Hi, and welcome to Strategy Stuff. This is a video series I originally made for CaspianReport
on the geostrategic analysis of the Peloponnesian War. Previously, we went over
the opening strategies of Athens and Sparta. Now, with their failure and the
death of the first generation of leaders, in this third video we look at how
both sides adapted to the developing war.
I. A New Kind of War
At the start of the War, Athens and Sparta hoped to
leverage their respective dominances, on sea or on land, to decisively defeat
the other side. From Athens, Pericles played a long game, launching naval raids
against Spartan allies in the hope that their defection would eventually grant
numerical superiority on land. From Sparta, Archidamus selectively ravaged
Athenian territory, hoping to lure the Athenians into a premature battle.
Neither plan had achieved much by the time this first generation of leaders
passed by 427BC.
While the strategic goals remained unchanged, the new
generation of Athenian and Spartan leaders had to grapple with the changing
nature of the war. Previously, we talked about a Greek conventional strategy where
war revolved around decisive land battles while minimizing human, time and
financial costs. This was what the Greeks expected to fight at the start of the
Peloponnesian War.
But by 427BC, it was clear that this time was
different. In wars past, when armies cut cities off from local farms, the
result was either a battle or surrender. But now, from Potidaea in 432 to
rebelling Mytilene in 428 to famous Plataea in 427, cities instead preferred to
hunker down for a long siege.
Why the change? The reason lay in the alliance
networks of Athens and Sparta. A besieged city without hope of reinforcement is
just delaying the inevitable, but with a nearby power promising relief, some now
saw political gain in enduring a few months’ hardship. The collective result
was a vast increase in war costs, the sort that derailed Pericles’ opening
gambit, and as exhaustion set in, the search for more decisive solutions grew more
urgent.
One way of achieving decision was to expand the war
into new theaters, and try to win there. This was what Sparta did in 430, when
it extended the War into the semi-tamed lands of Northwestern Greece. A link
between the Peloponnesians and their kin in Sicily, Northwestern Greece housed
an Athenian base at Naupactus, anchoring Athens’ encirclement of the Spartan
alliance. Now the local Ambraciots were asking Sparta to help with their
Acarnanian enemies, promising to deliver Naupactus if they won, and the
Spartans agreed.
The resulting campaigns in the Northwest were a
period of strategic evolution for Sparta and Athens. First, it showed the Spartans
that overcoming Athenian naval dominance was a fearsome task. King Archidamus
might have thought otherwise, but many Spartans expected their hoplites to
dominate the sea as easily as they did the land. The revolt of the Athenian
tributary of Mytilene in 428, encouraged by the thought of Spartan help, shows
that this was not an uncommon view.
This expectation was soon shattered. Back in the
Northwest, a small but skilled Athenian force would twice repel Peloponnesian
fleets in 429, leaving the nearby Spartan land forces isolated and vulnerable. Furthermore,
these defeats carried powerful strategic consequences – they convinced Spartan
sympathizers, and even Sparta itself, that the sea would remain under Athenian
rule, which meant that anybody fighting for Sparta overseas was going to be
doing it alone.
When a Spartan taskforce under Alcidas dashed
across the Aegean in 427 to rouse Athens’ other tributaries and perhaps even
Persia into war, he instead was received coolly and, as if to demonstrate why,
quickly fled before his Athenian pursuers. Alcidas would then go back to the
Northwest, and neutralize the important Athenian ally of Corcyra by instigating
a civil war, but fundamentally, the Peloponnesians were stuck in a strategic
dilemma: to defeat the Athenian navy, they needed the help of overseas allies,
but without defeating the Athenian navy, no overseas ally would dare help them.
Athens would gain far more from its Northwestern
experience. Reinforcing Naupactus in 428, Athenian forces under Demosthenes arrived
too late to help their Acarnanian allies repel the isolated Spartans in 429. Demosthenes
decided then to move east against the Boeotian League, hoping to knock out this
wing of the Spartan alliance by surprising it from its weakly-defended rear. But
as it turned out, there was a good reason why the Boeotians never bothered with
the place – the locals fought in a way completely alien to and completely
effective against Greek hoplites. Taking advantage of the broken terrain, their
skirmishers harassed, ambushed and finally destroyed Demosthenes’ force.
Demosthenes learnt from his disaster. When, in 426,
Sparta again joined with the Ambraciots in invading the Northwest, his force
would respond in local fashion. Combining skirmisher forces, unconventional tactics
and political trickery into one operations package, Demosthenes would utterly
annihilate the invaders, to such an extent that all sides agreed to maintain
the Northwestern status quo for the next century, which safeguarded
Athens’ pre-existing position there. More importantly, Demosthenes had found a
way to defeat the Spartans in battle.
II. Athens: Cleon’s Strategic Offensive
The creation of Demosthenes’ operations package
coincided with a new strategy in Athens. Although Pericles had died in 429,
power stayed with the democratic faction he once led – if anything, its power
increased as the Athenian masses, who so far had seen the most fighting as
sailors in the navy, leveraged their sacrifice to demand further concessions.
Thucydides identifies their key leader as the demagogue, Cleon.
Cleon’s strategic outlook, like the offensive interpretation
of Pericles, was unambiguously imperial, in that he saw the Peloponnesian War
as a fundamental struggle that would be decisively settled in favor of one side
or the other. But having seen Pericles’ plan stall into an unsustainable
stalemate, Cleon recognized that even Athens needed more money to pay for
spiraling war costs. The easiest way to increase income was to double the
tribute on its hapless empire, but if that caused tributaries to revolt, Athens
risked having to spend even more on military suppression. Was there a
financially-efficient way to hold down the empire?
Cleon’s response began with the assumption that
Athens could overawe its tributaries by flexing its military muscles. After
all, it was way past time to recognize the Delian League for what it truly was:
not a consensual self-defense League against the Persians, but instead an
Empire where, to quote the notorious Melian Dialogue, “the strong do what
they will, and the weak suffer what they must”. By demonstrating that
Athens was both incomparably strong and willing to use its strength to bully
the weak, the city might just inject enough fear into its tributaries to stop
them in their tracks.
This effect could not be achieved with Pericles’
cautious strategy, and thus Cleon replaced it with a more muscular policy.
Against rebelling Mytilene, Cleon’s demand for mass executions and was only
narrowly vetoed by the Assembly. In the wider Mediterranean, Athens would take
a more directly interventionist stance: whereas Pericles preferred to pay the
Thracians to invade Sparta’s ally Macedon, Cleon now launched taskforces into
Crete and Sicily, showing that no corner of the Greek world was too far from
the city’s reach.
The Spartan alliance was of course not exempt from
this. Many revolters expected that any Athenian response against them would be
blunted by Sparta’s military power. If Athens could ramp up the raids on
Sparta’s allies, or build forts directly on Sparta’s doorstep, Sparta’s
military shortcomings would be revealed to Greece, and in doing so not just rob
Athens’ tributaries of the hope of foreign aid, but perhaps also cause Sparta’s
helots and allies to come over to Athens as well.
In this, Cleon had the fortune to seize on a unique
opportunity – the operations package developed by Demosthenes in the Northwest.
It especially turned Athens’ forts from being shameful irritants into actual
strategic lures, drawing in blockading forces which could then be destroyed by counter-blockading
units utilizing anti-hoplite tactics.
This combination immediately delivered a major
success. In 425, Demosthenes built a fort at Pylos, near the helot homeland of
Messenia. That drew in a Spartan force, which after failing to storm the fort
decided to blockade it by occupying the nearby island of Sphacteria. Predictably,
that meant that when the reinforcing Athenian fleet arrived, the Spartans on the
island were isolated in turn. Now Cleon cooperated with Demosthenes, and once again
using skirmishers, unconventional tactics, and political trickery, the
Athenians came out of Sphacteria with 120 elite Spartan captives, the entire
Spartan fleet, and an immense blow to Spartan prestige.
Many historians consider Sphacteria to be the
height of Athens’ power in the War: after all, if it could beat Sparta, then
who else stood a chance? As if to emphasize this, Athens’ ultimatum, demanding
an end to invading Attica in return for sparing the 120 Sphacteria captives,
was meekly obeyed by Sparta. In that moment, it seemed as if the Athenian
hegemony had already begun.
III. Athens: The Culminating Point
Sparta and its sympathizers may have been overawed
after Sphacteria, but the Peloponnesian War was still ongoing, so what should
Athens do now to win the War? Some historians argue that Cleon should have
accepted the subsequent Spartan offer for white peace, but as mentioned in the
previous video, such a peace was really little better than a truce. In any case,
Athens had a winning hand and it was reasonable to press the advantage further.
Cleon’s counter-demands to Sparta show what
Athenians considered a proper peace. Couched in terms of ‘restoring’ what
Athens had lost in the First Peloponnesian War 20 years ago, Cleon demanded
control over the Corinthian isthmus through Megara, control over the Corinthian
Gulf through Achaea, control over the ports linking Athens to Spartan rival
Argos, and implicitly, the freedom to deal with Boeotia and recapture it into
the Athenian orbit. In short, Athens wanted a stranglehold over Greece and what
remained of the Spartan alliance, which was hegemony in all but name. This was
more or less what Pericles’ strategic offensive was aiming for.
Obviously the Spartans would reject this, but after
Sphacteria, the question was less what the Spartans would allow, and more what
the Athenians could take. Over the next two years, Athens would intensify
Pericles’ plan to “surround the Peloponnese with war”, building even
more forts on the Peloponnesian coast, while launching attacks on the most
exposed of Spartan allies: Corinth, Megara, and the cities near Argos. It’s
easy to see this as Athenian hubris, but at the same time, it was best to
exploit Demosthenes’ operational advantage while it lasted – after all, even
the Spartans were moving away from their traditional all-hoplite army and recruiting
their own cavalry and archers.
In any case, we need to qualify the Athenian
success. Granted, in many cases Athens seemed suddenly to be pushing at an open
door: resistance from Megara and the cities near Argos fell away, achieving in
months what Pericles’ immense spending had failed to do for years. But Cleon’s
strategy by itself did not deliver a fatal blow to Sparta, or bypass the need
for a decisive battle. The helots did not desert to the forts en masse and
destroy the Spartan economy. Spartan morale was not so crushed that it would
give up the hegemony.
Athens’ continuing efforts to force the defection
of Sparta’s key allies were also unsuccessful. In 424, an attempt to seize
Megara via coup narrowly failed thanks to the timely arrival of the Spartan
general Brasidas, but the far greater prize was Boeotia, the defection of which
would end the specter of a two-front war. Athens therefore invaded Central
Greece from the northeast, southeast and the southwest: not to split the
Boeotian defenders in preparation for decisive battle, but instead to build
forts, sow panic and confusion, and create conditions for a pro-Athenian coup
across Boeotia.
As it turns out, the Boeotians under Theban
leadership caught and defeated the Athenian main army at Delium, proving that
Athens’ newfound prowess on land was still not enough to win a decisive battle.
Still, Delium by itself was merely a setback, not a turning-point: Athens still
had its resource base and its operations package, and time would only make
Athens stronger and better-prepared for the decisive showdown.
IV. Sparta: Gambling on Brasidas
While Athens was ramping up its attacks, Sparta by
contrast had sunk into paralysis, unable to solve its fundamental strategic
problem. King Archidamus had recognized that the Spartan alliance had to seize
sea control in order to strike effectively at Athens, but even he overlooked
the conundrum that, without a successful Spartan fleet, no overseas power would
supply the funds or ships for such a fleet. The attempts at eroding Athens’
naval power by capturing Naupactus in the Northwest had failed miserably. Another
attempt to build a naval base at Central Greece also came to similar ruin.
So the defeat at Sphacteria did not create Sparta’s
problems, but only accelerated its sense of exhaustion. Even without the fear
of helot rebellion or the captives still in Athens, the Spartan army lacked
reachable targets; but on the other hand, staying at home gave Athens more time
to strengthen and peel off vulnerable allies. And speaking of time, the peace
treaty with Argos, due to end in 421, was almost over.
Under unfavorable time pressure, Sparta banked on
what can only be described as a gamble. Brasidas’ expedition to the North was mainly
meant to solve one problem, which was to take rebellious helots out of the
homeland. Officially, his 2000-man force, containing helots and mercenaries but
few Spartan citizens, was to assist Macedon in harassing the Athenian
tributaries of the Greek Northeast – but this entailed crossing the entire
length of Greece, a feat which was logistically difficult, militarily
hazardous, and probably intended to be fatal.
That the force achieved so much more is entirely
due to the acumen of its leader, Brasidas. Like Demosthenes, Brasidas
appreciated the benefits of combining warfighting and politics into a holistic operations
package. Whereas Demosthenes used political trickery to outfox his enemies,
Brasidas would unfurl the banner of ‘Greek liberty’ to win over Athens’
tributaries to his cause.
After stopping the Athenian coup in Megara,
Brasidas marched the length of Greece, did the minimum for the Macedonians, and
then sped to the Greek Northeast, where he convinced Athens’ local tributaries
to revolt against their overlord. The skill required to pull this off can be judged
from the panicked reaction of the unprepared Athenians, with Thucydides himself
dashing towards the city of Amphipolis and then being exiled by Cleon after it nevertheless
defected to Brasidas. The Northeast produced 30% of Athens’ tribute, and its
fall was a major setback to the war effort.
At the same time, we again need to place Brasidas’ efforts
into perspective. The ease by which he got Athens’ tributaries to defect bode
ominously for the stability of the Delian League, but despite taking away a
third of Athens’ income, Sparta still had no reliable way of reaching the rest
of the empire that lay overseas. Unlike Demosthenes in the Northwest, Brasidas’
Northeastern campaign did not uncover a method to beat Athens at its naval game,
but instead offered the opportunity to get out of an unwinnable war.
It was this understanding that informed Sparta’s
decision to drop its gains and settle for a white peace with Athens, first via
truce in 423 and then for 50 years in 422. Sometimes criticized as a wasted
opportunity done merely to get the 120 Sphacteria Spartans back, the fact was
that Sparta had no use for Brasidas’ gains: they did not want to deploy their limited
forces so far away, and they certainly understood that peacing out would still
leave Athens with a rebellious region to recapture. In any case, Brasidas was becoming
dangerously independent, first disobeying the truce with Athens and then
breaking Sparta’s alliance with Macedon. Cutting him loose was the right call.
V. Conclusion
As exemplars for the second leadership generation
in the Peloponnesian War, it is fitting that Cleon and Brasidas would both die
on the same occasion. In 422, as the truce between Athens and Sparta expired, Cleon
attempted to recapture the Northeastern city of Amphipolis, and both he and
Brasidas were killed in the ensuing battle. With this latest Athenian effort
dissolving into the ether, and with the key pro-war advocates in both cities
now dead, the Peace of Nicias was signed soon after with minor concessions to
Athens and Boeotia. Yet again, despite all the new strategies, war escalation
and bloodshed, both cities would arrive only at a stalemate.
This does not mean that Athens and Sparta were on
equal levels throughout what became known as the Archidamian War. Athens
repeatedly got the better of Sparta, partly because of Sparta’s inability to
bring the war to Athens, and partly because Athens found a way to beat Sparta
on land before Sparta found one for Athens on water.
In this sense, Athens had less reason to sign the
Peace of Nicias. It did so because of the panic created by Brasidas, as well as
the replacement of the pro-war Cleon with the pro-peace Nicias. The Peace was
meant to last for 50 years; but as both Athenians and Spartans recognized
previously, a white peace was only a truce between wars. Almost immediately
both sides began a new round of scheming, and another generation took up the
reins for war.
*
If you liked this video, 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 of a longer video series I originally made for
CaspianReport, and the final 2 videos should be coming out shortly.
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