The early years of the war saw stalemate as no side had the ingenuity or resources to achieve a decisive advantage. An attempt by Athens to win control of the plains of Boeotia ended in failure after a decisive defeat at the hands of Thebes and her allies at Delium in 424. It took a lucky and unexpected break in 425 to end the stalemate. While raiding on the Peloponnese the Athenians had managed to destroy a small Spartan fleet that was supporting a garrison on the island of Sphacteria on the western coast of the Peloponnese. (The full land - and seascape of the drama can be well seen today from the hilltop palace of Pylos above Navarino Bay, a good place from which to read Thucydides’ narrative of events.) There were only 120 Spartans in the garrison (with some supporting troops) but the shock effect of the Spartan capitulation was immense, not only on Sparta but on the Greek world. Traditionally Spartans died in battle rather than capitulate and the city’s reputation was shattered. Sparta was ready to surrender and would probably have done so immediately if raids by a Spartan general Brasidas between 424 and 422 had not succeeded in capturing a number of Athenian cities along the Chalcidice peninsula and the northern Aegean, including the vital centre of Amphipolis.
After an Athenian counter-attack saw the death of Brasidas, both sides were willing to come to terms. The Peace of Nicias, the pious and reserved Athenian general who was much honoured for his achievement, was signed in 421 with each side agreeing to give up its gains. Amphipolis, however, chose to stay independent of Athens and none of the underlying problems that had caused the war had been resolved.
Sparta appeared, at first, the more vulnerable of the two states. Her manpower was in decline, one reason why the loss at Sphacteria was so significant, and her control over the Peloponnese seemed to be faltering. Her ally Corinth refused to sign the treaty when land she had lost was not included in it. Athens, under the influence of a persuasive young aristocrat, Alcibiades, first elected to a generalship in 420, now began interfering directly in the Peloponnese, making treaties of mutual defence with two important cities, Argos, the ancient rival of Sparta, and Elis. (Elis oversaw the Olympic Games and even banned Spartan athletes from them in 420.) Sparta had to respond. A showdown came in 418. Mantineia, on the plain of Arcadia, north of Sparta, was one of the greatest hoplite battles in history. The Spartans and their allies were slightly outnumbered by a force of 9,000 Mantineians and Argives with an attendant Athenian contingent but it was a decisive Spartan victory. It was to be another thirty years before the Peloponnesian cities risked a fresh confrontation with Sparta.
Technically Athens and Sparta had not actually renewed their war but Athens’s hopes that she would extend her influence into the Peloponnese were now thwarted. The pause in direct conflict saw some nasty incidents as both Sparta and Athens brutally suppressed ‘allies’ who tried to assert their independence. It was now that all male citizens of Melos were executed and their women and children enslaved on the demand of a ruthless Athenian Assembly.
Athens’s next move was to launch an expedition to the west, to Sicily and southern Italy, as a means of strengthening her position as a Mediterranean power. Once again it was the brainchild of Alcibiades. He was a complex character, ‘willful, spoiled, unpredictable and outrageous’, as Donald Kagan puts it, but also impossibly attractive to both men and women and intellectually sharpened by his close association with Socrates (see earlier, p. 282). Thucydides considered his motives were largely egocentric, the desire to make his name as a military commander and to tap the wealth of the west for himself.
The problems involved in achieving and holding even a foothold in Sicily when the opposition of such wealthy and well-protected cities as Syracuse was bound to be aroused were immense. Yet such was the confidence of Athens that there was even talk of conquering the whole island. The tensions between the Sicilian cities were exaggerated, hopes of a native Sicel uprising talked up, and the resources of one city, Segesta, who had agreed to support the Athenians, magnified. (To impress the Athenians the Segestans built the magnificent temple that still greets visitors as they approach the city from the east.) Shortly before the fleet sailed, however, the Herms, marble pillars bearing the head of the god Hermes and an erect phallus, which were used as boundary markers and signposts and whose phallic properties were a token of good luck, were mysteriously mutilated. The hysteria that resulted and the witch-hunt that followed in the effort to find the perpetrators shows that, whatever the intellectual pretensions of the elite, Athens remained a deeply superstitious city. A number of aristocrats were rounded up (and Alcibiades himself later recalled from Sicily to face trial) but the matter was never satisfactorily explained. The city was left haunted by a sense of ill omen.
The story of the expedition is Thucydides’ masterpiece and deserves to be read in his own words. His account starts with a magnificent description of the fleet of 134 triremes and 5,000 hoplites setting off to the west in 415. Once the fleet had arrived in Sicily, however, Segesta turned out to have few resources and it soon became clear that direct conflict with Syracuse was inevitable. There were three commanders, among them Alcibiades himself, and they disagreed as to whether to launch an immediate attack, delay until they had found more allies, or return home after making a show of strength. Alcibiades was then summoned home (to defend himself against a charge of ‘profaning the mysteries’), but defected to Sparta instead. His family had always had strong links with Sparta and he had even represented its interests in Athens but his ambivalent loyalties eventually led to him being murdered by Persians at the request of Sparta in 404 BC. By the time he had left Sicily Athens was in direct conflict with Syracuse, and another of the commanders, Lamarchus, was killed in skirmishing around the city. Nicias, was left in charge. Always cautious by nature, he was the commander least committed to direct confrontation with Syracuse, whose fine position, large resources, and well-defended harbour made her a formidable enemy. He found himself trapped, sure of humiliation if he returned home now, but reluctant to risk all by striking hard at his enemy.
In fact, if she had proved more resolute, Athens might have triumphed. Her fleet gave her the initiative at sea and she captured Syracuse’s harbour. The construction of siege walls around the city was put in hand. However, Athens lost her chance. The morale of Syracuse was boosted when a Spartan commander, Gylippus, managed to infiltrate a small force into the city. Even though reinforcements arrived from home (bringing the total commitment to half of Athens’s entire navy) a land attack failed. Eventually the decision was made to evacuate the harbour, whose entrance was now blocked by the Syracusan fleet.
In one of his most gripping passages Thucydides describes the emotional impact of this decisive battle as the Athenian hoplites waited to see if they would be saved:
As the struggle went on indecisively, the Athenian soldiers revealed the fear in their hearts by the swaying of their bodies; it was a time of agony for them, for escape or destruction seemed every moment just at hand. So long as the issue of the sea-battle was in doubt, you could have heard every kind of sound in one place, the Athenian camp: lamentation, shouting, ‘We’re winning!’, ‘We’re losing!’, all the cries wrung from a great army in great peril. The feelings of the men on the ships were much the same, until at last, when the battle had gone on for a long time, the Syracusans and their allies routed the Athenians and fell upon them, decisive winners, yelling and cheering, and chased them to the land. And then the Athenian sailors, as many of them as had not been captured afloat, beached their ships wherever they could and poured into the camp. The soldiers were not in two minds any more, but all with one impulse, groaning, wailing, lamenting the outcome of the battle, rallied—some of them close to the ships, others to guard the rest of their defensive wall, while the greater part of them began to think now about themselves, about how they were going to survive. (Translation: Kenneth Dover)
A final attempt to urge the Athenians to renew the battle with their surviving ships was met with mutiny and the only option left was to escape overland. The description Thucydides gives is one of his most gripping and heart-rending. The dead were left unburied. The wounded, desperate at being left, dragged themselves after their comrades as they moved off, with those overcome by their own shame of betrayal. The plight of the retreating army, without food and with continual harassment by Spartans and Syracusans, was horrific. When they came to water the hoplites were so thirsty they rushed forward to drink even though enemy missiles rained down on them. They lay in a stream drinking what was turning into a mess of mud and blood before the final surrender. The survivors were herded back to Syracuse and then imprisoned in appalling conditions in the quarries that surrounded the city. Nicias was captured and executed.
There was no doubt that this was a catastrophe. Forty thousand men may have been lost as well as half the city’s fleet. Athens’s democracy came under severe strain, overthrown in 411 by an oligarchical government of Four Hundred who were in favour of making peace with Sparta. The empire was also in revolt. One rebel, Mytilene, was recaptured but the island of Chios had to be abandoned after a blockade that failed. In 411 Euboea revolted and joined Sparta. However, some historians, among them Simon Hornblower, argue that Thucydides inflated the importance of the Sicilian disaster, partly to create a literary impact. The fact is that Athens was able to continue the war. The Four Hundred were overthrown when they tried to make peace on behalf of Athens and replaced by a semi-democratic government of Five Thousand. The navy remained loyal to the democracy throughout and gradually new ships were built. Despite some defections, the empire survived largely intact. The will to resist remained amazingly strong.
Once again, however, it looked as if there would be deadlock with neither city able to deliver a deathblow to the other. Sparta, on the advice of Alcibiades, had set up a fortified base at Deceleia, halfway between Athens and her frontier with Boeotia, which meant that Spartan soldiers could dominate and ravage land in Attica all the year round. They could also lure slaves away from Athens, and 20,000 are recorded as escaping from the city, a severe drain on its human resources but not enough to crush it. Somehow new resources had to be found to bring the conflict to an end.
The only major source was Persia, and in fact from the 420s both Athens and Sparta had been hoping to secure her support. The Athenians ruined their chances by unwisely backing two satraps who were in rebellion against the monarchy, and from 411 it was Sparta who gained the money to build and equip a fleet. In return the Spartans acquiesced in the achievement of Persia’s main objective since the Persian Wars, the return of the Greek cities of Asia to her control. This was the end of any pretence that Sparta was fighting for the liberation of Greece.
The closing years of the war (411-404) saw the experienced Athenian fleet locked in conflict with the newer but better-resourced Spartan one. The ambition of Sparta was now to close off Athenian supplies of grain from the Hellespont. The city was dependent on them. A Spartan fleet was there in 411 and managed to capture the city of Byzantium. The Athenians were not finished, however, and won two major victories in 411 and 410. In 410 the Spartans even sued for peace, but Athens refused to negotiate. At first Athens’s stubbornness appeared to have paid off. Byzantium, the vitally strategic city on the Bosporus, was regained in 408, although another victory at Arginusae (near Lesbos) in 406 was marred when the Athenian Assembly condemned to death the generals who had been unable to rescue survivors from the battle in a brewing storm.
Even so, a final victory for Athens remained elusive. The Spartans now always had enough resources to rebuild their fleet. In 405 the Spartans, under their commander Lysander, captured the town of Lampsachus in the Hellespont and were able to shelter their fleet in its harbour. The Athenian fleet arrived to challenge them but had to beach on the other side of the strait at Aigospotamae where there was no harbour. This left them dangerously exposed. They sailed out day after day to challenge the Spartans, who would not come out. Lysander noticed, however, that once the Athenian ships returned across the strait they were left on the beach unmanned. He launched a sudden attack achieving complete surprise. Out of Athens’s fleet of 180 ships, 170 were captured. When the news reached Athens, and the truth sunk in, a howl of despair travelled up from Piraeus to the city. With the Hellespont now under Spartan control, Athens was starved and forced into surrender (404). The Long Walls were pulled down, the fleet reduced almost to nothing, and a Government of Thirty imposed on the city by the victorious Spartans. Against all expectations, Athens had actually been comprehensively defeated, even though the Spartans did not destroy the city completely, afraid perhaps of creating a power vacuum in the area.
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