The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta The Persian Challenge Paul A. Rahe New Haven and London Published with assistance from the Kingsley Trust Association Publication Fund established by the Scroll and Key Society of Yale College. Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2015 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. The prologue is adapted from Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution, by Paul A. Rahe. Copyright © 1992 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Designed by James J. Johnson. Maps by Bill Nelson. Set in Minion Roman and Trajan Pro types by Integrated Publishing Solutions. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015940163 ISBN 978-0-300-11642-7 (cloth : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 James Joseph Rahe Battles are the principal milestones in secular history. Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often treat the decisions in the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy. But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform. Winston S. Churchill Contents List of Maps ix Introduction: A Clash of Civilizations xi Prologue: A Regime and Its Grand Strategy 1 Part I. The Crisis of Sparta’s Grand Strategy 29 1. A Shadow Growing in the East 39 2. Mainland Defense 76 3. The Ionian Revolt 105 4. The First Round 130 Part II. The Crisis Comes to a Head 161 5. The Formation of the Hellenic League 167 6. Thermopylae and Artemisium 202 7. Salamis 241 8. Plataea and Mycale 282 Epilogue: The Aftermath 327 List of Abbreviations and Short Titles 337 Notes 341 Author’s Note and Acknowledgments 389 Index 393 This page intentionally left blank Maps Map 1. Mainland Greece xvi Map 2. The Persian Empire 30 Map 3. Anatolia, the Aegean, and Cyprus 46 Map 4. Attica, Salamis, and the Border with the Megarid and Boeotia 80 Map 5. Euboea, Boeotia, Thessaly, Macedonia, the Chalcidice, and the River Strymon 82 Map 6. From the Danube on the Black Sea to the Thermaic Gulf in Macedonia 87 Map 7. The Battle of Lade 120 Map 8. The Argolid 133 Map 9. From Tarsus to Marathon 142 Map 10. The Plain of Marathon 145 Map 11. From the Hellespont to the Athos Canal 169 Map 12. Xerxes’ Route from Critalla to Therme in Macedon 174 Map 13. The Passes at Tempe, Petra, and Volustana 207 Map 14. Xerxes’ Route from Therme to Thermopylae 210 Map 15. Thermopylae, the Gulf of Malia, and Delphi 212 Map 16. Cape Magnesia, Artemisium, the Gulf of Magnesia, and the Gulf of Malia 217 Map 17. Thermopylae and the Anopaea Path 223 Map 18. The Persian Circumnavigation of Euboea 229 Map 19. From Artemisium to Salamis 243 Map 20. Routes from Thermopylae to Phocis 247 Map 21. Phalerum, Salamis, the Bay of Eleusis, and Troupika 267 Map 22. The Battle of Salamis: The Corinthian Flight 273 Map 23. The Battle of Salamis: The Conflict 274 Map 24. From Phalerum and Salamis to the Andros-Euboea Gap 283 Map 25. Mardonius’ Retreat from Attica via Deceleia and Tanagra to Scolus 302 Map 26. Plataea, Hysiae, Erythrae, and the Passes from Attica into Boeotia 306 Map 27. Samos, Mycale, and the Battle of Mycale 325 ix This page intentionally left blank Introduction A Clash of Civilizations N 1846, shortly after the first two volumes of George Grote’s monumental History of Greece appeared, John Stuart Mill penned for the Edinburgh IReview an essay discussing them both. In it, he observed, The interest of Grecian history is unexhausted and inexhaustible. As a mere story, hardly any other portion of authentic history can compete with it. Its characters, its situations, the very march of its incidents, are epic. It is an heroic poem, of which the personages are peoples. It is also, of all histories of which we know so much, the most abounding in conse- quences to us who now live. The true ancestors of the European nations (it has been well said) are not those from whose blood they are sprung, but those from whom they derive the richest portion of their inheritance. The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings. If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods. There is only one thing that can be said in just criticism of Mill’s remarks, and it is that he left out something altogether essential: to wit, that the en- gagement at Marathon, important though it may have been, was a mere skir- mish in comparison to the series of battles that took place a decade or more thereafter—in places such as Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. Two thousand five hundred years ago, the Greeks living in the Balkan peninsula and on the adjacent islands in the Aegean were puzzling over the danger that they had dodged a handful of years earlier when the Athenians had unexpectedly massacred the Persian footsoldiers at Marathon, and they xi xii Introduction were contemplating the future as well. For, as the more astute among them understood, it was perfectly possible that the barbarians might return—this time with a much larger force. This was a possibility well worthy of contemplation. Achaemenid Persia was the largest empire hitherto known to man. Even by much later standards, it must be judged exceedingly grand. It encompassed the civilized world west of the Gobi desert almost in its entirety. It counted among its subjects some- thing like two-fifths of the human race—a greater proportion than any empire before or since. From its Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Hittite, Assyrian, Elamite, Urartian, and Median predecessors in the Near East, it had inherited an apparatus of power projection and domination that these despotic polities had articulated gradually by a process of trial and error over a period almost as long as the two and a half millennia separating the era of its dominion from us. Moreover, the Great Kings of Persia had devised improvements of their own—collecting tribute on a scale hitherto unknown and spurring a mari- time military revolution that enabled them to project power over great dis- tances by land and sea as no previous ruler had ever done—and their morale was sustained by the conviction that the Wise Lord Ahura Mazda, greatest of gods and creator of the universe, had chosen them to bring order, beauty, prosperity, and happiness to a world in commotion, afflicted with every spe- cies of conflict, ugliness, and misery. For Achaemenid Persia, the attempt to conquer Hellas was no ordinary war. It was divinely ordained. It was what would later be called a jīhad. Even after Marathon, no sane person would have supposed that the tiny cities of Hellas—only two of them capable of fielding more than ten thousand heavily armored men—had a chance in a contest with a monarch who, with considerable justice, styled himself the King of Kings. But, as it turned out, they won nonetheless. David not only defeated Goliath. He did so in a fashion that precluded the barbarian’s return. This book tells that story. It describes a clash of civilizations in which liberty successfully withstood the assault of despotism and a collection of diminutive and impoverished self-governing cities defeated one of the great- est empires the world has ever known. It describes that clash, moreover, as it has never before been described—from the perspective of Lacedaemon, the remarkable city around which the victorious coalition formed. In 480 and 479 b.c., had it not been for the Spartans, resistance to the Persian juggernaut would have been nonexistent or ineffective. They and they alone possessed Introduction xiii the prestige required for instilling confidence in the Hellenes living in and outside the Peloponnesus. They and they alone could take the lead—and this, in magnificent fashion, they did, as we will have soon occasion to observe. This volume, the first in a projected trilogy focused on the conduct of -di plomacy and war by ancient Sparta, is part of a larger attempt to see the Lace- daemonians whole. In the Prologue—which restates in abbreviated form with minimal annotation the conclusions that I argue for at length in the compan- ion volume, The Spartan Regime—I first describe their peculiar way of life, the mode of fighting they preferred, and their form of government, the first in human history to embody a system of balances and checks. Then, I trace their gradual articulation of an ingenious grand strategy designed to provide for the defense of Lacedaemon and the way of life that it fostered.