Book 4
The next summer, about the time of the earing425 B.C. of the grain, ten Syracusan and as many Locrian ships sailed to Messene in Sicily and occupied it, going thither on the invitation of the inhabitants; and Messene revolted
from Athens. The chief reason for this act, on the part of the Syracusans, was that they saw that the place offered a point of attack upon Sicily and were afraid that the Athenians might some time make it a base from which to move against Syracuse with a larger force; the motive of the Locrians was their hostility to the Rhegians, whom they desired to subdue by both land
and sea. And, indeed, the Locrians had at this same time invaded the territory of the Rhegians with all their forces in order to prevent them from giving any aid to the Messenians; and, besides, some Rhegians who were living in exile among the Locrians also urged them to make the invasion; for Rhegium had for a long time been in a state of revolution, and it was impossible at the moment to make any defence against the Locrians, who were consequently the more eager
to attack. The Locrians first ravaged the country and then withdrew their land forces, but their ships continued guarding Messene; and still other ships were now being manned to be stationed at Messene and to carry on war from there.
About the same time that spring, before the grain was ripe, the Peloponnesians and their allies made an invasion of Attica, under the command of Agis son of Archidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians; and encamping there they ravaged the land.
But the Athenians despatched the forty shipscf 3.115.4. to Sicily, as they had previously planned, together with the two remaining generals, Eurymedon and Sophocles, who were still at home; for Pythodorus, the third general, had already arrived in Sicily.
These had instructions, as they sailed past Corcyra, to have a care for the inhabitants of the city, who were being plundered by the exiles on the mountain,cf. 3.85.4. and the Peloponnesians with sixty ships had already sailed thither, with the purpose of aiding the party on the mountain and also in the belief that, since a great famine prevailed in the city, they would easily get control of affairs.
Demosthenes also, who had retired into private life after his return from Acarnania,cf. 3.104.1. now, at his own request, received permission from the Athenians to use the forty ships at his discretion in operations about the Peloponnesus.
Now when the Athenians arrived off the coast of Laconia and learned that the Peloponnesian fleet was already at Corcyra, Eurymedon and Sophocles were for pressing on to Corcyra, but Demosthenes urged them to put in at Pylos first, do there what was to be done, and then continue their voyage. They objected; but a storm came on, as it happened, and carried the fleet to Pylos. And Demosthenes at once urged them to fortify the place, as it was for this purpose that he had sailed with them;
and he showed them that there was at hand an abundance of wood and stone, that the position was naturally a strong one, and that not only the place itself but also the neighbouring country for a considerable distance was unoccupied; for Pylos is about four hundred stadia distant from Sparta and lies in the land that was once Messenia; but the Lacedaemonians call the place Coryphasium.
The other generals said there were many unoccupied headlands in the Peloponnesus, which he could seize if he wished to put the city to expense. Demosthenes, however, thought that this place had advantages over any other; not only was there a harbour close by, but also the Messenians, who originally owned this land and spoke the same dialect as the Lacedaemonians, would do them the greatest injury if they made this place their base of operations, and would at the same time be a trustworthy garrison of it.
But Demosthenes could not win either the generals or the soldiers to his view, nor yet the commanders of divisions to whom he later communicated his plan; the army, therefore, since the weather was unfavourable for sailing, did nothing. But at length the soldiers themselves, having nothing to do, were seized with the impulse to station themselves around the place and fortify it.
So they set their hands to this task and went to work; they had no iron tools for working stone, but picked up stones and put them together just as they happened to fit; and where mortar was needed, for want of hods, they carried it on their backs, bending over in such a way as would make it stay on best, and clasping both hands behind them to prevent it from falling off.
And in every way they made haste that they might complete the fortification of the most vulnerable points before the Lacedaemonians came out against them; for the greater part of the place was so strong by nature that it had no need of a wall.
As for the Lacedaemonians, they happened to be celebrating a festival when they got word of the undertaking, and made light of it, thinking that the Athenians would not await their attack when they got ready to take the field, or, if they should, that they could easily take the place by force;
and the fact also that their army was still in Attica had something to do with their delay. The Athenians in six days completed the wall on the side toward the land and at such other points as most needed it, and left Demosthenes there with five ships to defend it; they then took the main body of the fleet and hastened on their voyage to Corcyra and Sicily.
But the Peloponnesians who were in Attica, when they heard that Pylos had been occupied, returned home in haste; for King Agis and the Lacedaemonians thought that the Athenian operations at Pylos were a matter of deep concern to them. And at the same time, since they had made their invasion early in the season when the grain was still green, most of themEach division had its own commissariat, and some were better provisioned than the main body. Classen explains, “were short of food for so large an army” (τοῖς πολλοῖς). were short of food, and bad weather, which came on with storms of greater violence than was to be expected so late in the spring, distressed the army.
Consequently there were many reasons why they hastened their retirement from Attica and made this the shortest of their invasions; for they remained there only fifteen days.
About the same time Simonides, an Athenian general, getting together a few Athenians from the garrisons in Thrace and a large force from the allies in that neighbourhood, got, by the treachery of its inhabitants, possession of Eion in Thrace, a colony of the Mendaeans and hostile to Athens. But succour came promptly from the Chalcidians and the Bottiaeans and he was driven out with the loss of many of his soldiers.
On the return of the Peloponnesians from Attica, the Spartans themselves and the Perioeci who were in the neighbourhood of Pylos at once came to its relief; but the other Lacedaemonians were slower in coming, since they had just got back from another campaign.
Word was also sent round to the states of the Peloponnesus, summoning them to come to the relief of Pylos as quickly as possible, and also to the sixty ships that were at Corcyra.cf. 4.2.3. These were hauled across the Leucadian isthmus, and without being discovered by the Attic ships, which were now at Zacynthus, reached Pylos, where their land forces had already arrived.
But before the Peloponnesian fleet had yet reached Pylos, Demosthenes managed to send out secretly ahead of them two ships which were to notify Eurymedon and the Athenian fleet at Zacynthus to come at once to his aid, as the place was in danger. And so the fleet proceeded in haste in compliance with Demosthenes' summons;
meanwhile, however, the Lacedaemonians were busy with their preparations to attack the fortification both by land and by sea, and they thought that they would have no difficulty in capturing a structure which had been built hastily and was occupied by only a few men.
But since they expected the Athenian fleet to arrive soon from Zacynthus, it was their intention, in case they should fail to take the place before these came, to block up the entrances to the harbour and thus make it impossible for the Athenians to anchor inside and blockade them. Now the island called Sphacteria stretches along the mainland, lying quite close to it, and thus makes the harbour safe and the entrances to it narrow;
on one side, opposite the Athenian fortifications and Pylos, there is only room for two ships to pass through, on the other side, next to the other part of the mainland, there is room for eight or nine.The harbour of Pylos is regarded by Classen and nearly all recent commentators as identical with the modern Bay of Navarino, the ἔσπλοι τοῦ λιμέμος being the entrances north and south of Sphacteria or Sphagia. But the entrance to the harbour of Navarino south of Sphagia is now—and must have been in Thucydides' time—a channel more than three-quarters of a mile wide, and deep all the way across, so that it does not answer to Thucydides' description of a passage only wide enough to admit eight or nine triremes; rather, as Arnold says, “a hundred Greek ships might have found room to sail abreast quiet as easily as eight or nine.” Clearly, then, Thucydides could not have been personally acquainted with the scene, and was misinformed as to the breadth of the harbour's mouth, as Leake supposed. Or we must assume that the dimensions of the entrances mentioned by Thucydides were rather of those north and south of Coryphasium, the modern Palaeo-Kastro, and the “harbour” was not the Bay of Navarino, as Thucydides supposed, but the Lagoon or Lake of Osmyn Aga, north of the bay, and now cut off from it by a sandbar. This is the view of Grundy—who in August, 1895, spent fourteen days there making a survey—as to the lower entrance. The upper entrance, he thinks, was closed already in Thucydides' time, and the historian seems never to have apprehended that fact. Grundy's view as to the lagoon being the harbour meant by Thucydides is accepted by Steup, but he does not approve of Grundy's assumption that Thucydides, without personal knowledge of the region, following at different points reports of different informants, confused statements with reference to the harbour of Pylos and as to the bay as referring to one and the same. See Arnold in App. to Book IV. on Sphacteria; Grundy, “Investigation of the Topography of the Region of Sphacteria and Pylos,” in Journal of Hellen. Studies, xvi. 1-54; Steup, App. on IV. The whole island was covered with timber and, since it was uninhabited, had no roads, its length being somewhere near fifteen stadia. Now it was the intention of the Lacedaemonians to close up the entrances tight by means of ships placed with their prows outward;
and as for the island, since they were afraid that the Athenians would use it as a base for carrying on the war against them, they conveyed some hoplites across, at the same time posting others along the mainland.
By these measures, they thought, the Athenians would find not only the island hostile to them, but also the mainland, since this afforded no landing-place; for there were no harbours along the shore of Pylos itself outside the entrance,ie., north of the entrance, on the western side. on the side toward the sea, and therefore the Athenians would have no base from which they could aid their countrymen. Consequently the Lacedaemonians believed that, without running the risk of a battle at sea, they could probably reduce the place by siege, since it had been occupied on short notice and was not supplied with provisions.
As soon as they reached this conclusion they proceeded to convey the hoplites over to the island, drafting them by lot from all the companies. Several detachments had before this time crossed over, one group relieving another; the last to do so—and this is the force that was captured—numbering four hundred and twenty, besides the Helots who accompanied them, and they were under the command of Epitadas son of Molobrus.
Meanwhile Demosthenes also, seeing that the Lacedaemonians intended to attack him by sea and by land at the same time, set about making his preparations. He drew ashore, close up under the fortification, the triremesOnly three: five had been left him (4.5.2), but two of these he had sent to warn the squadron at Zacynthus. remaining to him out of those which had been left in his charge and enclosed them in a stockade; he then armed their crews with shields—poor ones. indeed, most of which were made of plaited willow; for it was not possible to procure arms in an uninhabited country, and such as they had they took from a thirty-oared privateer and a light boat belonging to some Messenians who chanced to come along, and included among them about forty hoplites, whom Demosthenes used along with the rest.
He then posted the greater part of his troops, the unarmed as well as the armed, at the best fortified and strongest points of the place, on the side toward the mainland, giving them orders to ward off the enemy's infantry if it should attack. But he himself selected from the whole body of his troops sixty hoplites and a few archers, and with them sallied forth from the fort to the point on the seashore where he thought that the enemy would be most likely to attempt a landing. The ground, indeed, was difficult of access and rocky where it faced the sea, yet since the Athenian wall was weakest at this place the enemy would, he thought, be only too eager to make an assault there;
in fact the Athenians themselves had left their fortification weak at this spot merely because they never expected to be defeated at sea, and Demosthenes knew that if the enemy could force a landing there the place could be taken.
Accordingly he posted his hoplites at this point, taking them to the very brink of the sea, determined to keep the enemy off if he could; and then he exhorted them as follows:
“Soldiers, my comrades in this present hazard, let no one of you at such a time of necessity seek to prove his keenness of wit by calculating the full extent of the danger that encompasses us; let him rather come to grips with the enemy in a spirit of unreflecting confidence that he will survive even these perils. For whenever it has come, as now with us, to a case of necessity, where there is no room for reflection, what is needed is to accept the hazard with the least possible delay.
However, as I see the matter, the odds are on our side, if we are resolved to stand our ground and are not so terrified by their numbers as to sacrifice the advantages we possess.
As regards the position, the difficulty of approach I regard as in our favour, since if we stand firm that becomes a support, but once we give way, even though the ground be rugged it will be easy of access when there is none to resist; and we shall then find the enemy more formidable, since it will be no easy matter for them to turn and retreat, if they should be hard-pressed by us; for though very easily repelled while on board their ships, when once they have landed they are on an equal footing with us.
And, as regards their numbers, we need have no very great fear; for however numerous they are, they will have to fight in small detachments on account of the difficulty of bringing their ships to shore. And we have not to deal with an army, which, though superior in numbers, is fighting on land under like conditions with ourselves, but fighting on ships, and these require many favouring circumstances on the sea.c.g. a fair wind, space for manoeuvring, etc.
I therefore consider that their disadvantages counterbalance our inferiority in point of numbers. At the same time I call now upon you, who are Athenians and know by experience that it is impossible to force a landing from ships against an enemy on shore, if the latter but stand their ground and do not give way through fear of the splashing oars and of the awe-inspiring sight of ships bearing down upon them—I call upon you, in your turn to stand your ground, and, warding off the foe at the very water's edge, to save both yourselves and the stronghold.”
Thus encouraged by Demosthenes, the Athenians became yet more confident and going still nearer the water took up their position at the very brink of the sea.
The Lacedaemonians, on the other hand, moved forward, and attacked the fortification at the same time with their land-army and with their ships, of which there were forty-three, the admiral in command of them being Thrasymelidas son of Cratesicles, a Spartan. And he attacked just where Demosthenes expected.
The Athenians, on their part, proceeded to defend themselves in both directions, by land and by sea; but the enemy, dividing their ships into small detachments, because it was impossible for a larger number to approach the shore, and resting by turns, kept charging upon the Athenians, showing no lack of zeal and cheering each other on, in the hope that they might force the enemy back and take the fortification.