The Athenian Soldier versus the Spartan Hoplite
In the 5th century BC, two great city-states of Greece waged a decades-long war for dominance. At stake were contrasting approaches to war and peace.
The wars fought by Sparta and Athens in the 5th century BC, pitted Sparta with ancient Greek’s greatest army against Athens boasting her most powerful fleet.
Yet the Spartan and Athenian soldier followed ways of war that differed in far more than a simple preference for fighting on land rather than sea. In fact, the distinctive approaches that a Spartan hoplite and Athenian soldier took to combat embraced a wide range of tactics, only a few of which were tied to their traditional divide at the shoreline.
Military historians have tended to focus on the severe boyhood training regimen in Sparta (the agoge) and the potent combination of hardy physique and iron-willed martial philosophy it promoted.
But the Spartan way of war was not simply a matter of outstanding individual toughness, strength, or even weaponry skills. Superior tactics played key roles as well—discretion was often the better part of valour for Spartans. They were adept at assessing battle odds and, should these not be to their liking, heading home without a fight.
Despite its fierce image, Sparta had a more extensive record of dodging armed confrontations than any other Greek city-state. It was not unusual for Spartan commanders to turn back before crossing a hostile border if the omens were bad. And even on the brink of combat, they might still choose to avoid action. Spartan King Agis II (427-400 BC) once claimed that “Spartans do not ask how many the enemy are, only where they are,” but on at least four occasions he personally refused engagement with the enemy.
Advantages in the Spartan Hoplite approach to warfare
Classical Greeks fought in a dense linear formation or phalanx as armoured spearmen known as hoplites. These hoplites were protected from their ankles up by greaves, cuirass, shield, and helmet as they stood close alongside each other in ranks that could be many hundreds of men wide.
This allowed them to present a broad front that was hard to overlap or outflank. But there was a limit to how thin a formation could be without falling into disorder. Thus, most Greeks tried to form a file at least eight men deep to accept battle. Spartans, however, could advance and manoeuvre effectively in files as slim as four men. Those in the first three ranks struck overhand with their spears at the enemy front, and the fourth rank joined rows two and three in pressing shields into the backs of their fellows in a concerted effort to shove through the opposition, a tactic called othismos. This ability to manoeuvre when short-handed yielded success several times, most famously against a much larger Arcadian army at Dipaea in 464 BC.
Most Greek armies advanced with men shouting encouragement and issuing distinctive battle cries. They would then rush the last few yards into close action. In contrast, Spartans moved forward slowly in measured steps to the sound of pipes and the rhythmic chanting of battle poetry. This allowed them to keep excellent order all the way into engagement. Moreover, the Spartans saw their opponents’ noisy rush as amateurish, signalling false bravado to suppress fear. Their own deliberate and disciplined pace was meant to set a tone of both overwhelming confidence and deadly menace. So unnerving was this approach that many foes broke and ran before first contact.
Spartan hoplites followed a natural urge when marching into battle to edge closer to the man on their right. They did this to gain better cover from the shield held on his left arm. This tendency caused phalanxes to fade toward the right as they advanced and often resulted in a mutual overlap of formation flanks on opposite ends of the field. The Spartans exploited this by deliberately exaggerating their own rightward movements. They would combine the movement with well-practiced wheeling by elite troops on their far right to curl around a foe’s left flank. Once enveloped, the encircled wing would break and run, causing the enemy phalanx to collapse.
Besides exploiting the common phenomenon of rightward drift, Spartans also used more unique schemes on the battlefield. King Agis once shifted units in his formation during an advance. To attempt this in the very face of the enemy suggests that Spartans considered such risky moves to be well within their capabilities.
Athenian general Cleandridas defeated Italian tribesmen in 433 BC by hiding a contingent of hoplites behind his phalanx. This disguised his true strength and, once engaged, let him wheel his men against the enemy flank to trigger a rout.
The most daring Spartan battle manoeuvre was to break off in the midst of combat and withdraw. All other Greek armies shunned this for fear of inviting disaster. The Spartans, however, could not only pull out of hopeless spots at minimal loss, but could also fake the manoeuvre and trick foes into breaking formation to give chase.
Herodotus cited such false retreats at Thermopylae in 480 BC. The Spartans then wheeled about each time and obliterated the overly eager Persians, who had fallen into premature and disordered pursuits. Plato claimed the Persians also suffered this same Spartan ploy at Plataea one year later.
While Spartans heavily punished those breaking ranks to follow their feigned retreats, they themselves refrained from any sort of pursuit. First, they saw no profit in risking precious lives to chase an already defeated enemy. Furthermore, staying on the battleground allowed them to possess the field at day’s end. This was the universally accepted definition of formal victory in Greek warfare.
Finally, by maintaining formation, the Spartans could rapidly reform on a different front, giving them the opportunity of mounting a second attack against any opponents that were still intact.
The Spartans were well aware that success on the battlefield could carry a special danger in the form of friendly fire. Helmets limited vision and the din of battle was deafening, causing hoplites to easily mistake friend for foe in the mixed-up ranks. Thucydides cited just such a tragic incident within the encircling Athenian right wing at Delium in 424 BC. One way the Spartans reduced this hazard was by adopting uniform gear so as to more easily identify each other in the heat of a confused melee. To this purpose, they wore highly visible tunics that were dyed crimson. Their cloaks might have been red as well; however, they rarely, if ever, took these cumbersome garments into combat. The Spartans also painted large devices on their shields for identification, the most famous being the Greek letter lambda. Looking like an inverted V, this was the first letter in Lacedaemon, which was the ancient Greeks’ name for Sparta.
Sneak attacks were not a staple of the Spartan army, but one did yield a victory at Sepeia in 494 BC.
There, Sparta’s famously wily King Cleomenes was facing a slightly larger host from Argos. Arranging a temporary truce and camping opposite the Argives, Cleomenes set up a routine that included signalling meals with a horn. When the enemy stood down at the same time for their own food, he had his men charge and put the unprepared Argives to a horrific rout. Another Spartan commander who used a sneak attack to good effect was Brasidas at Amphipolis in 422 BC, where he was under siege from Cleon of Athens. Cleon had lined up for a return to his base after a scouting expedition when the Spartans surprised him by rushing out of the city in two detachments, cutting the Athenian column in half and defeating each segment in detail. Brasidas brought the opening phase of the Peloponnesian War to an end with the victory, although he himself died in battle.
Even the best armies sometimes find retreat unavoidable. The Spartans, having lost 300 picked men and a King Leonidas in a rearguard action in 480 BC at Thermopylae, came up with a less costly way to withdraw—the marching box. First used successfully under Brasidas in 423 BC, this formation consisted of forming most of the hoplite infantry into a hollow rectangle, placing the lightly armed soldiers and noncombatants inside the formation, and then deploying the remaining hoplites fore and aft to meet any enemy threats. The marching box could retreat and defend itself from all forms of attack.
Xenophon of Athens claimed credit for creating the arrangement during the famed Retreat of the Ten Thousand after the Battle of Cunaxa in 401 BC. However, it is more likely that Xenophon simply modestly modified existing Spartan protocol.
Athens as a military power
Regard for classical Athenians as fighters in general has lagged behind their fame as creators of democracy and masters of aesthetic culture.
From antiquity to the present, the Spartans have had far greater martial repute. Yet Athens in its 5th century BC heyday not only fought more than three times as many battles as Sparta, but actually enjoyed a slightly higher overall rate of combat success. In fact, Athenians developed the largest and most sophisticated war machine in all of Greece and applied tactics as creatively as they pursued the fine arts.
Athens followed adoption of democracy in 510 BC with a period of rapid expansion. The Athenians kept pace with rising territorial commitments by greatly increasing the size of their military. Athens’ army went from a late 6th century BC count of 3,600 armoured spearmen to 13,000 citizen regulars on the rolls by 431 BC.
Likewise, the Athenian fleet grew from 60 to 300 ships over the same period. Sparta could answer with only about half as many Spartan hoplites of its own and had no navy at all.
Short on cash and having severely limited citizenship, the Spartans relied upon a system of alliances. The Peloponnesian League gave them access to tremendous manpower, but had serious handicaps. Sparta often had to coerce or cajole reluctant allies into action. There was also danger that a balking ally might spark an unwanted and costly conflict. Indeed, Thucydides suggested that Corinth set off the great Peloponnesian War in just such a way. In contrast, Athens had full control over its own larger military, as well as those of other states that were much closer to being subjects than true partners.
As Athenian soldiers grew in number and strength, the Greek city-state also greatly boosted its number of horsemen. Their cavalry force grew from fewer than 100 riders to some 2,200 during the 5th century BC. This was the only contingent of its kind among southern Greeks and was quite large even by the standards of horse-rich central and northern Greece. Moreover, Athenians held an edge over other cavalry in mounted archers. Originally imported from Scythia, these deadly riders rose to 200-strong. Horses made easy targets for the javelins of opposing skirmishers. By using an alternative screen of swift horse-archers with longer ranging composite bows, Athens transformed its cavalry into one of the most dangerous and versatile in all of Greece.
Two unique city-states, two unique ways of war
Accounts of actual combat between Sparta and Athens at their height make it clear that each had a fair share of success against the other.
The Athenians used their expertise at surprise mobilisation, amphibious operations, and light-armed warfare (both mounted and afoot) to achieve a greater number of victories.
But Sparta’s hoplites plied their own deadly skills to win every large action. Any advantage in tactics that either could claim was fleeting, the temporary product of unique circumstances holding sway on a given battlefield.
The century closed after long decades of bloody fighting very much as it had begun, with both Sparta and Athens still fiercely independent and equally powerful in their different approaches to war.
The Peloponnesian War
One of the most significant events in ancient Greek history, enveloped the city-states of the ancient Greek world, forever changing the region.
The Peloponnesian War was a war fought in ancient Greece between Athens and Sparta—the two most powerful city-states in ancient Greece at the time (431 to 405 BC). This war shifted power from Athens to Sparta, making Sparta the most powerful city-state in the region. The war featured two periods of combat separated by a six-year truce.
Athens and Sparta had previously quarrelled in the decades prior to the war. One of Sparta’s allies, Corinth, had directly engaged the Athenian army. As a Spartan ally, Corinth resumed hostilities toward Athens when Athens threatened Corinth’s interests in the region surrounding Corcyra. This eventually drew Sparta into the conflict. The Spartan army began by raiding lands within an Athenian allied territory, particularly a region near Athens called Attica. The Athenians had built walls stretching from their seaport to the city of Athens. The walls helped protect Athens from direct assault, and its leader, Pericles, urged Athens not to engage in direct land battles with the Spartans. Instead, the Athenians used their navy to deliver troops into the Spartan territory to conduct raids on settlements.
After years of open warfare, Sparta offered peace and Athens accepted. The agreement was made official with the signing of the Peace of Nicias. The treaty stated that Athens and Sparta would defend each other for the next 50 years. However, the treaty only lasted six years.
Hostilities resumed between Athens and Sparta with an assault launched by the Athenians at Sicily (415–413 BC). The expedition ended in a devastating defeat for the Athenian forces by Sicilian Greeks, severely impacting Athens.
Sparta decided to retaliate. Learning from its past experiences with the Athenian navy, they established a fleet of warships. It would be another decade of warfare before the Spartan general Lysander defeated the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami. This defeat led to Athenian surrender. As a result, the Peloponnesian War was concluded. Simultaneous to the end of this conflict came the end of the golden age of ancient Greece.
Source: Fred Ray, warfarehistorynetwork.com, nationalgeographic.org
Image: A fully armoured Spartan hoplite wears a Corinthian helmet and sports greaves, spear, sword, and shield in this watercolour by Peter Connolly.
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