As the Spartan Apella shouted ‘Yes’ to war with Athens, and as Potidaea
was under siege by the Lacaedominians, the Delian and Peloponnesian Leagues,
each full of their intrigue and backstabbing, entered a titanic clash that brought epic battles
and endless suffering called the Peloponnesian War. What happened in the first phases of the
Peloponnesian War? How did Athens and Sparta use their different strengths against each other, and
how did iconic moments like the Funeral Oration unfold? Welcome to our video on the first phase
of the Peloponnesian War and its consequences. Even back then, war was mostly a case of waiting
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The Peloponnesian war was a decades-long, multi-part conflict, the first phase of which
is often referred to as the ‘Archidamian War’, a name stemming from the Spartan King Archidamos,
who initiated it after the Apella’s decision. This phase of the conflict lasted from 431 to 420 BCE.
Thucydides describes its causes and conditions: Sparta technically initiated the conflict, but
many Greek poleis were on their side as they saw the Athenians as an emerging superpower to fear.
Sparta itself claimed to be a liberator of Hellas from Athenian imperialism,
a sort of ‘defender of the free world’. Meanwhile,
Athens proclaimed itself to be a defender of democracy against repressive oligarchies.
This mutual finger-pointing, so reminiscent of the Cold War of the 20th Century, hid cynical
geopolitical agendas. It should be noted that, due to Thucydides’ thorough habit of describing
wars year-by-year, historians are blessed to have a comprehensive and reliable primary source that
allows us to follow this conflict's incredibly complex shifting alliances pretty easily.
The Peloponnesian League began the war by invading Attica, Athens’ breadbasket.
Almost every year throughout the war, the Spartans and their allies would invade this region in a
scorched earth policy to starve out Athens. In retaliation, Athens blocked the Gulf of Corinth
as a countermeasure. However, this did not stop the burnings in Attica from resulting in many
civilian deaths, both from famine and pillaging, and many refugees from the Attican hinterlands
fled behind the walls of Athens proper for protection. Immediately, Perikles began
to face attacks from many angry Athenians, who questioned why he had dragged them into this war.
Perikles tempered their panic by advising that their war would be won by strategy and that their
indomitable navy would be able to win the day, so long as they could avoid engaging the Spartans in
ground combat, where the Spartan hoplites were at their strongest. After a month of the initial
pillaging spree, the Spartans and their allies returned home to participate in the harvest,
as was the custom. Thus given a reprieve, at the end of this year, the city of Athens held a public
funeral to honor the dead. Perikles recited his iconic Epitaphios Logos, or Funeral Oration at
this funeral. Thucydides takes this opportunity to dissect Perikles’s and Athens’s ideology. We
can see this in the Logos excerpt where Perikles honors the dead as heroes of the Athenian ideal.
(...)I would have you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until
you become filled with the love of her; and when you are impressed by the spectacle of her glory,
reflect that this empire has been acquired by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it,
who in the hour of conflict had the fear of dishonor always present to them, and who,
if ever they failed in an enterprise, would not allow their virtues to be lost to their country,
but freely gave their lives to her as the fairest offering which they could present at her feast.
The sacrifice which they collectively made was individually repaid to them;
for they received again each one for himself a praise which grows not old,
and the noblest of all tombs, I speak not of that in which their remains are laid,
but of that in which their glory survives, and is proclaimed always and on every fitting occasion
both in word and deed. For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they
commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells
also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. (...)
The Logos is remembered as an anti-capitulation song that tries to frame the deaths of Athenians
as sacrifices made in the fight for a unique democratic ideal.
Unlike the strictly militaristic Spartans, it also frames Athens as heroic for its participation in
both mercantile and military affairs. Athenian lifestyle is extolled as outgoing and linked to
the sea, and their adventurousness as something to be celebrated. Rather ironically, one year
after Perikles gave this speech, the Plague hit Athens, and Perikles himself died of it.
Thucydides respects Perikles in his evaluation as a strong and vanguardist leader.
In 429 BCE, the Peloponnesian League tried to lift the Athenian blockade off of the
coast of Rhium, a small Northwestern Peloponnesian coastal settlement.
The Athenian navy was stretched thin at the time, having dispatched troops to both Potidaea
in Macedonia, and to traditionally Dorian-leaning Crete. Thus, while the Peloponnesian League had
sent 47 ships, mostly Corinthian in origin, the Athenians had only 20 ships to stand against them.
On the Peloponnesian side, the Navarch Cnemos amassed 1,000 Hoplites from Sparta as well as
2,000 Hoplites from allied states to attack a nearby city of Acarnania.
In response, the Athenians sent out a team led by a commander called Phormio, the man responsible
for controlling the blockades of both Naupaktos and Rhium, to lead a direct assault on Rhium.
These two battles were set to decide the blockade’s fortune.
The Rhium and Antirhium are found near the modern city of Patra, where the Peloponnese comes the
closest to touching the rest of Hellas at the shortest distance within the Isthmus. Hence,
it was both the easiest to blockade and the most strategic location to attack.
The Peloponnesians had a lot of transport ships in their midst,
and so decided to use their triremes warships to defend these more vulnerable cargo-bearing
vessels as they sailed past the narrow Rhium. Phormio had to decline sending help to Acarnania,
but instead focused on the Peleponessian convoy. Phormio, a major innovator in naval maneuvering,
utilized the weather as a key part of his tactics. Seeing the heavily fortified
Peloponnesian triremes, he decided to perform an unorthodox tactic. With twenty triremes
of his own, he fanned them out to surround the Peloponnesian fleet and began to move ever closer.
Approaching slowly, he sent smaller ships forward in a false dash attack to force the Peloponnesian
ships into a defensive cluster. The Peloponnesians were incapable of fighting back, though they could
have attacked individual ships during their attack. Phormio had noticed that winds blew
into the gulf at dawn, and surmised that they could use that against the Peloponnesians.
Just as Phormio had predicted, upon clustering, the Peloponnesians fell victim to the fickle
weather, being blown away by the wind and crashing into each other, at which point the
Athenians attacked. The Peloponnesian fleet was utterly crushed, with the Athenians capturing 12
ships and destroying the rest. Meanwhile, on the shore, Cnemus had reached the Acarnanian capital
of Stratus, and split his troops into three divisions. The left was manned by Spartans and
Ambraciots, and was commanded by Cnemus. The center was made up of barbarian mercenaries,
and Leucadians and Anachoriats commanded the right. Cnemus himself was keen to encamp the
divisions and begin negotiations. However, the center division, hoping for pillage and glory,
continued to advance against Cnemus’ wishes. They eventually faced the Stratians, only to discover
that the defenders were experts in close combat. Thus, the barbarians were promptly sent packing.
The other divisions were caught by surprise, and formed ranks, but the Stratians lacked the
forces to defeat them, so they did not press their advantage. However, the next day Cnemus discovered
that the rest of the Acarnians were sending reinforcements, and thus decided to flee, meeting
up with the survivors of the Peleponessian fleet on the way. In both the naval battle at Rhium and
the engagement at Stratia, the Athenians and their allies had emerged as the undisputed victors.
The death of Perikles allowed for some of the allies who were not too keen on the war,
like Lesbos. These were quickly dispatched with, as Athens had an unparalleled fleet at the time.
Mytilene was another, and they managed to back various revolts in Ionia and the nearby
islands. We will return to the revolt in due course; but what is important is that Thebes,
an ally of Sparta and keen enemy of Athens, began to encroach upon Plataea. Initially, 300 Theban
hoplites approached the city, where two oligarchic sympathizers let them in. These two Plataeans were
hoping for a victory against the newly-risen democratic factions in the city. The Plataeans
were initially shocked into submission but then realised their numerical superiority and killed
over half of the Thebans, with the rest either captured or escaping. In this dire engagement,
the Theban reinforcements could not aid their dying brethren due to the Asopos river flooding.
Initially, both sides swore sacred oaths to negotiate the release of Theban prisoners if
Plataea was left alone. We don’t know who broke the oaths taken, but the Thebans eventually began
to attack again. The Plataeans called for Athenian help, while the Thebans appealed to Sparta.
This is technically the official beginning of the Peloponnesian War.
Archidamos sent an expeditionary force to burn the farmlands outside Plataea, something the Plataean
ambassador reminded the Spartans they were not allowed to do due to the holiness of Plataea.
Sparta said that they would only agree to protect them if they became neutral, but Plataea,
which was very close to Athens in terms of both geography and ideology, rejected said proposal.
Athens pushed the Plataeans to avoid agreeing to the terms,
making the Plataeans more confident in the fact they could hold out until Athenian aid arrived.
Archidamos thus began his work of besieging the city, beginning by constructing a wooden palisade
around it. He managed to build a mound leading up to the walls, which he tried to use for an assault
over the city walls. The Plataeans countered this measure by extending the height of their walls,
while also digging under the walls and burrowing inside the Spartan mound,
thus delaying the mound’s construction. They also managed to build further fortifications inside the
city using the materials from the mound, and thus had an additional means of defence in case of a
Spartan breakthrough. The Spartans also built up siege engines, but these were ineffective as the
Plataeans used lassoes and fire to disable these instruments of war. The Spartans continued to try
to force their way through Plataea’s walls for some time, but, eventually, they decided that it
was fruitless, and decided to simply sit back, surround the city, and starve it out instead.
Their next step was to start throwing fire projectiles into the city proper.
A large part of Plataea was destroyed by fire, but the Spartans missed the defensive positions
and thus their bombings only ended up amounting to an archaic form of terrorism. After this failure,
the Spartans decided to simply double down on their attempt to starve out the Plataeans.
To that end, the Lacedaemonians built a wall of circumvallation around Plataea, and seeing as
they did not need most of their troops, dismissed a large part of the besieging force. Blockades
are not a nice affair, and soon, the Plataeans began to suffer the effects of malnutrition.
The Spartan walls essentially were a two-way avenue, with walls outside for Spartan protection,
and the walls inside to lock off the city, with towers used for scouting and keeping sentries. The
Spartans built wooden settlements in between the walls so they could live within the walls, manned
by Boeotian allies. According to Thucydides: The Plataeans had before sent off their wives
and children and oldest men and the mass of the non-combatants to Athens; so that the number
of the besieged left in the place comprised 400 of their own citizens, 80 Athenians, and 110 women
to bake their bread. This was the sum total at the commencement of the siege, and there was no
one else within the walls, bond or free. Such were the arrangements made for the blockade of Plataea.
The siege took two years, and inflicted incredible hardship upon the population within the city.
By the winter of 428-427 BC, provisions within the city began to grow thin, bringing desperation
to the civilian population. The Plataeans decided to try and break out. At first,
this was to be an attempt of the entire male population of the city to escape, but half of the
garrison then decided that it was too dangerous. In the end, only 220 Plataean soldiers took part.
They used ladders to climb over the walls, captured two of the ten towers of the
fortification, and managed to get across the outer wall before strong reinforcements could arrive.
The Peloponnesian League tried to send 300 men as reinforcements, but by the time of their arrival,
the Plataean escapees had fled to Athens. The Plataeans then moved up the road
leading to Thebes, deceiving the besiegers, who attempted to find them on the road to Athens.
Eventually, 212 of the escapees managed to reach Athens. Thucydides claims that their
success was mainly due to the darkness and the storm that was raging during that night.
Even though the escapees managed to reach Athens, their pleas for aid fell on deaf ears.
The Athenians were continuing to follow Perikles' strategy of avoiding direct ground combat with
Sparta, and thus didn't send a relief force to Plataea for fear of being bogged down.
By the summer of 427 BCE the Plataeans and their allies inside the city were
totally burnt out and starved, and thus the Spartans began their ominous assault.
At this point, the Spartan commander tried to persuade the besieged that it would be better to
surrender, that when a peace treaty was eventually negotiated, the Spartans would allow them to keep
their land, and that only those who provoked the riot two years prior would be punished. The
Plataeans agreed to those terms and surrendered. However, the Thebans were bitter and angry at
the Plataeans and immediately put pressure on the Spartans to go harder on their vanquished foes. As
a result, the Plataeans were brought into a show trial and condemned to death. All 200 Plataean and
25 Athenians who had survived the siege were executed, and the women who had remained in
the city to cook for the garrison were sold into slavery. The Thebans took the land for themselves,
and to rub salt in the wounds of the tragic city of Plataea, they then burnt the entire city to
the ground. Plataea would not be rebuilt until 381 BCE when Philip of Macedon defeated the Thebans.
The start of the Peloponnesian War proved to be a bittersweet win for Athens. They
had lost their greatest statesman, and then had emerged victorious from important fights against
overwhelming odds in the Peloponnese. However, they had also shown an unwillingness to help their
allies, something which had cost their Plataeans dearly. The Spartans had had a difficult start
to the war. They had been humiliated in Rhium and Naupaktos, but had rushed to the aid of Thebes and
had delivered a crushing blow to Plataea. These contradictory positions of the two great powers
would continue for the next decade, with equal levels of machinations and suffering for both
sides. This is where we will leave it off for now, but the Archidamian War is far from over,
and has many more twists and turns for us to unravel. This series will continue, so to make
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