Thucydides Roundtable, Book IV: Devastation

[by A. E. Clark]

In the Peloponnesian War there is a great deal of “ravaging” and “laying waste.” The verbs most commonly used are d?io? and temn?, which both come from roots that mean “to cut.” It was grain crops that were cut, and fruit trees, and vines. While the Greek term describes the physical action, the Latin vastare refers to the result: a land that is empty because uninhabitable. While the tactic might be rationalized as reducing the food supply of the enemy army, it visited the greatest suffering upon civilians of the countryside, a suffering that might last for as many years as the trees needed to grow back. For anyone who has ever walked through an olive grove under a Mediterranean sky, the practice drily reported by Thucydides inspires a shudder.

It was an innovation. For about two centuries, hoplite warfare had known informal rules that, among other things, protected non-combatants. Like most of the rules that limited the destructiveness of war between Greeks, this one was discarded in the middle of the fifth century.  In the essay he contributed to The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World, Josiah Ober held the Athenians responsible. As a naval power with a society that did not need to be protected from its lower classes, Athens did not require the Hoplite rules and could win by breaking them. I believe Ober had in mind chiefly the efforts (shocking at the time) which Athens made to subvert Sparta by stirring up the Helots. The practice of devastation, however, does not seem to have been introduced by the Athenians, but rather by the Spartans, who began ravaging Attica when they invaded it in 431 BCE (2.18).  Moreover, Pericles expected this devastation and prepared for it, which suggests that the old laws of war must have been weakened already.  There is evidence of this in 457 BCE during what is sometimes called the First Peloponnesian War, which Thucydides summarizes in 1.102-115.

After entering the Megarid and cutting down the fruit trees, the Spartans returned home across Geraneia and the isthmus. (1.108.2)

Victor Davis Hanson is careful not to limit blame to one side when he writes, in the introduction to the Strassler edition,

…there existed between the powers neither an adherence to the past restrictions on Greek warmaking nor sufficient common political ground to negotiate a lasting peace.

At times the Spartans used the threat of devastation to extort submission or cooperation.  In his astute speech at 1.80-85, Archidamus advises that it will be less effective to devastate Attica than to hold over the Athenians’ heads the prospect of devastating it.

For the only light in which you can view their land is that of a hostage in your hands, a hostage the more valuable the better it is cultivated. This you ought to spare as long as possible, and not make them desperate and so increase the difficulty of dealing with them.

The Spartans, however, rejected the counsel of Archidamus and later would condemn his reluctance to devastate Attica (2.18).

At the war’s outset, by ravaging Attica the Spartans do not intend to extort submission but rather to goad their adversaries into combat:

. . . [W]e have every reason to expect that they will take the field against us, and that if they have not set out already before we are there, they will certainly do so when they see us in their territory wasting and destroying their property. (2.11.6)

It didn’t take long to discover that Pericles had made the Athenians proof against such provocations. Yet the Spartans continued their policy of devastation for the duration of the war.

Devastation may have been more logical, and was sometimes more effective, in Sparta’s dealings with Athens’ allies.  On Archidamus’ reaching the walls of Plataea we read that “he was about to lay waste the country” (2.71) but was willing to engage in a lengthy negotiation with the Plataeans, even allowing them time to consult with Athens, before he brought out the axes. Likewise Brasidas, arriving at Acanthus “just before the grape harvest,” employs to good effect the threat of destroying their vineyards.

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