The remarkable Salaethus and the siege of Mytilene

I mentioned in a previous post how, three years into the Peloponnesian war (i.e. in 428 BC), taking advantage of Athenian setbacks – plague, the death of Pericles, diminishing resources – the oligarchic regime in Mytilene saw an opportunity to fulfill its long-held aims of expanding its authority over the whole of Lesvos and removing the island from the Athenian empire.

In this revolt, Sparta, inevitably, offered backing and encouragement, while the Mytileneans promised that a united Lesvos under their hegemony would attach itself to the Peloponnesian alliance.

Outraged by Mytilenean duplicity and impudence, and defying the repeated blows it had recently endured, the Athenians summoned all their fiscal and materiel resources to despatch a task force to put down the Mytilene rebellion. After skirmishing and an inconclusive battle, the Mytileneans retreated behind their city walls and prepared to hold out against Athens until Spartan relief arrived.

JE Lendon, in his Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins, describes the increasing desperation of the Mytileneans after six months of siege:

‘A winter’s day in embattled Mytilene. The hungry guards looked out from the walls at the Athenian stockade surrounding the city; the cold Athenians on the stockade gazed resentfully at the city walls topped with cozy towers. All the long winter, Mytilene has been blockaded by darting ships upon the deep and by soldiers from the landward side: food was running short, and once again there was talk of begging Athens for terms. But suddenly a knock on a postern or a low cry from no-man’s land revealed the impossible: someone wanted to get into the city.

‘Opening a gate in the city wall, the astonished guards admitted a drenched figure whose long hair and red cloak – and no doubt his chilly equanimity at having crept through the Athenian lines – revealed him as a Spartan. Salaethus was his name, and in a trireme he had crossed the stormful February Aegean to land at one of Mytilene’s small allies on Lesvos; then on foot to Mytilene he had come, slipping under the Athenian fortifications by crawling up the bed of a torrent. Now, having rattled the ice out of his beard, he spoke his message to the besieged. The Peloponnesians were coming!’

Despite the heroic Salaethus’ confidence, the Spartans and their Peloponnesian allies, encumbered by hesitation and misjudgment, did not come and the demoralised Mytileneans were soon compelled to surrender their city to Athens. Then there follows one of the most celebrated episodes in Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian war, in which the Athenian assembly debates what punishment to mete out to defeated Mytilene.

Mytilenean ambassadors pled their city’s case, only for the appalling (to Thucydides) Cleon to demand that Mytilene be made an example of to deter any other potential defectors from the Athenian empire. And, indeed, his proposal for the wholesale destruction of Mytilene, the slaughter of its male population and the selling into slavery of the city’s women and children, is passed and a ship with the grim order is despatched to the Athenian garrison stationed on the island.

However, the following day, having reflected on the harsh punishment they had decided to inflict on the Mytileneans, the Athenians conduct a new debate and vote, which rescinds the original order in favour of a more moderate one, targetting only the rebellion’s ringleaders.

Now, in a race against time, to prevent the first order from being carried out, a second ship is sent to Lesvos. It arrives in the nick of time, just as the Athenian commander Paches is preparing Mytilene’s annihilation.

As for the remarkable Salaethus, having failed to convince the Mytileneans to attempt a break out rather than surrender and having escaped from Mytilene before the Athenians entered the city, finding sanctuary in an allied town on Lesvos, he is eventually captured, sent to Athens and executed, along with 1,000 Mytileneans, supporters of the rebellion.

For more discussion on issues emanating from JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins, see here.

Athens as America

‘Contemporary America is often now seen through the lens of ancient Athens, both as a center of culture and as an unpredictable imperial power that can arbitrarily impose democracy on friends and enemies alike. Thomas Paine long ago spelled this natural affinity out: “What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude.” Like ancient Athenians, present-day Americans are often said to believe that “they can be opposed in nothing,” and abroad can “equally achieve what was easy and what was hard.”

‘Although Americans offer the world a radically egalitarian popular culture and, more recently, in a very Athenian mood, have sought to remove oligarchs and impose democracy – in Grenada, Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq – enemies, allies, and neutrals alike are not so impressed. They understandably fear American power and intentions while our successive governments, in the manner of confident and proud Athenians, assure them of our morality and selflessness. Military power and idealism about bringing perceived civilization to others are a prescription for frequent conflict in any age – and no ancient state made war more often than did fifth-century imperial Athens.

‘So great were the dividends of envy, fear, and legitimate grievance against the ancient world’s first democracy that the victorious Peloponnesians who oversaw the destruction of the Long Walls of Athens – the fortifications to the sea symbolic of the power of the poor and their desire to spread democracy throughout the Aegean – did so to music and applause. Again, most Greeks concluded that, as Xenophon wrote, Athens’ defeat “marked the beginning of freedom for Greece” – without a clue that the victorious Sparta would move immediately to create its own overseas empire in the vacuum. Blinkered idealists in America who believe that the world wishes to join our democratic culture might reflect that at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, “the general good intentions of people leaned clearly in favor of the “Spartans” and that “the majority of Greeks were deeply hostile toward the Athenians.

‘The wealth and very liberality of Athens also encouraged dissent and hyper-criticism at home and abroad. The Athenians’ detractors expected a much higher level of fairness from them than they ever would have from the Spartans. Not until fourth-century Sparta incurred commensurate jealousy and envy as the Hellenic world’s only superpower, following its victory in the war, would the Greeks at last cease their distrust of imperial Athens.

‘This paradox was an exasperating experience for Athenians. And it perhaps presages the dilemma faced by generations of subsequent powerful Western liberal and imperial republics that were singularly chastised to match their idealistic and high utopian rhetoric with deeds. Just as states reprimanded Athens but preferred to visit the Acropolis rather than the unimpressive national Spartan shrine to Menelaus, so too the West’s Cold War detractors roundly condemned its realist foreign policy but usually preferred to accept a visiting professorship at Oxford, the Sorbonne, or the University of California, Berkeley, rather than a teaching slot in Moscow, Havana, or Cairo.

‘Sparta counted on these inconsistencies in its upcoming war with “Athens: the rest of the Greek world would subject Athens to a standard of behavior that it would never apply to illiberal Sparta. The privileged citizens of a consensual and affluent Athens would purportedly have a much lower tolerance for a drawn-out war’s pain and sacrifice than the militarists at Sparta, whose society was on a constant war footing and reflective of the barracks. And the volatile assembly would vote for and then reject military operations in a way unheard of at oligarchic Sparta.

‘Consequently, many have carefully read Thucydides in just that historicist context. Our leaders and pundits are eager to learn from the Athenians’ mistakes and successes. They are unsure whether the fate of Athens is to be our own, or whether Americans can yet match the Athenians’ civilization and influence while avoiding their hubris. Perhaps never has the Peloponnesian War been more relevant to Americans than to us of the present age. We, like the Athenians, are all-powerful, but insecure, professedly pacifist yet nearly always in some sort of conflict, often more desirous of being liked than being respected, and proud of our arts and letters even as we are more adept at war.’ (Victor Davis Hanson: A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War).

Sparta: its political regime and grand strategy

I mentioned in a previous post the tendency among Sparta’s detractors to caricature it as a despotic, tyrannous, even fascistic regime, suggesting it was a model for Nazi ideologues or resembled Soviet society – in the latter case, it’s often pointed out that, just like the communist Eastern bloc, Sparta did not welcome foreigners and prevented its citizens from travelling beyond its borders for fear of ideological contamination. I also mentioned that rather than trying to interpret Sparta adopting modern preoccupations and prejudices it’s more useful to consider Aristotle’s view that the Spartan political system was a mixed regime – oligarchic, monarchical and democratic.

This nuanced approach to the Spartan polity is emphasised by Paul Rahe in the talk above, in which he draws attention to those elements in the Spartan constitution that could be described as democratic – general participation in the assembly, the selection of ephors by lottery, the checks and balances inherent in Spartan government designed not to allow one branch to exert sole and untrammelled influence over any other.

In The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, Rahe expands on his analysis of the Spartan constitution and way of life, before explaining how this revealed itself at the high point of Spartan civilisation, i.e. its command of allied Hellenic forces in the repulsion of the Persian invaders in the fifth century BC.

Rahe insists, however, that Sparta’s leadership in securing Hellenic independence against the Persians should not mislead us about Sparta’s ‘grand strategy’, which, Rahe says, was limited and conservative and dominated by anxieties closer to home, of helot revolt and the threat this posed to the Spartiates’ aristocratic way of life – with its disdain for work and emphasis on military training, hunting, wrestling and athletics. 

Thus, Rahe points out, although Sparta has the reputation of being a belligerent and belicose power, in reality the Spartans tried to avoid fighting and were loathe to engage in wars outside their immediate sphere of influence and vital living space – i.e. the Peloponnese. Indeed, for Rahe, echoing J.E. Lendon’s account of the Peloponnesian War, if any Hellenic power deserves the label of aggressive and imperial, it was ambitious democratic Athens not cautious authoritarian Sparta. 

On Athenian propaganda and the Battle of Plataea

Above is a video with Professor Paul Cartledge lecturing at the Hellenic Society on the Battle of Plataea (479 BC) – at which, a year after Thermopylae and Salamis, Greek forces routed the Persian invaders. Cartledge wants to explain why the massive barbarian empire was so determined to conquer tiny Greece and how it was that tiny Greece managed to defeat the Persians. Cartledge – a Spartan expert – is also interested in how Athens, as part of its aim to become the pre-eminent Greek state, usurped the glory associated with the victory at Plataea when it was the Spartans, as the leaders of the Hellenic Alliance and the most renowned Greek warriors, who deserved the most honour and credit for Greece’s salvation.

Homer against realpolitik. On JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins

JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins is an excellent account, elegantly written, of the first 10 years of the Peloponnesian war (431-421 BC), which questions Thucydides’ renowned assertion that the ‘truest cause of the war between Athens and Sparta was the growing greatness of the Athenians and the fear that this inspired, which compelled the Lacedaemonians to go to war’.

Thucydides’ ‘realpolitik’ Lendon points out, has informed analyses of conflict for centuries and has held particular sway over modern American strategists and international relations gurus.

However, Lendon believes that in order to understand the causes and conduct of the Peloponnesian war it is necessary to go beyond ‘realist’ doctrines and insist on the centrality of Homeric values to the motivations of fifth century Greeks – with the emphasis on rank, honour, prestige, competitiveness, vengeance and shaming.

Reasserting Homer not only presents us with a more compelling portrait of classical Greek culture, self-perception and psychology, but also provides us with a valuable paradigm for appreciating the motivations behind all wars and conflict.

Wars are often fought, if we follow Lendon (and Homer), not for pragmatic reasons, in struggles over power, resources or conflicting interests, but for the sake of reputation, national self-esteem, pride and out of wrath and revenge, the latter for perceived injustices that may have been inflicted decades or even centuries ago.

Furthermore, by rescuing the Peloponnesian war from ‘realist’American scholars, who regard the conflict as a ‘power struggle’ between democratic Athens and totalitarian Sparta – and want, in the process, to identify dynamic, open American society with Athens and depict its enemies as embodying grim and stolid Sparta – Lendon asks us to reconsider the modern tendency to extol the virtues of Athens and denigrate or caricature the Lacedaemonian way of life.

For Lendon, the Peloponnesian war was a conflict the Spartans were reluctant to fight and sought to resolve at every opportunity, while charges of war-mongering, brutality, hubris and arrogance stick more to Athens. The noblest and most sympathetic character of the period was not the paradigmatically democratic Athenian leader Pericles but the moderate king of Sparta, Archidamus.

Above is a podcast of JE Lendon in conversation with Bill Buschel (http://billbuschel.wordpress.com/) regarding Song of Wrath. The show was first broadcast on Hellenic Public Radio in New York in 2011.

And for more discussion emanating from Song of Wrath, go here.

Thermopylae, the Persian invasions and Greek triumphalism

Above is a lecture from Jeremy McInerney of the University of Pennsylvania on the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC) in which, famously, a small group of Greek warriors led by Leonidas’ 300 Spartans, resisted for three days a vastly superior force of invading Persians, dying heroically to the last. It’s a seminal moment in Greek and European history that McInerney provides a good introduction to, placing it within the wider context of the Persian invasions of Greece – the Ionian revolt, Marathon, Salamis, Plataea and so on – the repulsion of which is widely considered to have resulted in an upsurge of Greek self-confidence that paved the way for the flowering of Greek culture that continues to resonate to this day. 

In the last 10 minutes of the lecture, however, McInerney claims that apart from the extraordinary vitalism of Greek culture that flowed in the aftermath of the defeat of the Persians, he also detects the emergence of an overweening and deplorable triumphalism in which Greeks developed a contempt for the East that has never been erased from Western discourse – and McInerney points to the war on Islamic terror and the recent cartoon film, 300, which purports to be about the Spartans at Thermopylae, as examples of this. 

McInerney’s condemnation of the Greeks is nonsense. 

Not only was swaggering pride not something the Greeks lacked before the Persian invasions, but it is also characteristic of Greek culture, beginning with Homer, that this conceit was tempered by self-criticism and objectivity. Aeschylus’ Persians is anything but patriotic tub-thumping and even Herodotus, in whose Histories the Persian invasions are documented, was censured, most notably by Plutarch in his Of Herodotus’ Malice, for favouring the barbarians and maligning the Greeks. 

Isaac Asimov on the Spartans

Sparta was the dominant land power in Greece for two centuries, not that Isaac Asimov, in The Greeks: A Great Adventure, thought much of the Lacedaemonians: 

‘Sparta was never really suited to the task of leading Greece. The Greeks were at home on the sea and Sparta was not. The Greeks had interests from end to end of the Mediterranean and Sparta was interested, in her heart, only in the Peloponnese. The Greeks were quick, artistic and free and Spartans were slow-moving, dull and enslaved either to each other or to the military way of life. 

‘In later years, the Greeks of other city-states sometimes admired the Spartan way of life because it seemed so virtuous and seemed to lead Sparta to such military glory. However, they were wrong to do so. In art, literature, music, love of life, all that makes it worthwhile to be on the earth, Sparta contributed nothing. She had only a cruel, inhuman way of life to offer, dependent on a brutal slavery of most of her population, with only a kind of blind animal courage as a virtue and her way of life soon became more show than substance. It was her reputation that saved her for a while when her core was rotten. She seemed strong as long as she won victories but whereas other states could withstand defeats and rise again, Sparta lost her domination of Greece after a single defeat. The loss of one major battle [at Leuctra, 371 BC] was to expose her and dispose of her.’

When Yanis met Jeremy

Above is a conversation between economist cum politician Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s finance minister from January to July 2015, and Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, at the Edinburgh Book festival on 20 August this year.

They talk about the usual – democracy, socialism, post-capitalism, etc, etc, before going on to discuss Brexit.

Here, Varoufakis, comes out against a second referendum since, he says, referenda require a binary choice whereas the UK has, in fact, four choices in front of it. These are the Canada plus deal favoured by the hard Brexiteers; Norway plus, the deal Varoufakis advocates and which the Labour party is broadly putting forward – staying in the single market and the customs union; the Chequers proposal supported by the British government; and Remain. 

Corbyn argues the case for a General Election rather than a second referendum, before going on to state the customary issues Labour intends to fight the Tories on: health, education, poverty, homelessness, inequality, low and stagnant wages, etc. 

Moral outrage shapes Corbyn’s politics and, for him, socialism is simply the triumph of justice over iniquity, of fairness over inequality, and, when all is said and done, of right over wrong. Varoufakis has a more highfalutin understanding of what a socialist society would look like, referring us to Star Trek – in which, Varoufakis says, technology is harnessed in the service of the common good or, as Varoufakis puts it, machines do all the work while citizens discuss philosophy and explore the universe. 

The conversation continues with Varoufakis repeating his rather hysterical warning that Europe is currently staring into the abyss and risks a return to the politics of the 1920s and 1930s, i.e. risks the rise of fascism, and he points to the emergence of Victor Orban in Hungary, Sebastian Kurz in Austria and Matteo Salvini in Italy to prove his (facile) theory.

Finally, there is a brief discussion of the contrasting regimes of Athens and Sparta. Corbyn clearly has no idea how radical Athenian democracy was and regurgitates the usual platitudes about its flaws – slavery, the exclusion of women and migrants (metics) from Athenian political life – while Varoufakis reverts to the usual caricature of Sparta as a despotic or, in his terms, ‘fascistic’ regime. 

In fact, while it’s not unreasonable to describe Sparta as a totalitarian regime, it was not a dictatorship, tyrannical or despotic (unless you were a helot). Rather, Sparta’s constitution, with its senate, ephors, kings and assembly, was designed to ensure accountability, transparency and checks and balances. 

Aristotle asserts Sparta was a mixed regime, in which its two kings represented monarchy; the senate (gerousia) represented oligarchy; while the assembly – to which all Spartan citizens (Spartiates) were entitled to attend – and the institution of the ephors reflected the democratic aspect of Spartan politics. 

Indeed, ephors (or magistrates) – perhaps the most powerful element in the Spartan politeia – were selected in the most democratic method possible, via lottery, and had their terms in office limited to only one year, after which they were put on trial to judge whether they carried out their duties legally and effectively. 

Insult, wrath and retribution in the Peloponnesian war: yet more thoughts on JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath

As I’ve said in my last two posts on Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins, JE Lendon is keen to stress the role that revenge plays in that conflict and, indeed, in all conflicts.

The mechanism of revenge, Lendon says, starts with an insult (ὕβρις/hybris) – amounting to a calculated attempt to demean and cause an affront to honour (τιμή, timē) – which induces an ‘overpowering wrath’ and necessitates vengeance.

Only when revenge is accomplished is wrath ameliorated and honour restored. But, as Lendon points out, and demonstrates with examples from Homer and tragedy, this pattern – from humiliating insult to wrath to revenge to restoration of honour – is not a redemptive process. Rather, it is a process (directed by the Furies) involving chaos, frenzy and self-destruction. Such a process – of chaos, frenzy and self-destruction – is what ultimately characterises the Peloponnesian war.

Revenge not only defines the conduct of the Peloponnesian war but also goes to the heart of the dispute between Athens and Sparta, which is a dispute, according to Lendon (stressing the importance of Homeric ethics in classical Greece) about rank – about Sparta’s determination to retain its ascendant position in Hellas and Athens’ attempt to compel Sparta to accept its burgeoning status.

Shaming is the weapon of choice to undermine, reinforce or elevate rank in the classical Greek world and, as such, the Peloponnesian war begins with punitive Spartan raids into Attica, looting, ravaging and wasting of land, which are reciprocated not by full-scale hostilities but by similarly pernicious Athenian raids into Laconia and against Sparta’s Peloponnesian allies.

Attacking your enemy’s allies is a crucial tactic in this war of reputation, retribution and shaming because it aims to prove that you are incapable of defending your subordinate confederates and are unworthy of your hegemonic position.

Thus, in the first years of the war, Athens moves on from raids against Elis and Messinea in the Peloponnese and expands its theatre of operations to Halkidiki in northeastern Greece where, in an attempt to prove the limitations of Sparta’s reach and power, Athens attacks and seizes pro-Spartan Potidaea.

Sparta responds to this humiliation by attacking an Athenian protectorate, Plataea, in Boeotia; but when Plataea holds out, Sparta seeks to undermine Athenian prestige and restore its own by encouraging the Mytelineans to break free from the Athenian sphere of influence (and fulfill Myteline’s long-term ambition to exert authority over the whole of Lesvos). Athens crushes the Mytelinean revolt, prompting the Peloponnesians to try a similar shaming maneuver in Corcyra. Here, they sponsor a pro-Spartan oligarchic coup, triggering years of strife and carnage on the island, which comes to epitomise the loathing and vindictiveness of this Greek civil war.

For all posts discussing issues emanating from JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian begins, see here.

History, myth and self-destruction among the Greeks: more thoughts on JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath

More reflections emerging from reading Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins, in which JE Lendon stresses the role of status and prestige in that particular conflict and, indeed, in all conflicts.

Lendon makes clear that for the classical Greeks, imbued with Homeric culture, identity and rank were shaped not only by the historical but also the mythical past. Thus, we note that at the conclusion of the Peloponnesian war and the defeat of Athens (404 BC) – and despite the urgings of its allies – Sparta declined to destroy Athens because of the city’s role decades earlier in the service of Hellas during the Persian wars.

For the same reasons, Alexander the Great was lenient towards Athens despite its overt hostility towards Macedonia – its part in the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC) and the revolt of Thebes (335 BC) – although the Macedonians had no such compunction when it came to Thebes itself, which was razed and its population sold into slavery, and not just because in resisting Macedonia, the Thebans had lobbied for assistance from the Persian king, but because this treachery was part of an inherited pattern of betrayal, in Alexander’s eyes, in which Thebes had also sided with the Persian invaders more than a century before.

More illustrative, perhaps, of the way the past informed Greek self-perception, we note that Sparta’s perennial Peloponnesian rival Argos, after being defeated in the Battle of Champions (546 BC) and the Battle of Sepeia (494 BC), never reconciled itself to its diminished status and Sparta's hegemony in the peninsular and in Hellas; the Argives justifying their obsessive enmity towards Sparta on the grounds that in the legendary war that, essentially, established the Greeks as a nation, i.e. the Trojan war (1250 BC), it was Argos (under King Agamemnon) that led the pan-Hellenic expedition in Asia, while Sparta (and its cuckolded king, Menelaus) was a bit-part player.

 As Lendon puts it:

‘On the basis of Argos’ standing in myth, Argos could claim the highest rank of any Greek state. And the Argives were anxious to vindicate their rank in every succeeding generation.’

This vicious irreconcilable rivalry meant that from the fifth century onwards, Argos’ main foreign policy objective was to undermine Sparta and this it did by allying itself with whichever state happened to be fighting the Lacedaemonians – with Athens during the Peloponnesian war; with Thebes, Athens and Corinth in the Corinthian war; with Thebes, under Epaminondas, who took on and dealt a shattering blow to Spartan leadership and power, most notably at the Battle of Leuctra (371 BC); with Macedonia, as it sought to establish and maintain hegemony in Greece; and, finally, with Greece’s Roman overlords.

Indeed, Argos’ interminable feud with Sparta is typical of inter-Greek state relations – in fact, such abiding antipathies could be found as much within Greek states as between them – in which destroying yourself seemed a price worth paying so long as you took your rival down with you. No surprise, therefore, that Greeks inspired the concepts of the Cadmean as well as the Pyrrhic victory.

For more discussion emanating from Song of Wrath, go here.