. Money, more than any other single resource, was the fuel of the war efforts of both sides. In this regard, Sparta would come to hold, late in the war, a nearly insuperable advantage in the form of Persian gold.

How this startling turn of events came about is the story of this book, a tale of fleets, seamen and money. It is a naval history, as the war was primarily one fought at sea and along the coasts in amphibious actions. It is a history, too, of how Athens, the brightest city in fifth-century BC Greece, came to ruin, and how culturally backward Sparta came to dominate the Hellenic world. To begin the story, we must make our acquaintance with the pre-eminent historian of the war, Thucydides, son of Olorus.

Ancient Sources

Thucydides (b. c. 460 BC, d. c. 400 BC) wrote his History believing that it would be a war of immense importance that deserved to be chronicled. He did not title this, or specifically call it a history, that being a designation later given to it and used in modern translations of his work.2 It was nonetheless a history, but with the difference that it was a narrative of contemporary events, not one of tales culled from the distant past. He began his narrative not long after the war began in 431, and he was an active participant in the conflict from its beginning until his exile from Athens in 424 after his failure to prevent the capture of Amphipolis by the extremely capable Spartan officer Brasidas. He was not to return home for twenty years. His involvement included not just holding a major military command. He was also afflicted by the deadly plague that struck Athens between 430 and 427, but was lucky enough to survive, unlike so many thousands of his fellow countrymen.

Thucydides’ History, in eight books, remained unfinished when he died sometime around 400. The story of the war is taken down only until the winter of 411, and it breaks off in the middle of his narrative in the eighth book. He clearly knew how the war ended in 404, since he included a number of comments showing that he was aware that the Athenians had been defeated in the end. It is thus certain that Thucydides was in the process of composing and editing his work when he passed away. The last book, the eighth, has been criticized for lacking in editing, and as such was almost certainly not the final draft of that part of the history as Thucydides would have intended it. There can be no doubt that Thucydides would have continued the history down to 404 had he lived, but his death ended any chance of that. He would, though, have a number of continuators.

As an incomplete work, the History shows signs of revisions that suggest that Thucydides might have made more had he lived longer. It is by no means a first draft, but it is certainly not a finished product as Thucydides would have wanted it, even when considering the books that were finished by the time of his death. It is nevertheless the only source that we possess for many things relating to the war, and when this is not the case, it is still the best. And it holds a special distinction in that, unlike so many histories that survive from the ancient world, the History dates from the period that it describes, not centuries afterward.

Thucydides’ focused historical survey was, for his day, remarkable. He eschewed the broad gaze of Herodotus, whose wandering narrative contained many extraneous details and digressions, and instead set his sights on the essentials when composing his work.3 He attempted to write a ‘scientific’ history, sticking to the facts as best as he could ascertain them, explaining at the outset of his work: ‘With reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the reports being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible.’4 There is thus something of a dry (though by no means dreary) quality to the History, at least in comparison to those of the far more colourful Herodotus. ‘The absence of romance in my history,’ Thucydides acknowledged, ‘will, I fear detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future … I will be content.’5

When it comes to the causes of the war, Thucydides divides them into two categories. There were the causes of the complaint (aitiai) – the controversies over the allegiance of Corcyra and Potidaea – and the real reason for the conflict (prophasis). The intervention of Athens at Corcyra and Potidaea stirred up grievances that gathered momentum of their own. Such grievances were often the proximate causes of wars, but as already noted, Thucydides saw the ultimate cause of the war being Athenian expansionism, and the fear it had generated among the Spartans.6

Thucydides was keen to allow the actors in the war to do much of the talking, and so the speech was a common and very important device in the History. Thucydides made wide use of speeches in the body of his narrative to explain the viewpoints of the various participants. These were not precise records of what was actually said, since such things ‘in all cases [were] difficult to carry … word for word in one’s memory’. Instead, Thucydides meant them to hew as close as could be to ‘the general sense of what [the speakers] really said’.7

It is often stated that money makes the world go around, and that was true of warfare in ancient Greece as well. The financing of military operations is a recurrent theme in Thucydides, as is his attention to naval power within the larger context of the conflict. Indeed, he begins his work with an examination of the history of naval power among the Greeks prior to the Persian Wars of the early fifth century BC. By his own day, later in the same century, Athens had by far the strongest navy; it would hold this pre-eminent position at the outset of the Peloponnesian War, and retain it for long thereafter. Athenian seapower is repeatedly noted in the historian’s narrative, and their opponents, the Peloponnesians, were at a serious disadvantage in this area for a long time. They had far fewer ships, and their efforts to close the qualitative gap between themselves and the Athenians were understood by all sides to be fraught with many practical difficulties. Thucydides makes the maintenance of this edge in seapower one of the critical elements in Athenian early war strategy.

As previously mentioned, Thucydides’ History breaks off in the year 411. Xenophon, (b. c. 428, d. c. 354 BC), a conservative Athenian gentleman-soldier, consciously took up the task of completing Thucydides’ work, picking up the story more or less where Thucydides had halted. Like Thucydides, Xenophon was a military man and an exile from Athens. After the war, he would accompany Prince Cyrus of Persia on an expedition against his older brother for possession of the Persian throne. In 401, Cyrus, with the help of his Greek mercenaries, was victorious at the Battle of Cunaxa, but the prince was himself slain in the engagement, and the Greeks were left stranded deep inside the Persian Empire. After their commanders were slain through treachery by the Persian satrap (provincial governor) Tissaphernes, of whom we shall hear much more later in this book, it fell to Xenophon to lead them out of the empire to safety. Xenophon penned the story of this harrowing journey in the Anabasis, or March Inland, which he wrote around 379.8

Xenophon was a prolific author, and apart from the Anabasis, he wrote a work, Cavalry Commander, on cavalry tactics, about which he possessed extensive knowledge, as well as a book on horsemanship.9 The Hellenica, his greatest work, records Greek events from 411 down to the Battle of Mantinea in 362 that ended the supremacy of Thebes. For our purposes, it is Xenophon’s completion of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War down to 404 that is most valuable, and he supplies the oldest extant narrative for this period. He moves much more quickly than Thucydides did in his work, and the Hellenica lacks the fine Attic style of its predecessor. Xenophon of course was not attempting to imitate Thucydides, merely take up where he had left off.

Like Thucydides, Xenophon was attentive to fiscal matters. In 405–404, Persian money would make possible a reconstruction of the Peloponnesian fleet after its devastating defeat at Arginusae, allowing the Spartans to achieve rapid parity with the Athenians despite their heavy prior losses. This rebuilt fleet would prove strong enough to win the decisive Battle of Aegospotami in 405, bringing the war to a close. Xenophon’s work is not without its difficulties, as certain problems exist with his chronology of the period of the so-called Ionian War, representing the latter years of the broader war, and as much as possible a plausible chronology of those years has been reconstructed in the present book.

Also of great use for the later years of the war, especially as a companion to Xenophon, is the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who composed his Library of History in the first century BC. Books 12 and 13 cover the years of the war. Diodorus was in the main a compiler of the written histories authored by earlier historians, and his quality is therefore largely dependent upon the accuracy of the underlying sources that he used. It is known that he relied heavily upon the fourth-century BC historian Ephorus for much of his material. Ephorus is now lost but for fragments, and what has survived largely exists second hand in Diodorus’ writings.10

Plutarch of Chaeronea (b. c. AD 50, d. c. 120) wrote in Greek when the Roman Empire was at its height and Greece had been subsumed within its grand imperial structure. He composed a series of biographies, Parallel Lives, of famous Greek and Roman figures, organized in pairs of one Greek and one Roman, twenty-three pairs of which still survive. Each Greek and Roman in a pair were compared with one another. For the present work, the biographies of leading fifth-century BC Greeks such as the Athenians Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles and Alcibiades, and the Spartan Lysander, contain the most valuable information relating to the naval aspects of the Peloponnesian War.

Also of note is the anonymous work Hellenica Oxyrhynchia. In 1906, a lengthy papyrus fragment of a fourth-century BC history was discovered in an ancient garbage heap in the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus. It was followed by two further fragments of the same history later in the twentieth century. Each of the three derived from a different copy, from which it may be inferred that the work was a popular one and in wide circulation at some point in time. It was in the latter two fragments that mention of wartime events occur, including an Athenian seaborne campaign in Asia Minor in 409 and the Battle of Notium in 406, while the first fragment dealt with events subsequent to the end of the war. Like Xenophon, the Oxyrhynchus historian, tentatively identified as one Cratippus, a contemporary of Thucydides and an otherwise totally lost historian, was a continuator of Thucydides’ history, and it is possible that Xenophon had his work available to him as he wrote his own history.11

The Athenians

Athens was an old city even in the Classical era, with an existence dating back to the Bronze Age. The city survived and prospered after the disasters that overwhelmed the earlier Mycenaean Greek civilization in the thir...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Preface
• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: The Trireme
• Part 3: The Archidamian War
• Part 4: The Sicilian Expedition
• Part 5: The Ionian War
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography