SCRIPT - Geostrategy of the Peloponnesian War, Part 4: Syracuse and the Ionian War (06/01/2020)

Geostrategy of the Peloponnesian War, Part 4: Syracuse and the Ionian War

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 This is a video series I originally made for CaspianReport on the geostrategic analysis of the Peloponnesian War.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 3^rd 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 2^nd 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.

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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.