Tags
Plataea and surrounds 479BC
Date:
May 429–summer 427 b.c.
Location:
province of Boeotia, some 50 miles northeast of Athens, Greece.
Forces Engaged:
Spartan: unknown, possibly 30,000 troops. Commander: Archidamos II.
Plataean: 400 Plataeans and 80 Athenians. Commander: a command council.
Importance:
Plataea marked the introduction of siege machinery and tactics to Greek warfare and began the social and psychological decline of Hellenic society.
Historical Setting
The town of Plataea was unfortunately situated—in the ancient Greek province of Boeotia at the opening of two passes from southern Greece, one of which led toward the Peloponnese (home of Sparta) and one toward Attica (home of Athens). While this was an excellent location for trade, it was a crossroads for war as well, and any neighboring aggressor had to control Plataea to expand or defend its territory. Two powerful neighbors to the south was bad enough, but the occasional expansionary desires of Thebes, 9 miles to the north, also was a consideration. Thebes was also the most regular aggressor, and Plataea was often obliged to seek aid from one of her powerful southern neighbors.
In 519 b.c. that aid came from Athens when Thebes attempted to force the creation of a Boeotian League, with itself as the leader. Thirty years later Plataeans fought alongside Athenians against the Persian army at Marathon. A decade later, Plataea was the site of the final Persian army defeat in Greece. In the 460s–450s b.c., Plataea also aided Sparta in suppressing a peasant revolt.
In the 450s, Plataea aided Athens in establishing control over Boeotia; when Boeotia successfully revolted in 447, Plataea remained an Athenian ally. Thus, when Athens and Sparta fell out in 432/431 b.c., Plataea had friendly relations with both sides and no real desire to fight either of them.
Within Plataea the issue was hotly debated. The bulk of the population favored close relations with Athens, while the upper classes preferred to join the resurgent Boeotian League. The aristocrats secretly plotted with Thebes, allowing a small force of 300 into the city one night in the spring of 431. Rather than seize any pro-Athenian leaders, the Thebans instead tried to reason with them. The population rose up and killed or captured the Theban soldiers. The 180 prisoners were held hostage to force the withdrawal of an advancing Theban army, then they were murdered. Although Athenian leaders realized the stupidity of that act, they still evacuated non-essential personnel from Plataea and added 80 soldiers to the 400-man garrison left behind. That obliged them to remain on Athens’ side when war with Sparta broke out. After a couple of failed invasions of Attica, Spartan troops and their Theban allies marched against Plataea in 429.
With thousands of men encamped around the city, the Plataeans sent emissaries to the Spartan King Archidamos II. They reminded him that after the Persian defeat in 479, all Greek city-states had sworn to defend Plataea. Archidamos replied that he would go along with that if Plataea would fight against the aggressive Athenians or at least stay neutral. Given that their women and children were in Athens, the Plataeans could hardly agree to that. The Spartan king then offered an unusual alternative: let Sparta possess Plataea and its surrounding countryside for the duration of the war, all the while paying rent, while the Plataeans could have safe conduct anywhere they wanted to go to avoid the fighting. At war’s end they could return home and Sparta would leave. That seemed reasonable to the garrison, but Athens overrode the deal. When informed of that decision, the Spartans began their siege.
The Siege
Archidamos began by plundering the countryside of supplies, then having as many trees as possible cut down. He ordered a surrounding palisade built to keep any defenders from escaping. He then used his large army (the size is unknown, but could possibly have numbered 30,000) to move earth against the city walls, which were only accessible from the south and southeast. Building a ramp would allow his men to enter the city without having to scale the walls or batter down gates. With the vast superiority in numbers, it is difficult to understand why Archidamos did not order the walls stormed. Perhaps a failed attempt at forcing the town of Oenoe two years earlier discouraged him. Further, Plataea’s stone walls were reportedly 30 feet high, making the use of scaling ladders difficult. At a reported 10 feet thick, the walls would also have been an insurmountable challenge given the siege machinery of the day.
For weeks the besiegers moved dirt. The Plataeans responded both by building up their own walls facing the growing mound and by burrowing through their own walls and removing dirt the Spartans had placed next to the wall. This kept the mound from reaching the wall until the Spartans responded by dropping in pieces of clay wrapped in reeds that were too large to remove through the burrows. (This Plataean tactic suggests that the Spartans should have tried undermining, but inexplicably they did not.) The Plataeans then built a second semicircular wall within the city (a lunette). This would present the attackers with another barrier to breach once their mound reached the top of the original wall. The curvature would make the attackers easier targets as well.
As the Spartan mound grew, Archidamos finally brought in battering rams. They had little success against clever Plataean countermeasures. They would drop nooses over the ends of the rams and then hoist them up over the walls. They also suspended heavy logs atop their walls to drop on top of the rams, breaking them. Frustrated at this, Archidamos ordered the use of fire. Brush was piled alongside the wall, covered with sulfur, pitch, and (some sources say) arsenic, making it the first recorded use of chemical warfare. They also threw as much brush as they could inside the city walls to spread the fire, for the counterwall the Plataeans built had used up most of the building material provided by nearby houses. Unfortunately for the Spartans, the wind did not cooperate and there was possibly a well-timed thunderstorm as well.
Archidamos finally sent many of his troops home to attend to the harvest, while having the remainder build a stronger encircling wall as well as a wall of circumvallation, 16 feet outside the first wall, facing outward to defend against any relief force. Some 2,000 Spartan and Beoetian troops remained on guard duty through the winter.
The small garrison and wise stockpiling of food meant that the defenders were in no immediate danger of starvation. However, since no Athenian aid seemed in the offing the soothsayer Theaenetus, along with Eupompidas (son of General Daimachus) offered a breakout plan sometime in the winter of 429–428. On a stormy, moonless night the garrison would sneak out of the city. The defenders were observed taking shelter in towers along the encircling wall during bad weather, so scaling it should prove easy. Pull up the ladders, cross to the outer wall and scale it, then be off into the night. When the appropriately rainy night arrived, only 220 decided the attempt was worth the risk. They succeeded in scaling the first wall, but loose bricks falling alerted the defenders. The Plataeans quickly seized the two towers flanking their breakout and with archers were able to keep the Spartans and Thebans at bay. The second wall was scaled during the fighting, but on the opposite side lay a ditch filled with freezing water. This ditch had been the source of the clay for the brick walls they had just climbed. In spite of the neck-deep cold water, all but one of the escapees made the crossing; the one that did not surrendered.
The Spartan-Theban besiegers lit signal fires to alert reinforcements in Thebes, but the Plataeans countered that by building multiple fires of their own, which confused any signal being sent. The escapees in the darkness fooled the Spartans by fleeing not toward Athens but toward Thebes. When they were sure the pursuit was headed in the wrong direction, they safely took a circuitous route to Athens. The Plataeans who had stayed behind thought the escape an utter failure until they asked permission to bury the dead. Only then did they learn the wisdom of the escape plan. They had more than a year to ponder on their decision to stay behind, for the decreased garrison was able to take further stretch the city’s food supply until the summer of 427. By then a Spartan force convinced the remaining defenders to surrender.
Results
After a trial, two hundred Plataeans and twenty-five Athenians were executed and the women who had remained behind to cook for the garrison were sold into slavery. Those who escaped, as well as those who fled to Athens before the siege, were awarded Athenian citizenship. They remained in Athens until war’s end, then returned to their city. A later Spartan-Theban conflict found the city on the side of Sparta, but the Plataeans found them little better allies in the end than the Athenians had been. Thebes occupied the city after a surprise attack in 373 b.c. Not until the arrival of Philip’s invading Macedonians did Plataeans once again control their own city, in 338.
Thucydides’ account of the siege of Plataea is the first recorded description of both Greek siege machinery (primarily battering rams) and the use of walls of circumvallation. There is much debate over how the Spartans came to use these siege tactics. Some think that they learned them from the Persians or the Carthaginians (in Syracuse, Sicily). Others propose that Archidamos himself should be given credit for initiating rams, approach mound, and walls. Whatever the true answer, the results here and for the remainder of the Peloponnesian War were the same: no besieged city was taken by attack in the entire conflict. The strategy of deceit remained the primary Greek method for overcoming strong walls.
There was a psychological effect to the siege as well. The surrendering Plataeans were offered freedom, except for those guilty of crimes. The Spartan trial consisted of one question to each defender: What good have you done for Sparta in this war? The Plataeans blamed Thebes for forcing them into an Athenian alliance; after all, the Thebans were no good since they had conspired with the Persian invasion. The Thebans responded that that was a leadership decision, not one of the citizens, and thus the citizens only followed orders. Neither of these arguments changed the ultimate Spartan query: What have you done for us, Plataea? When no one could offer a positive response, all were killed. “The significance of the Spartan action, brutal as it may have been, did not lay with the execution of the Plataeans…. why they acted was more important than what they did, for the reasoning brought to the surface, without apologies and for all to examine, the attitude which destabilized their own world…. Alliances between states, as between families, evolved over generations…. If Sparta, the greatest champion of conservative values of the Greek elite, could brush aside profound attachments which had been established in the memory of men still living and which solemn rituals kept alive year by year, then there was no basis for long-term loyalty to any state” (Crane, “Plataia”).
“Military Technology and Ethical Values in Ancient Greek Warfare: The Siege of Plataea.” War and Society VI, No. 2 (September, 1988), 1-20. – Paul B. Kern
Thucydides on the siege of Plataea
The translation of Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.75-78 was made by Richard Crawley.
[2.75] After an appeal to the gods Archidamus put his army in motion. First he enclosed the town with a palisade formed of the fruit trees which they cut down, to prevent further egress from Plataea; next they threw up a mound against the city, hoping that the largeness of the force employed would ensure the speedy reduction of the place. They accordingly cut down timber from Mount Cithaeron, and built it up on either side, laying it like lattice-work to serve as a wall to keep the mound from spreading abroad, and carried to it wood and stones and earth and whatever other material might help to complete it.
They continued to work at the mound for seventy days and nights without intermission, being divided into relief parties to allow of some being employed in carrying while others took sleep and refreshment; the Spartan officer attached to each contingent keeping the men to the work. But the Plataeans, observing the progress of the mound, constructed a wall of wood and fixed it upon that part of the city wall against which the mound was being erected, and built up bricks inside it which they took from the neighboring houses. The timbers served to bind the building together, and to prevent its becoming weak as it advanced in height; it had also a covering of skins and hides, which protected the woodwork against the attacks of burning missiles and allowed the men to work in safety. Thus the wall was raised to a great height, and the mound opposite made no less rapid progress. The Plataeans also thought of another expedient; they pulled out part of the wall upon which the mound abutted, and carried the earth into the city.
[2.76] Discovering this, the Peloponnesians twisted up clay in wattles of reed and threw it into the breach formed in the mound, in order to give it consistency and prevent its being carried away like the soil. Stopped in this way, the Plataeans changed their mode of operation, and digging a mine from the town calculated their way under the mound, and began to carry off its material as before. This went on for a long while without the enemy outside finding it out, so that for all they threw on the top their mound made no progress in proportion, being carried away from beneath and constantly settling down in the vacuum.
But the Plataeans, fearing that even thus they might not be able to hold out against the superior numbers of the enemy, had yet another invention. They stopped working at the large building in front of the mound, and starting at either end of it inside from the old low wall, built a new one in the form of a crescent [1] running in towards the town; in order that in the event of the great wall being taken this might remain, and the enemy have to throw up a fresh mound against it, and as they advanced within might not only have their trouble over again, but also be exposed to missiles on their flanks.
While raising the mound the Peloponnesians also brought up engines against the city, one of which was brought up upon the mound against the great building and shook down a good piece of it, to the no small alarm of the Plataeans. Others were advanced against different parts of the wall but were lassoed and broken by the Plataeans; who also hung up great beams by long iron chains from either extremity of two poles laid on the wall and projecting over it, and drew them up at an angle whenever any point was threatened by the engine, and loosing their hold let the beam go with its chains slack, so that it fell with a run and snapped off the nose of the battering ram.
[2.77] After this the Peloponnesians, finding that their engines effected nothing, and that their mound was met by the counterwork, concluded that their present means of offense were unequal to the taking of the city, and prepared for its circumvallation. First, however, they determined to try the effects of fire and see whether they could not, with the help of a wind, burn the town, as it was not a large one; indeed they thought of every possible expedient by which the place might be reduced without the expense of a blockade.
They accordingly brought faggots of brushwood and threw them from the mound, first into the space between it and the wall; and this soon becoming full from the number of hands at work, they next heaped the faggots up as far into the town as they could reach from the top, and then lighted the wood by setting fire to it with sulfur and pitch. The consequence was a fire greater than any one had ever yet seen produced by human agency, though it could not of course be compared to the spontaneous conflagrations sometimes known to occur through the wind rubbing the branches of a mountain forest together.
And this fire was not only remarkable for its magnitude, but was also, at the end of so many perils, within an ace of proving fatal to the Plataeans; a great part of the town became entirely inaccessible, and had a wind blown upon it, in accordance with the hopes of the enemy, nothing could have saved them. As it was, there is also a story of heavy rain and thunder having come on by which the fire was put out and the danger averted.
[2.78] Failing in this last attempt, the Peloponnesians left a portion of their forces on the spot, dismissing the rest, and built a wall of circumvallation round the town, dividing the ground among the various cities present; a ditch being made within and without the lines, from which they got their bricks. All being finished by about the rising of Arcturus,[2] they left men enough to man half the wall, the rest being manned by the Boeotians, and drawing off their army dispersed to their several cities.
The Plataeans had before sent off their wives and children and oldest men and the mass of the non-combatants to Athens; so that the number of the besieged left in the place comprised 400 of their own citizens, 80 Athenians, and 110 women to bake their bread. This was the sum total at the commencement of the siege, and there was no one else within the walls, bond or free. Such were the arrangements made for the blockade of Plataea.
Note 1:
The technical term is demilune.
Note 2:
About 20 September 429.
