Smoke hung in the air, thick and gray. Occasional gusts of wind blew through the narrow alleys of the town and sent it swirling along, but always it returned, replenished by the building still smoldering and flaming in the early morning light. The sun rose over a town at war with itself. Here and there, bodies lay on the packed dirt of the streets, surrounded by drying pools of blood. The light of dawn glistened off the bald head of an older man who had nearly made it inside a temple. Nearly, but not quite. His corpse was sprawled on the steps leading up to the entrance, close to the promise of asylum, but too far. A woman stood over the man's body weeping softly, while her two young girls looked on, stone-faced with shock, not understanding what had happened. A few hours ago, the girl's father had been one of the town's leading citizens, an oligarch. No longer. The polus was under new management. The surviving oligarchs, a dozen men, were panned in the town's Agora, the marketplace at the center of the houses and shops. Soldiers in bronze helmets, carrying long spears stood guard over them. Their ships, long, lean, tri-reams, sat at anchor in the harbor down below.

The Athenians had come up the hill in the night, led into the town by the oligarchs' opponents, Democrats who were willing to open the gates and return for control of the polus. They, not the soldiers, had wielded the knives, swords, and spears that took the lives of the oligarchs. No conflict was bloodier than civil conflict. Nothing more bitter than the settling of long, simmering scores. The Democrats had suffered in the past. Their fathers and uncles executed. They themselves sent into exile, their property confiscated. They were simply returning the favor, and the Athenians, in the midst of this long, brutal war, had given them the opportunity to do so. Sparta was far away, and so was Athens, but this conflict was here and now. The oligarchs sat in a cluster, their injuries bound by strips of their tunics and cloaks. Some wore looks of the utmost despondency, tears running down their cheeks. Others simply waited impassive. They knew, or at least strongly suspected, what would happen next. Their wives and children clustered around the edge of the Agora, looked on. The representatives of the demos, the people, signaled to the Athenian soldiers. They used their spears to rouse the oligarchs from their makeshift seats and herded them together.

It wasn't the first time these Athenians had seen this, and it wouldn't be the last. The only question was whether they would have to dig the graves. The Peloponesian War began in earnest in 431 BC. For the next decade, like clockwork, the forces of Athens Sparta and their various allies clashed in theaters across Greece. Yet, armies in the field and fleets at sea were only part of the story. The war wormed its way into the incessant conflicts that always defined life in Greek police, making the factual divisions between the people and the oligarchs far bloodier and more tragic than they had ever been before. Today, on Tides of History, we'll discuss this first long stage of the Peloponesian War.

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Hi, everybody. From WNDYRI, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me. When the Peloponesian War finally flared into life in 431 BC, nobody knew that it was the beginning of a conflict that would last for nearly 30 years. The great historian Thucydides, the essential chronicler of the war, tells us that he started recording what happened from the very beginning, believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it, he says. Perhaps if more Athenians and Spartans of that time had the same insight Thucydides did, taking note of the intense preparation decisions both sides had made for war, the two powers wouldn't have walked so carelessly into a devastating confrontation. Or maybe Thucydides is giving himself a little too much credit for that unique viewpoint, and he just started keeping track because he knew that he himself, as a relatively young Athenian, would participate in those events. Who doesn't think that their times are the most important and impactful the world has yet seen? Not everybody is going to be right about that. But Thucittides, at least from his perspective, may well have been.

The outbreak of the Peloponesian War was the beginning of something different, a new scale and intensity of warfare in a land that was plenty familiar with the concept. But even the most astute observer, if we give Thucidities the benefit of doubt on that front, couldn't have known just how long things would go on or how deep the effects would be. A quick note before we move on, as in the last episode, I'm relying on Thucidities in the edition edited by Robert B. Strassler as the landmark Thucidities, along with recent narratives by Donald Cagan and Jennifer Roberts. Tensions between Athens and Sparta were nothing new in 431 BC. The two most powerful states in Greece had been at odds with one another for much of the fifth century, and even before. Sparta had been intimately involved in the turmoil surrounding the birth of Athenian democracy in the last decade of the sixth century, intervening both to remove the tyrant Hippius and also to attempt to crush the nascent democratic movement. The Spartans showed up late to the Battle of Marathon after the Athenians had defeated the first Persian incursion in 490 BC, something the Athenians never let them forget.

When the Persians came again in 480 BC, the two Pelais were able to put aside their differences just long enough to defeat Xerxes on land and sea. Each claimed its own victory in that war, Athens at Salamis and Sparta at Plataia. But their newfound amity didn't last long. Ideologically, Athens and Sparta lay at opposite ends of the Greek political spectrum. Athens was the most radical democracy with the greatest powers allotted to the people, while Sparta, though technically a dual monarchy with a pair of kings, was in actuality a narrow oligarchy. There were many within both cities who were inherently suspicious of the other, though there were also some, mainly Athenians, who admired their opposite number. Anti-sparton sentiment in Athens became dominant in the late 460s BC, and anti-Athenian sentiment in Sparta grew in parallel with it. As Athens turned its Delian League of Allies into an Athenian Empire, Sparta's suspicion of Athenian intentions grew. The result of that was what scholars call the first Peloponesian War. From 460 to 446, Sparta and Athens were drawn into a series of what amounted to local and regional conflicts throughout Greece. The two major powers rarely confronted one another directly, but their broader interests were always at play no matter who was fighting or where.

And that was the basic dynamic that essentially ensured another war was coming, despite the 30-year peace treaty on which Athens and Sparta had agreed in 445 BC. For Thucittides, the fundamental cause of the war was Spartan suspicion of Athens growing power and ambition. In a land with two great powers organized into separate blocks, the Athenian Empire on one side and the Spartan-led Pelip Polynesian League on the other, any victory for one was a blow to the other. In this conception, power was a zero-sum game. They were forbidden from interfering with each other's allies, but neutrals were free to pick sides. The problem was that a neutral polus to tip the balance of power in the direction they chose. This gave every war between cities an outsized importance in the larger political context. And in a Greece where Polais went to war with striking regularity, marching out every year or two to do battle with their neighbors over what Herodotus had called small pieces of not very good land, the result was a powder kick waiting to explode. The actual cause of the Peloponesian War proper, when it came, seemed almost impossibly minor. An internal conflict within the small city of Epidomenus, located in the far northwest, what's today Albania.

The larger cities of Corkura and Korenth were soon drawn in. Corkura was a neutral, but Korenth was a longtime ally of Sparta. Facing destruction at the Corinthians hands, Corkura turned to Athens for aid. Weighing carefully the consequences and being quite aware that their intervention might lead to the outbreak of a general war with Korenth, and thus likely Sparta as well, the Athenians decided to intervene on Corkura's side. The ships they sent to Corkura in 433 BC were drawn into an open naval battle with Corinthians' larger fleet. The battle was a draw, but Corkura survived, and the Corinthians were incensed. They saw an opportunity to pay back the Athenians for what they saw as interference soon afterwards. The city of Potidaia was a colony of Corinthians located in the Tchao Kudike, a series of three peninsulas stretching into the Aegean-like fingers in far northeastern Greece. Unlike Corkura, Potidaia retained extremely close and deferential ties to its mother city of Korenth. Every year, the Corinthians sent out magistrates to help govern the city on behalf of the Potidaians. Yet, Potidaia was located in a strategically important place, directly on the sea route to the Black Sea, while also offering trading access to Macedonia and the interior of Thrice.

As such, Potidaia was a valued member of the Delian League and had been paying tribute to Athens for decades. The Macedonian king, a man named Perticus II, had been fomenting revolts against Athens in this region for a while, between Potidaia's tight Corinthians ties, now a liability after the incident at Corkura and the meddling of Perticus, the Athenians saw trouble on the horizon. They ordered the Potidaians to pull down their city's land walls to make it impossible for the polus to hold out in the event of a rebellion against Athenian rule. To make the point completely clear, they also demanded that the Potidaians get rid of their Corinthians magistrates and give hostages to the Athenians to guarantee their good behavior. The Potidaeans, bolstered by secret promises that Sparta would invade Attica, the Athenian homeland, in the event of a conflict, went ahead with their rebellion. The Spartans did not, in fact, invade Attica, but individual Corinthians sent a substantial number of mercenaries and volunteer soldiers to aid their colony against the Athedian response. When the Athenians besieged Potidaia, these Corinthians volunteers were stuck inside the city. The edge of the precipice was clearly visible now. Corent, Sparta's most important ally had incited one of Athens' tributary allies to revolt.

Even if the Corinthians inside Potidaia were technically volunteers, they were clearly present on their city's behalf. The Corinthians, for their part, could claim that the treatment of their colony was unacceptable and that the Athenians owed their citizens stuck inside Potidaia, some deference. Still, there was a chance to walk it back to prevent a general conflict. Neither side took advantage of that chance. Instead, both marched headlong toward the abyss. Once again, it was Corenth that took the fateful steps. They submitted a meeting of the Peloponesian League to bleed their case to Sparta and the other allies, and Thucidities tells us at length what they had to say. Not the exact words, but the gist of their arguments as he understood them. It was the Spartan's fault, the Corinthians said, that Athens was now able to treat other Greeks so poorly. For the true author of the subjugation of a people is not so much the immediate agent as the power which permits it, having the means to prevent it, particularly if that power aspires to the glory of being the liberator of Helles. The Spartans, the Corinthians were saying, went around proclaiming themselves to be the defenders of Greek liberty.

Yet whenever they had been presented with concrete opportunities to prove that by intervening against the Athenians, they had refused to do so. And now the problem was worse than before and would only grow harder to deal with. You alone wait until the power of an enemy is becoming twice its original size instead of crushing it in its infancy. This was a brilliant piece of rhetoric from the Corinthians. It attacked the Spartans' self-image as defenders of Greek freedom, an idea they had cherished since before the Persian Wars. It challenged their concrete power as the leaders of the Pelipanesian League, and it played on their ongoing fears of Athenian power, fears that the Corinthians knew precisely how to exploit. In the end, the Corinthians threatened to leave the Pelipanesian League altogether, adding that they would try to peel off Sparta's other allies as they departed. The Athenian envies, who happened to be present at the meeting of the Pelipanesian League were allowed to give a brief address of their own. In it, they defended their city's past actions, from their integral role in the defeat of the Persians to the acquisition of their empire. The Spartans had been unwilling to continue fighting the Persians after Plataia, and so that leadership had fallen to the Athenians by default.

Once they had the empire, the Athenians said they couldn't very well give it up. It was not a very remarkable action if we did accept an Empire that was offered to us and refused to give it up under the pressure of three of the strongest motives: fear, honor, and interest. And it was not we who set the example, for it has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger. Besides, we believed ourselves to be worthy of the position. Now, whether that's really what the Athenian envoy said, it's safe to say that it reflects the opinion of elite Athenians at the outbreak of the war. They couldn't give up their empire without putting themselves at risk of disaster. And besides, what was really wrong with an empire anyway? In the end, the Spartan's choice was made for them, not so much by the Corinthians, or the Athenians, or the Potidaians, or the Corcureans, but by the fundamental structural conditions of political life in Greece at the time. Polace were tied to one another in myriad cross-cutting ways that guaranteed conflict at every turn. Private citizens could pursue their own interests, and in so doing, involved their polus as a whole in unexpected confluxations.

Mother cities claimed rights over their colonies, even as those colonies were full-blown cities with their own interests to pursue. Alliances and straightforward calculations of power and benefit might be contradicted by the ideological claims to authority and honor that gave a polus its sense of itself. That was how seemingly minor and unimportant clashes on the very fringes of the Greek world, in Epidomenos and Potidaia, became the immediate causes of the most devastating war the Greeks had ever known. It was baked into the nature of the relationships that police had with one another, for better and worse, relationships that had developed over the course of decades and centuries. Thucidities was crystal clear about this. When it finally began, the war hadn't sprung into being overnight. It was the product of years and years and years of conflicts, slightly fights and insults, threats real and imagined, and clashing understandings of who was owed what for their part in events that stretched back to the Persian Wars and even beyond. A voice vote in the Spartan assembly approved the war, despite the misgivings of more than a few Spartans who knew the Athenians and the resources at their disposal.

The Corinthians were overjoyed and already had plans for how to conduct this coming war. Still, all was not yet lost. A Spartan embassy presented one final ultimatum to the Athenians. Athenians, an offer that the Athenians couldn't possibly accept, a tacid demand that they give up their empire. The great statesman Pericles addressed the Athenian assembly and laid out precisely why they couldn't afford to agree to the Spartan demands. They would accept arbitration, but not capitulation. And the Pelipanesian War was finally about to begin.

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Both sides had good reasons to feel confident in the opening months of 431 BC, after the embassies had failed and war began to seem inevitable. For Sparta, things looked pretty straightforward. With a massive advantage in both quality and numbers of heavily armored hoplite Infantry, the citizen corps of any Greek army, they were almost certain to win a full scale battle against the Athenians. All they had to do was invade made Attica, the region surrounding Athens, in order to force that battle. Either the Athenians would come out and fight and be defeated, or they would have to suffer the humiliation of letting the Spartans burn their crops, destroy their farms, and starve them into submission. From where the Spartans were standing, neither option seemed particularly viable. Sure, the Athenians might be able to last a year, but after that, they couldn't sit behind their walls forever, or so the most popular lines of reasoning among the Spartans and their allies said. The Athenians, by contrast, would have to do something totally unique in the history of Greek warfare, fight a patient defensive war that allowed the enemy to do precisely what he wanted to do while attempting to win the initiative, not on land, but at sea, where the Athenians' advantages in ships and naval skill would give them the edge.

The three or four to one advantage the Athenians had in ships was just the tip of the iceberg. They also had dramatically more cash on hand and the ability to raise more in an emergency. Years of imperial tribute had left Athenian coffers overflowing with more than 6,000 talents on hand, while the entire Peloponesian League had practically no cash reserves at all. Even if Attica was thoroughly blockaded by land, the Athenians could still bring in sufficient supplies by sea. While the Spartans wasted their energy on futile destruction, the Athenians would be bleeding them dry in a war of attrition and resources, not one of brave deeds on the battlefield. But that was much easier said than done. Could the Athenians really sit tight behind their walls and the forts scattered around Attica and watch the Spartans destroy their livelihoods? It was a new and untested strategy, one that no other state in ancient Greece even could have considered attempting before this time. War between place was a matter of the citizen soldiers marching out for a single campaign, maybe even a single battle, and then returning home to harvest their crops. Perhaps they would do it again the next year, but the fighting was always discontinuous.

This was what Thucydides meant when he said that he knew from the beginning that the Pelopanesian War was going to be something different. The great Athenian statesman, Pericles, addressed the city's assembly at length in speeches Thucydides recounts, laying out his plan in detail. Thucydides would have known what he said because he was probably present in person for those discussions. At worst, he got the gist of what Pericles had discussed secondhand from others who were there. It's worth remarking on how unusual that is. In all of ancient history, there are only a couple of occasions when our major source for conflict was privy to any of the planning that went into a military campaign. The combination of Thucydides, the man, Pericles, the orator, and the Athenians need to have their war aims and plans discussed in public, fortuitously provides us with insights we would never otherwise have. Not all among the Spartans and their allies were so convinced that the war would go quickly. One of the two Spartan Kings, Archedamus, had warned of precisely the dynamics I just mentioned at the meeting when the Peloponesian League voted to go to war against Athens. Archedamus was nobody's fool, a moderate with long experience as a military leader and plenty of first-hand knowledge of the Athenians and their ways.

Yet in Sparta, as elsewhere in the Greek world, there were political factions. Those who cautioned that war would be neither short nor easy were at present outnumbered by those who believed that the time had come to take a stand. As it happened, most of the Greeks probably agreed with them. The Spartan slogan that they were fighting for the freedom of the Greeks and always had been resonated associated with more of those Greeks than the Athenians' protestations that their empire had been justly earned. What Pericles was staking his strategy on was the belief that internal opinion within Sparta would shift faster than Athenian resources would dry up. Sparta had two not two kings, but five ephors, the city's chief magistrates, and ending the war only required a majority vote of those ephors. All it would take was for one or two ephors to decide that the war was fruitless and it would be over. Athens didn't have to win It just had to not lose. When the war began in 431 BC, it wasn't a Spartan invasion of Attica, but a Theban attempt to take the nearby city of Plataia that launched the proceedings. Thebes, the most powerful city of Boetia in Northern Greece, was a Spartan ally, Plataia, an Athenian ally.

In an incident halfway between farce and tragedy, a Theban advanced force attempted to take the city in a rapid coup, with the main Theban army following behind them. The Plataians fought back. They trapped the advanced force inside the city and killed or captured almost all of them. The Plataians then executed 180 prisoners, a shocking act to pay back the Thebans for an undeclared night time attack in peace time. Both the sneak attack and the execution of the captives were almost unprecedented. Both would set the tone for the war to come. Shortly after, left with no other choice, Sparta and its allies assembled their main army, some two-thirds of the total hoplites available, and Archidamus led them toward Attica. Archidamus took his time, first attacking an Athenian fortress outside the Athenian heartland before entering Attica proper. When criticized for this delay, Archidamus replied, Do not think of their land as anything but a hostage for us. The better it is cultivated, the better hostage it will be. This was sound strategic logic. There was no benefit in ravaging Attica before the grain was ripe, and by waiting until the end of May, Archidamus ensured that he held maximum leverage.

Moreover, Archidamus didn't particularly want to fight, much less begin a full-blown war under conditions that didn't favor Sparta. When he delayed still further, holding back from ravaging the most valuable farmland in Attica, even after arriving, the goal was clear, to force the Athenians to the bargaining table. The question was whether Athenian resolve and Pericles' personal prestige could hold out against the Pelipanesian League's destruction around Athens. For the time it did hold. Archidamus and his army stayed for a month, exhausting their provisions but accomplishing nothing aside from discomforting the Athenians stuck inside the city's walls. In response, the Athenians sent a hundred of their own ships, along with perhaps half that number of Allied vessels, all of them loaded with hoplites and archers to accomplish a series of limited goals. First, they opportunistically raided the coastline, avoiding pitched battles at all times. Second, they seized a series of strategically located towns and islands off the Coast, providing bases for future operations. Finally, the Athenians took the nearby island of Igena, which had been one of Athens's main rivals at sea for centuries. This time, the Athenians were determined to end the rivalry for good. They took the whole island, expelled the entire population, and resettled Igena with their own colonists.

Never again would the approaches to the Piraeus, Athens main Harbor, be threatened by Igena. Finally, with the Pelopanesian army dispersed after its campaign, Pericles himself led an Athenian army to ravage the territory of Megara, a Spartan ally located directly on the route from Attica to the Peloponese. This was a low-risk move, one that at worst would demonstrate that the Athedians were capable of doing something. At best, it might make Megara defect. In the north, the siege of Potidaia, the beginning of which predated the formal start of the war, continued, draining the Athenian treasury and sapping Athenian morale. The war showed no sign of abating as 4:30 431 gave way to 430 BC. Archidamus returned to Attica at the head of a Pelipanitian army, and this time spared no part of the fertile plain surrounding Athens. For 40 days, they burned crops, uprooted ancient olive trees and vines, and destroyed the homes of Athenian citizens, doing their utmost to attack both their livelihood and their willingness to continue fighting. Yet, Athens did not yield, and in response, Pericles led a much larger sea-born force to attack the city of Epidarus in the Peloponese, located down the Coast from Athens and adjacent to the territory of Corinthians.

Soon after setting out, however, the fleet and the 4,000 hoplites aboard returned to Athens. Why? Because a plague had broken out in the city, a devastating pandemic ravaging the thousands of people crowded into the city, thanks to the presence of the Pelopanesian army in Attica. We don't know precisely what pathogen caused what is commonly known as the Plague of Athens. The most likely candidates are typhus or typhoid fever, with a smaller possibility of a viral hemorrhagic fever like Ebola. Thucydides, who was in Athens at the time, suffered from it and describes the symptoms in detail. People in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes. The inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural infetted breath. These symptoms were followed by sneezing and hoarseness, after which the pain reached the chest and produced a hard cough. When it fixed in the stomach had upset it, and discharges of bile of every kind named by physicians ensued, accompanied by very great distress. Externally, the body was not very hot to the touch, but internally it burned so that the patient could not bear to have on him clothing or linen, even of the very lightest description.

This sickness wasn't necessarily fatal, but if it descend into the bowels, Thucydides tells us, it almost always was. If a person happened to survive, she or he was blessed with immunity from the disease, a small consolation to those who suffered lasting damage and had watched their friends and family perish. The plague never affected the besieging Peloponesians, and it never entered the Peloponese. As devastating as the death and disease was on its own, it was the social disruption and political damage that were far more serious for Athens. Pericles, who had planned and implemented a strategy that wasn't getting visible results and presided over a city hollowed out by plague, was a convenient target. The many enemies and critics of Pericles momentarily prevailed, and the Athenians sent envoices to Sparta to sue for peace. Had the Spartans offered less onerous terms, the Athenians might well have accepted. But the Spartans continued to demand that the Athenians give up their empire completely. This was plainly unacceptable, and the Athenians refused much to Pericles' relief. He addressed the assembly, arguing that the basic strategic calculus of the war hadn't changed at all. If they made peace now, they would have suffered for nothing.

The real danger, Pericles said, came not from fighting on to a stalemate, but from making a bad peace and giving up the empire. By now, the empire you hold is a tyranny, he said. It may now seem wrong to have taken it, but it is surely dangerous to let it go. Although Pericles won the battle on strategy, his enemy succeeded in having him charged with corruption. He got off with a fine but spent the coming winter out of office. While Pericles was on the sidelines, events took a turn. The siege of Potidaia continued in the north. Due to a fortuitish stroke of luck, the brilliant Corinthians commander of the besieged and a number of Peloponesian ambassadors fell into Athenian hands. When the ambassadors arrived in Athens, they were immediately executed and tossed into a pit, denied any trial or a proper burial. When challenged, the Athenians claimed it was in response to Spartan summary executions of those they captured at sea, mostly Athenians and their allies. Potidaia soon fell, however, ending drain on the treasury. Still, the Athenians had spent half of their accumulated wealth. They had suffered a plague. They were unclear as to whether Pericles was the right man to lead them into the future.

After two years of war, things weren't looking great for Athens. Pericles returned to office in the next summer, July of 429 BC, with things at a low ebb. Platea was under siege from the Spartans, and a campaign in the Tchalkidike in the Northwest had gone disastrously for Athens. Four 130 hoplites and a number of generals were lost in a clash at the city of Spartolis. The Spartans assembled a fleet, but the Athenians managed to defeat it in a pitch battle, then snipped out and defeated an attempted surprise attack on their Port of Piraeus. But as these events happening. With Athens itself under threat, Pericles himself was stricken with plague and died a slow, painful death. The architect of Athenian strategy, the city's leader for more than 30 years, the rock on which Athenian Empire had been built was now gone. What would Athens do next?

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Pericles' successors were nowhere close to as capable as the great statesmen had been. More on a level with one another, Thucittides wrote, and each grasping its supremacy, they ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude. This, as might have been expected, produced a host of blunders. As 428 BC dawned, the fourth year of the war, it showed no signs of abating. If anything, it scope was growing. The kings of Thrace and Massodon, large and populous Kingdom to the north of the Greek mainland, launched their own war against both one another and the Greek cities of the Tchaalkeadeeke. A small Athenian fleet rated the Coast of the Peloponese, accomplishing little. There was trouble brewing in Athens Empire, too, as the powerful island of Lesbos began plotting a revolt against Athenian rule. They sent envoices to Sparta to suss out support for their cause, but were forced to launch their rebellion prematurely when the Athenians discovered their plans. The result was yet another painful siege, draining resources and manpower that could have been put to use elsewhere. It's worth hearing what the envoices from Mitalini, the leading city of Lesbos, had to say when they were trying to justify their rebellion at the Festival of Olympia.

We did not become allies of the Athenians for the subjugation of the Helines, but allies of the Hellions for their liberation from the Med, meaning the Persians. We could no longer trust Athens as a leader. How could we put our trust in such friendship or freedom as we had here. The Spartans agreed to throw their support behind Mitalini and the rebels on Lesbos, but their attempt to relieve the pressure of the siege with an attack on Attica went nowhere. As the siege of Miteilini continued, the Athenians' need for money grew. They were maintaining 250 ships and at least 2,000 hoplites in the field at any given time, paying wages for rowers and soldiers and buying supplies. The drain on Athens's treasury was alarmingly quick, and though a war tax raised a considerable sum from Athens' own citizens, more was necessary. A dozen ships set out to collect tribute from Athens' allies, effectively distorting money under threat of violence. This was effective in some places, but one of the expedition's commanders and a group of his soldiers were cut off and cut down in Kareya on the Coast of Asia Minor during the course of their activities.

This didn't exactly prove that the people of Miteilini were wrong about their complaints regarding the Athenians and their empire, and the Athenians' future actions showed just how right they were. The Spartans had promised aid, but were so leisurely in sending a fleet across the Aegean to help Miteilini that the city surrendered to the Athenian besiegers without much of a fight before the Pelipanesian relief force arrived. Too late to aid the rebels in Mitekini, the Spartan commander, Alkides, was presented with a plan to attack the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. This was, as Thucidides points out, a good plan. Their coming was welcome everywhere. Their object would be, by this move, to deprive Athens of her chief source of revenue, he writes. But Alkides blew the opportunity and managed to squander any potential goodwill by taking captives and butchering many of his prisoners on the island of Chios. Alkides eventually sailed for home without accomplishing anything positive. The Athenians, meanwhile, were trying to decide what to do with the rebels of Mitalini. They decided immediately to put to death the Spartan commander who had aided the rebellion, but then they went a step further. They ordered Pâques, the Athenian general who had taken Miteilini, to put to death all the adult males of the city and make slaves of the women and children, even those who had no part in the rebellion.

The politician Cleon, who was now most in favor with the Athenian people after the death of Pericles, made a long speech exhorting them not to change their minds, but to go ahead with the punishment. Don't be merciful, he said, For if they were right and rebelling, you must be wrong and ruling. However, if right or wrong, you determine to rule, you must carry out your principle and punish the Mytilinians as your interest requires. Empires, or else you must give up your empire and cultivate honesty without danger. Luckily for the Mytilinians, another orator, Diaedotus, spoke in favor of sparing the people of the rebellious city. Diaedotus' more moderate approach prevailed by the slimmest of margins. An almost equal number of hands were raised for both. And the reprieve arrived in Mytilini by fast ship, just in time to save the people of the city. Plataia, which had been under siege since the beginning of the war four years earlier, wasn't as lucky as Mitelini. The city finally fell to the Spartans, or more properly to the Thebans, who's sneak attack had marked the actual beginning of the fighting in the war. Presented with the same dilemma, the Spartans, urgent on by the Thebans, decided on an opposite course.

They massacred the 200 remaining Platean defenders and their 25 Athenian allies and took the remaining women as slaves. The city itself was razed down to the foundations. The land leased to the Thebans and resettled with colonists loyal to Thebes. In 427 BC, the focus of the war shifted to one of the places where it had begun. Corcura, the Corinthians colony whose conflict with its mother city had helped spark the whole war. Coraunth attempted to bring Corcura over to its side by releasing the Corcurean oligarchs they had held captive for years, with the understanding that they would detach the city from its alliance with Athens. The result was an abortive sea battle, the arrival of a large Athenian fleet, and the triumph of the people of Corkura over the oligarchs. The people wasted no time in killing their oligarchic enemies. Some of them were killed on temple altars, others walled up until they starved, still others hung from the trees planted in sacred groves. Famine soon followed, and the killings intensified rather than prevented future violence inside Corkura. That was the nature of civil conflict, and the broader context of the Pelipanesian War made such conflicts all but inevitable as factions within cities sought support from the Spartans or Athenians to advance their own domestic goals.

On and on the war went. An Athenian expedition went to Sicily, a harbinger of disastrous events in the offing a decade later, and the Athenians again sent out naval expeditions to pick off likely targets along the Coast. The Athenian general Damosthenes attempted a bold strategy, using a tiny Athenian force to rouse allies and rebels to attack Boetia from the rear. Thebes was Sparta's most important ally, and an attack there would shift the balance of the war with little risk to Athens. Damosthenes failed, and failed badly, but he put his lessons to good use. Shortly after, Demosthenies was asked to take command of a force of Athenian allies facing a Spartan invasion in central Greece. Demosthenies set a trap for the Spartans. Knowing that they would attack, he used the terrain to his advantage, baiting the Spartans into an ill-conceived assault while he hit a flanking force of hoplites and light-arm troops behind a sunken road. When the Spartans did attack, Damosthenes' hidden force hit them in the rear. The Spartans broke and ran, leaving behind their dead, including two generals. In the aftermath of the battle, Demosthenies negotiated a clever truce with his Spartan counterpart.

They would be allowed to escape, but not their local allies, thereby discrediting the Spartans even further as, quote, betrayers and self-seekers, in Thucydides' words. Demosthenies thus attacked the Spartans' impeccable reputation on the battlefield, and their credit with their allies at once. When the Spartans and the other Pelipanesians departed safely, Demosthenies and his allies cut down their remaining enemies to a man. The next year of the war, 425 BC, belonged to Damosthenes. He came up with a brilliant plan to plant a fort on the Coast of the Pelipanese at a place called Pelos, just 50 miles from Sparta itself. In six days, Damosthenes soldiers built a series of haphazard fortifications. When the Spartans learned of this, the keener minds among them grasped the potential danger of an enemy foothold so close to home, from which the Athenians could both launch raids and, much worse, stir up the Helets to revolt against their masters. They immediately gathered an army and sent their fleet south from Corkura to deal with a problem. Badly outnumbered but confident, Damosthenies, accompanied by just 60 hoplites and a few archers, repelled an amphibius attack. When the full Athenian fleet arrived, they won a complete victory over the Spartans at sea.

The 420 Spartan hoplites who had come by land were trapped, stuck by land, and blockaded by sea at a place called Sfactaria. For Sparta, this was an utter disaster. Those 420 hoplites, of whom 180 were full spartiate of the finest families represented a 10th of their total military manpower. The Spartans immediately called a halt to hostilities to negotiate their release, and they were willing to make peace to avoid demographic doom. Yet they couldn't agree on terms, and in the end, the Athenians assaulted the besieged Spartans. Despite their sterling military reputation, the Spartans were utterly routed. The Athenians took 292 prisoners, including 120 Spartiates, while 128 laid dead at Bacteria. In the eyes of the Greeks, Thucidides wrote, it was the most unexpected event in the war. It was simply unbelievable that Spartans would ever surrender. Suddenly, all the leverage lay with the Athenians. If the Spartans invaded Attica again, the Athenians threatened, they would execute every single one of their Spartan prisoners. The Athenians put that leverage to good use, seizing the initiative to end the ongoing disorders at Corkura in favor of their democratic allies. As 425 BC melted into 424, the eighth year of the war, things were looking good for the Athenians.

After years of plague and mixed results, the Athenians were finally ready to go on the offensive. This also happened to be the year our friend Thucidid the son of Elorus, the author of the history on which we rely for these events, was elected a general in Athens. The results of the Athenian offensives that year were mixed. In Sicily, where the Athenians had been attempting to intervene for a few years, they failed to do much of note, and the generals responsible were either exiled or fined. Another attack on the Pelipindian coastline, this one on the town of Kithera, was a crushing success. The Athenians aimed to do the same as they had at Pelos, setting up a base from which to harass the interior of the Pelipindies. They succeeded, and the inhabitants of Kithera were scattered across the Aegean. But some of the other residents of the town had been natives of the island of Igeana, Athens' old enemy, who had been displaced at the start of the war and then resettled in the Pelipindies. The Igentayans, already refugees, were either killed during the sack of the town or put to death in the aftermath. However, war had been conducted in Greece in the past, it was clear that the rules were changing.

Not just defending soldiers, but even civilians were now in serious danger of summary execution. At strategically vital Magara, which controlled one of the key routes into the Pelipanese, another Athenian assault very nearly succeeded in taking the city and turning it toward Athens. But at the last minute, the democratic plotters inside the city were betrayed, and a Spartan relief force arrived. The oligarchs inside the city fictiously put to death their democratic opponents, and Magara was cemented as a Spartan ally for the rest of the war. The real action, however, was in the north. The Athenians invaded Boetia using two separate prongs, one led by the general Demosthenies and the other by the general Hippocrates, while simultaneously supporting uprisings within Boetian towns and cities led by democratic elements. At worst, the Athenians that they could plant a series of fortresses on the borders of Boetia as they were in the process of doing in the Pelipanese, bases from which to raid and ravage and tie down much larger numbers of enemy soldiers. But the complex operation soon turned into a disaster, as Hippocrates led his prong of the invasion into a pitched battle with the Boetians at a place called Delium.

The Boetian commander, Pagandis, lined up the Thebans in his phalanx in an innovative formation 25 men deep instead of the usual eight. While that deeper formation held the Athenians, two squadrons of Boetian cavalry circled around the back, breaking their line and causing a mass route. The philosopher Socerties was one of the lucky Athenians who escaped with his life, but many more did not. Around a thousand Athenian hoplites were killed in the fighting, along with many more lightly equipped troops, among them, Hippocrates himself. At the same time, events still further north, in Thrace, in the Greek cities, in the Northwest Aegean, were also turning against the Athenians. The brilliant Spartan general, Brocidas, who had earlier rescued Magara from the Athenian invasion, was leading a small force north to the Tchaalkeedeeke. If he could take and hold the region, Athens, route to the Bospers, and thus its all-important supply of grain, could be cut off. Through clever diplomacy, Brocidas managed to get his army of helets and mercenaries through unfriendly territory. Bored by the presence of Brocidas, numerous Athenian allies and subjects revolted. All Brocidas had to do was take Amphibolus, a short distance further north, and the Athenian cause would be in serious trouble.

With Brocidas outside the walls, the Athenian Garrison Commander at Amphipolis called for help to none other than our friend Thucidides, the historian who was commanding the Athenian fleet nearby. Thucidides was half a day's sail away, however, and by the time he arrived, Amphibus had surrendered to Brocidas. This was yet another disaster. Rebellions broke out throughout the region with factions inside the towns and cities, calling to Brocides for aid. The Athenian cause suffered, and Thucidius was recalled, held on charges of treason, and exiled for 20 years, the remainder of the war. By this point, both sides were ready for peace. The Spartans wanted their hostage citizens back. The Athenians were exhausted. A truce was declared in March of 423 BC, but the Boetians rejected it, as did the Corinthians and Megarians. Rositus, too, objected and continued to support rebellions in the Northern Aegean against his orders and the truce. When the Athenians sent a force north to deal with the rebellious cities, they were determined to both recover their lost possessions and to do so without the mercy they had previously shown Mitalini. Led by the politician and general Cleon, who had previously advocated for that policy of terror, the Athenians quickly returned most of the rebel cities to the fold.

But at Amphipolis, Cleon faced off with Prusitus, who badly routed the Athenian general. Cleon died in the fighting. Thucidides does himself no favors by saying that Cleon fled the battle. That was surely a product of his bitterness over his trial and exile. The rest of the Athenians regarded Cleon as a hero. But Versailles, too, fell in the battle. And with those two deaths, the two men most dedicated to continuing the fighting were now gone from the scene. The Athenian politician, Nicius, negotiated a peace that was supposed to last 50 years, ending a full decade of fruitless, damaging, and violent war in 421 BC. But the peace of Nicius did not, in fact, last 50 years. War would soon break out again bloodier than before. That's where we'll pick up next time on Tides of History. Tides of History is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. Sound designed by Gabriel Gould for Ayrship. The sound engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Tides of History is produced by Morgan Jaffe. From WNDYRI, the executive producers are Jenny Lohr-Beckman and Marshall Louis. Thanks again for listening. Until next time from WNDYRI, this has been Tides of History. Enhance your listening experience with WNDYRI Plus.

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