From the seventh century onward, poleis girded their citadels (akropoleis) with defensive walls, and by the Classical period virtually every polis, with the notable exceptions of Sparta and Elis, had a fortified akropolis. The akropolis walls protected temples and civic buildings, and in time of war served as a temporary refuge for citizens. Circuit walls covering the entire urban area of a polis were rare at first, but became increasingly common from the mid-fifth century onward. Most Greek walls were of quarried granite or limestone. Ashlar masonry, regular rectangular blocks in courses of equal height, eventually became one of the most common building methods. Walls frequently consisted of two ashlar facings enclosing a rubble core, sometimes with ashlar transverses for greater strength. Mud brick was occasionally employed when local stone was unavailable or of poor quality. The city walls of Athens, destroyed by the Persians in 480, were hurriedly rebuilt using recycled gravestones, bits of sculpture, and other rubble.
City walls were both a military advantage and a vivid symbol of polis sovereignty. They were also amongst the most expensive and labor-intensive projects a state could pursue. In 401, to cite an extreme example, Dionysios I of Syracuse conscripted 60,000 workers and 6,000 yoke of oxen to construct a 6 km wall with towers in two weeks. The total cost of this has been estimated at around 300 talents, the equivalent of almost two million daily wages for an average worker (Camp 2000: 46-7). At the other end of the scale, the akropolis walls of Halai in central Greece, with a circuit of roughly 0.5 km, went through many decades of patchwork building and modification. Once erected, walls required regular maintenance and sometimes, especially after earthquakes, extensive repairs.
Several poleis constructed Long Walls, paired extensions of a circuit wall running from an inland city to a port or beach. The best known of these, dating from the midfifth century, connected Athens with its port of Piraeus some seven kilometers to the southwest. Along with a third wall stretching south to the beach at Phaleron, the Athenian Long Walls enclosed several square kilometers of relatively open land, space for refugees from the Attic countryside during wartime. The countryside itself was dotted with numerous freestanding towers, which served as agricultural storehouses and slave quarters, lookout and signaling posts, and temporary refuges from raiders. Finally, elaborate border defense fortifications appeared in the fourth century. The Athenians, for instance, constructed a chain of forts, including Phyle, Oinoe, and Eleutherai, to cover the mountain passes leading into Attika from the north. There was also the so-called Dema Wall, perhaps built as early as the first quarter of the fourth century to cover the western approaches to Attika.
Figure 23.6 The Long Walls connecting Athens and its port of Piraeus. In Piraeus were the dry docks, yards, and warehouses of the Athenian navy. John M. Camp, The Archaeology of Athens (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Used with permission.
For much of the Classical period the Greeks lagged far behind in poliorcetic, or siege, technology, and defenders held the upper hand in siege warfare. The Athenians enjoyed a reputation as expert besiegers, but aside from being the first Greeks to deploy battering rams, at Samos in 440, they were not particularly successful. Indeed, their siege of Poteidaia (432-430) at the start of Peloponnesian War was typical: the Poteidaians surrendered only when food ran out. For their part, the Peloponnesians attacking Plataiai in summer 429 attempted a succession of different techniques (Thuc. 2.75-8). Blockading the town with a palisade of felled fruit trees, they began to heap up an earthen ramp to surmount the defensive walls. The Plataians countered by heightening their walls and undermining the ramp. When the Peloponnesians brought up battering rams, the defenders dropped heavy beams on chains to snap off some ram heads, and used lassoes to grab and disable others. Ultimately, although the Peloponnesians were able to collapse portions of the Pla-taian wall, they were unable to capture the city. They settled for a blockade, which took two years to starve the defenders into submission.
The Peloponnesian War saw further technological innovations. At Delion in 424, for example, the Boiotians devised a primitive flamethrower to drive Athenian defenders from a wooden fort (Thuc. 4.100); the Spartans used a similar device successfully on at least one other occasion (Thuc. 4.115). The greatest danger to fortifications, however, came from within. A gate left unguarded at night or opened by traitors within could provide attackers quick access to the city. Stealthy attackers could also scale unpatrolled walls at night or be smuggled into the city by a sympathetic faction. So serious were these threats that Aineias Taktikos devoted the majority of his handbook on siege warfare to discussing countermeasures against them. Getting past the walls, however, did not necessarily equal capturing the city, as the 300 Theban attackers of Plataiai discovered in 429. Let into the town by traitors, they made the mistake of grounding arms in the marketplace rather than immediately going house to house and arresting any who might oppose them. The Plataians soon recovered their courage and fought back, building street barricades and cutting holes through mud-brick house-walls to encircle the confused Thebans. Only a handful of attackers escaped, while 180 were captured and executed. The Macedonians let into Olynthos by traitors in 348 did not make the same mistake, but even so extensive urban fighting was required to subdue the city (Lee 2001).
The fourth century saw the advantage shift slowly to the offensive. The Carthaginians were the first to use mobile siege towers that overtopped defensive walls, at Selinous and Himera in 409. Dionysios I of Syracuse borrowed the idea to take Carthaginian-held Motya in 397. Dionysios also introduced the first bolt-shooting artillery. The earliest version, a sort of oversized crossbow called the gastraphetes, could reach perhaps 185-230 m. By around 375, this had grown into a mounted bolt-thrower (oxybeles or katapaltes) powered by winches and levers, able to propel a 1.25 m missile up to 275 m. The size and range of bolt-throwers continued to increase, and by the 350s some had been modified into stone-throwers (lithoboloi). These machines were effective against personnel, but not powerful enough to knock down walls or towers. Only during the 340s did torsion artillery, powered by twisted sinew or hair, come into use. Using bolts or heavy (15 kg) stones, torsion engines could shoot to ranges of 370 m or more (Marsden 1969: 12-17, 86-91). At closer ranges, with much heavier stones (up to 36 kg), they could breach most fortifications.
The development of siege artillery dramatically influenced military architecture. Tall artillery towers, designed to mount multiple defensive batteries with wide fields of fire, replaced or were retrofitted over earlier archery platforms and bastions. The number of towers in any given length of wall also increased significantly. Masonry was rusticated, left with an unfinished convex surface to deflect stone shot. Besiegers responded with larger mobile towers, more powerful artillery, and better engineering, inaugurating a race between attackers and defenders that would continue unabated into the Hellenistic period.
Given the advantages enjoyed by defenders in siege warfare throughout much of the period, why did Classical armies still sally forth to meet invaders in pitched battle? The obvious explanation is that citizen-soldiers sought to protect their fields and orchards from invading ravagers. Yet matters are not so simple. Agricultural devastation was time-consuming and often ineffective, and troops dispersed for ravaging were vulnerable to counterattack. Even the repeated Spartan invasions of Attika during the Peloponnesian War seem to have caused relatively little permanent damage (Hanson 1998: 174-84). The real damage, it has been argued, was to the pride and territoriality of citizen-farmers, who saw trespassers on their land, mucking about in their crops and defiling their ancestral shrines. Ravaging, in sum, was more symbolic than practical, intended to goad citizen-hoplites out of their walls and into pitched battle. This incitement usually worked. In fact the Athenians at the start of the Peloponnesian War were unusual precisely because they withdrew behind the Long Walls and did not sally forth to confront the Spartans. Perikles, indeed, experienced great difficulty convincing his fellow citizens to stick with this passive strategy (Thuc. 2.21).
Even if ravaging did not always cause irreparable long-term damage, the short-term damage could be significant. Successive repeated invasions coupled with semi-permanent occupation could do real harm, as the Athenians discovered later in the war when the Spartans established a fortress at Dekeleia in northeast Attika from which they could raid the countryside and offer sanctuary to escaping slaves. The Athenians at least had a naval lifeline which kept grain ships coming into the Piraeus until the last months of the war. Smaller poleis were not so fortunate. Even localized, temporary agricultural destruction could mean starvation for some, and so their citizens probably marched out to battle as much for practical economic reasons as for symbolic ones. If nothing else, they could delay the enemy long enough to evacuate the countryside. City walls were there to provide a fallback position if necessary, but the first thing to do was undertake an active defense against the invader.
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