Hi, and welcome to Strategy Stuff. This is a video
series I originally made for CaspianReport on the geostrategic analysis of the
Peloponnesian War. In the third video, we examined Athens’ ascent and Sparta’s
response during the Archidamian War. Now, we see how a 3rd
generation of leaders sought decision in the final phases of the conflict: the
Peace of Nicias, the infamous Sicilian Expedition, and the Ionian War.
I. The Peace of Nicias
Throughout the Peloponnesian War, Athens and Sparta
both sought to gain a strategic edge over the other, as a prelude to the
decisive battle to determine who would dominate Greece. Athenian general
Demosthenes developed an operations package that defeated Sparta in small-scale
battles, but the city still could not win the large battles that would prompt
the defection of Sparta’s major allies. Sparta, on the other hand, quickly
discovered that it had no way of overthrowing Athenian naval dominance and, by
extension, its Empire. Therefore, despite the bloodshed split from Naupactus to
Sphacteria to Delium to Amphipolis, both sides remained stuck in a strategic
stalemate, symbolized in the status quo Peace of Nicias in 421BC.
Ironically enough, the signing of the Peace would generate
the conditions to break this stalemate. Sparta’s unilateral withdrawal from the
War angered major allies like Thebes and Corinth, who had hoped to gain
something from the struggle. The result was that the Peloponnesian League
imploded as members decided to go their own way. Over the next few months, a
number of ad-hoc alliances were made in light of these new circumstances: at
one point, Athens and Sparta even joined together to stabilize the shaky peace.
So despite the cliché that the Peace was
fundamentally doomed, this unholy alliance shows the lengths pro-peace factions
in both cities went to to sustain the peace. But equally vigorous were the
attempts of pro-war parties to go back to war. On the Spartan side, the late
Brasidas’ lieutenants refused to return the rebelling Greek Northeast back to
the Athenians, and in response the Athenians refused to abandon the fort of
Pylos in the helot homeland of Messenia. Thebes also rejected Spartan demands
to obey the terms of the Peace.
On the Athenian side, pro-war advocates interpreted
Nicias’ Peace as nothing less than the maturation of Pericles’ opening
strategy. After all, Pericles’ long-term goal was to turn Sparta’s allies to
gain the numerical advantage for decisive battle, and now peace finally offered
what a decade of war could not. And here, we turn to the plan of a certain
Alcibiades.
II. The Culmination of Athenian Strategy
A protégé of Pericles, Alcibiades accepted the idea
that the Peace was only a brief intermission before the war began again. Athens
therefore needed to use this breathing-space to gain as much advantage as it
could for the decisive battle.
Pericles had shown that Athens did not have the economy
to grind down the enemy over the long-run. Cleon had shown that Athens’
military was not strong enough to even take out an isolated Thebes one-on-one.
Now Alcibiades proposed a third approach – diplomacy.
The implosion of the Spartan alliance gave Athens a
chance to weave a new coalition that would provide an overwhelming numerical
superiority over Sparta. And Alcibiades was talented indeed in his weaving:
Argos, whose truce with Sparta ended in 421, was easy enough to convince.
Against former enemies Mantinea and Elis, Alcibiades deployed his notorious
power to recast political circumstances in a different light, taking their fear
of Athenian power and turning it into an invitation to use said power for their
own territorial expansion. As all four powers were democracies, Alcibiades
furthermore wrapped the alliance up in the language of a democratic front
against oligarchy, cementing ties between fast friends while severing
longstanding links with Sparta.
By 419, the alliance was throwing its weight around
with impunity against Spartan allies Corinth and the towns near Argos. In
response, Sparta fully mobilized its army but otherwise decided not to act
against these provocations. Officially this was due to religious reasons, but
perhaps Sparta was genuinely deterred by the strength of this new alliance. Or,
perhaps, they had received news from the Athenian home front.
Alcibiades might have been a genius at roping in
foreign powers, but his Achilles’ heel would always be his domestic support.
Having established this formidable alliance in Sparta’s backyard, Alcibiades would
lose to the pro-peace faction in the Athenian elections of 418, which meant a
minimal Athenian contribution for the duration of the year. Unsurprisingly,
Sparta chose this time to seek a decisive battle at Mantinea, and on this clash
upon which hung the hopes of Athenian hegemony over Greece, Athens would only
contribute about 1000 of the 8000 troops fielded by the alliance. The result
was a resounding Spartan victory.
The Battle of Mantinea would be the closest Athens
ever came to winning the Peloponnesian War. As Sparta once again proved its
ability to settle disputes through its military might, Alcibiades’ diplomatic
project unraveled as Mantinea and Elis left the Athenian alliance, and Argos
fell into political instability. Athens – or perhaps, the pro-peace Nicias –
had squandered a golden opportunity for a decisive victory, but at least this
only meant reverting to the status quo. Sparta still had no way of
overthrowing Athens’ naval power and empire. There was still time for Athens to
find another path to victory.
III. The Sicilian Expedition
Many reasons have been proposed for why Athens
would attack Sicily on such a grand scale from 415-413, which seems
breathtakingly irrational given the city’s engagements in Greece. But we can
dispose of an argument right off the bat: Thucydides’ insinuation that the
Athenians were uninformed about Sicily. This is unlikely given Athens’
longstanding trade and political links with towns on the island, which had led
to the campaigns in the Northwest and even an expedition in 427. So, excluding
the xenophobic underestimation of Carthage that all Greeks shared, we can
assume the Athenians had a good idea of what they were dealing with.
We might also consider Nicias’ alternative that
instead of Sicily, Athens should have doubled down on efforts to recover the
Greek Northeast, which had defected to Brasidas in 424 and which Sparta had
lied about returning. But Athens had been doing exactly that since at least
422, without much to show for it. Even if the Northeast had been recaptured,
Athens would have had to tie down large forces there on perpetual guard against
re-insurrection and Spartan strikes. On a cost-benefit analysis, Athens seemed
to be better off capturing resources overseas than staying on mainland Greece.
All in all, after the defeat at Mantinea, Athens
was back to square one in finding an advantage to overpower Sparta in decisive
battle. Alcibiades’ third approach of allying with the Mainland Greek cities
had failed; now, the obvious choice left was the overseas Greek colonies.
Forcing overseas neutrals onto Athens’ side therefore became the new strategy,
notoriously demonstrated in the subjugation of Melos in 416. And naturally
enough, the island of Sicily, with its large number of overseas Greeks, would
have been a high priority.
Unlike what he told the Spartans later and despite
Thucydides’ claim, Alcibiades’ original idea was probably not to conquer Sicily
– after all, he only requested a small force for his expedition. Instead, he
wanted to win over the minor Sicilian towns, by using the same diplomacy he did
in the run-up to Mantinea, inviting them to see Athenian dominance as an
opportunity for expansion against local hegemon Syracuse. Indeed, Syracuse had
banned the Sicilians from asking for foreign help out of this very fear, way
back in 424.
So how did the Sicilian Expedition veer so far off
from this original intention? Thucydides blames Nicias, who tried to cancel the
Expedition entirely by demanding a gigantic army, only to see the city approve
his request in comical fashion. But clearly, the political appetite for a major
intervention existed: in 417, after the defeat at Mantinea, Alcibiades and
Nicias teamed up to expel a demagogue called Hyperbolus, whose policy outlook
was similar to Cleon’s – aggressive and imperial.
If Hyperbolus was politically dangerous enough to
target, then it’s likely that an influential number of Athenians shared his
view of wanting less allies and more direct control. Perhaps in their view,
allies could underperform like at Mantinea; by contrast, incorporating Sicily into
the Empire would not only grant Athens a larger military to beat Sparta in
decisive battle, but also a larger economy to grind down the Spartans even if
said battle failed.
So in a sense, we’ve come back full circle to argue
that Alcibiades was probably correct after all, when he told the Spartans that
the Athenians were out to conquer Sicily. It just wasn’t his strategy, nor
Nicias’; instead, it was the strategy of an increasingly-radicalized democratic
faction, convinced that only Athens had the motivation and the power to bring
about its own hegemony. Everybody else had to either obey, or die like the
rebelling Scionians in 421 and the conquered Melians in 416. In their strategy
the concept of “the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they
must” reaches its final, destructive apex.
So perhaps it was a good thing for Greece that the Sicilian
Expedition, right from the outset, was hobbled by divided leadership, two out
of three who fundamentally disagreed with the strategic objective at hand. Alcibiades
would immediately defect to Sparta as Athens recalled him for religious crimes.
Nicias wasted valuable time dithering in Sicily, but clearly he would have been
punished if he simply called everything off and went home.
Judging from how close the Athenians came to
breaking Syracuse’s will, the radical democrats were correct in their
assessment that the Greek part of Sicily could be conquered. As it turns out,
however, Nicias’ delay gave the Syracusans just enough time to kill the radical
democrats’ representative Lamachus and resist the eventual assault.
Unwilling to bear the political costs of retreat,
Nicias let his Expedition waste away in Sicily, even as Syracuse received
reinforcements from Sparta. With this attitude, even additional Athenian
support led by Demosthenes did nothing but compound on failure. Eventually, the
entire Athenian army and fleet would be annihilated, meaning more than 200
triremes, 10 thousand hoplites, and the equivalent of 50 years’ of imperial
tribute. Along with them went two key strategic cushions: the experienced
fleets that separated the Empire from Sparta, and the wealth that let Athens determine
its own strategic fate.
IV. Ionian War 1 – The Conventional Strategy
Reversed
As Athens was slowly consumed by the Sicilian
Expedition, Sparta – with a little prodding from the defecting Alcibiades –
decided to resume the War in 414. This was understandable, as Syracuse, whose
naval aid Sparta had hoped for since King Archidamus’ time, was now finally on
the Peloponnesian side. The strategic problem of not having a navy to defeat
Athens with still remained – but then came Athens’ naval annihilation at
Syracuse, and now the bar for wresting away sea control was lower than ever.
‘Easier’ still meant pretty difficult. Having lost
its entire fleet at Sphacteria, Sparta’s naval power had recovered enough a
decade later to send reinforcements to Syracuse, but in terms of resources and
certainly skill this was not enough to immediately challenge Athens. Faced with
a golden opportunity, Sparta finally accepted the idea that the War would not
be settled through the ‘conventional strategy’ of a quick decisive battle. Instead,
this was to be a war of naval attrition, where Sparta would secure resources to
build up its own sea power while simultaneously preventing Athens from doing
the same.
This recognition quickly brought decisive changes. In
413, King Agis II, son of King Archidamus, invaded Attica again – but this
time, instead of raiding farms to lure the Athenian army into battle, the
Spartans instead built a fort at the nearby village of Decelea, so that they
could raid them permanently. Furthermore, like the Athenian fort at Pylos a
decade ago, Decelea attracted runaway slaves who would otherwise have been manning
Athenian triremes. The end result was to deduct from Athens’ production and
instead adding it to Sparta’s own.
Decelea also had another effect. Temporarily freed
from the fear of overwhelming Athenian retaliation, the city’s rebellious tributaries
began conspiring with King Agis for a general revolt across the Aegean. Even
more encouraging was the Persian Empire’s newfound willingness to support
Sparta, with both Pharnabazus in the Northern Aegean and Tissaphernes in the
Southern Aegean promising aid in their respective theaters.
So in a complete 180 from the strategic situation a
decade ago, Sparta was now presented with a deluge of choices: whether to focus
on the Northern, Central or Southern Aegean. In the end, Sparta decided to aim
for all three theaters at once. Normally, dispersal of effort is frowned upon
in strategy, but in this case, it was a reasonable decision – a simultaneous
rebellion across the entire Athenian Empire might have shattered Athens’
residual confidence, ending the War in a single political stroke.
Unfortunately for Sparta, a grimly-determined Athens
reacted to this strategy with a well-considered counterstroke, concentrating
its forces in the Central Aegean to confront the Spartan squadron sent there. Success
there isolated the Northern Aegean from Sparta, immunizing 2 out of the 3
theaters from the threat of uncontrolled rebellion. Still, this meant conceding
the Southern Aegean to Sparta, and the consequences of that were bad enough –
not only did Sparta’s resources again grow at the expense of Athens’, but the
Spartans now also had a solid link to the immense wealth of Persia.
And as Sparta’s navy grew in size, Athens found
itself having to tie down more and more of its own fleet in unproductive
activity, simply to guard against a Spartan attack. From here on out, Athens
would lose the ability to take the strategic initiative, until, by the end of
the war, its fleet movements were almost exclusively dictated by where it could
find supplies to sustain itself.
V. Ionian War 2 – War Termination
After Athens’ disasters from 414 to 412, the War
was now Sparta’s to win. And as the Spartan fleet reached numerical parity with
the Athenian fleet, a specific strategic objective also became clear: if Sparta
gained sea control, this control should be used to cut Athens’ Black Sea grain
supply, and the city would be starved into surrender.
On the surface, this seems like the naval
equivalent of the conventional strategy: as Sparta encroached on Athens’ supply
lines, especially at the bottleneck of the Hellespont in the Northern Aegean,
Athens was sure to respond with everything it had, and the War would be decided
in a single stroke.
But in fact, it was the opposite: now it was
Sparta’s turn to refuse decisive battle and instead, play the longer game of
grinding Athens down. In fact, the same concerns that Pericles had about Athens’
army twenty years ago, now repeated themselves for Sparta’s fleet. Sparta kept
a healthy respect for the skills of the Athenian navy, and furthermore, the quick
methods of obtaining overwhelming numerical superiority were gone. What little
Syracuse actually sent to Greece disappeared as intervened in Sicily, and
despite Sparta agreeing to hand the Greek cities in Western Anatolia back to
Persian rule, a major revolt in Egypt prevented Tissaphernes from delivering on
the naval aid he promised. Sparta therefore did not have any decisive advantage
over Athens in battle.
So, again echoing Pericles, the solution was simple
– don’t battle! Despite Sparta’s own poverty, contributions from Persia and Athens’
rebelling tributaries now let Sparta maintain a large and permanent fleet. It
therefore had ample time to carry out a slow but systematic strategy: tie down
the main part of the Athenian navy with a portion of their own, confront weaker
Athenian detachments elsewhere with a superior force, rip away another sliver
of the Athenian Empire, and repeat. While Athens faced off with Sparta in the
Central Aegean, a Spartan detachment raised its backyard of Euboea in revolt; while
the Athenians were distracted by that, Sparta moved into the Hellespont.
The success of Sparta’s strategy here can be seen
in how it made decisive battle irrelevant. Going back for the Spartan fleet, the
Athenian fleet under a re-defecting Alcibiades managed to corner and destroy it
at Cyzicus in 410, throwing Sparta’s naval position back to where it was just
after Syracuse. Yet even a result like this failed to tip the strategic balance:
the intervening period had bled Athens so dry, that the city could only watch
as Sparta rebuilt its fleet, all the while applying non-military pressure on
Athens. Specifically, with the arrival of the Persian Prince Cyrus the Younger
in 407, and his warm relationship with the Spartan naval commander Lysander,
Persian gold now flowed to encourage sailors to defect from Athens to Sparta.
Admittedly, after this defeat and others to come,
Sparta would offer peace to Athens, but only on the basis that Athens would
keep what it still had. Had Athens accepted them, the result would have been
perpetual insecurity under Spartan watch, and an undeniable Spartan victory. They
instead used the intervening period to reclaim some of what they once held.
But by 406, Athens’ strategic position had deteriorated
to such an extent that its navy began making desperation attacks against the
Spartan fleet. One such attack resulted in Athenian defeat at Notium and the
third defection of Alcibiades to Persia. Another defeat might have been the end
of the War, had a jealous Lysander not cut off funds to his replacement as
naval commander, resulting in the Spartan fleet’s 2nd destruction at
Arginusae. Still, this was hardly to Athens’ benefit, as Lysander accordingly
returned as naval commander in 405, cornering and destroying Athens’ fleet at
Aegospotami.
Without a fleet, Athens only had starvation and
defeat to look forward to. The pro-war holdouts were quickly overwhelmed as
Lysander overloaded the city with expelled colonists as the rest of the empire
fell. In the end, Athens agreed to completely dismantle its Empire, its walls,
its navy, and its democracy, placing itself under the control of Sparta.
VI. Conclusion
Sparta’s strategy in the Ionian War, aside from the
episode at Arginusae, was competently planned and executed. Successfully
leveraging its resource advantage in a way that no Athenian leader managed
during Mantinea or Sicily, Sparta systematically deprived the city of resources
and defeated it without staking the long-term outcome on decisive battle.
But contrary to the most fundamental reason the
Greeks had for fighting the Peloponnesian War, Athens’ loss did not settle the
question of Greek hegemony, not even temporarily. Within 3 years of
Aegospotami, Athens would free itself from Spartan control; within 10 years,
Greece would again be engulfed in general war.
*
Thanks for watching the video, and please do give a
like and subscribe. If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in
the comments section. This is part 4 of a 5-video series I originally made for
CaspianReport, and the final video, on the effects of politics on Greek
strategymaking, should be coming out shortly. Also check out my Facebook page,
where I review the literature and post some additional thoughts regarding the
video.
No comments:
Post a Comment