CHAPTER 3
The Culture of Delium,
November 424 B.C.
The Battle
Imagine a rolling plain of dry grain stubble, extending for not more than a mile before being cut off by ditches on both sides. Crowd fifty thousand men on it—some nearly naked, others weighed down with more then sixty pounds of arms and armor. Have them mass into two huge armies and then collide at a run with edged iron weapons—all striving to kill one another through their collective muscular strength at stabbing and pushing. Then end the entire sordid business in about an hour—with over two thousand corpses littering the ground in a trail of blood and entrails for a mile. Finally, simply forget about the afternoon’s carnage and assume it never occurred at all.
The battle of Delium is just that—a gory nonevent. At best it is known only as one of many such hoplite bloodbaths of the past, in which thousands of Greek infantrymen lined up to spear the enemy, push the opposing phalanx off the field of battle, claim victory, and then return home. Most were obscure and sometimes stupid fights in far-off places of a distant age, of little interest or meaning in the grand sweep of history, rarely prominent even in the story of Greece, and entirely without any relevance for the lives of Americans today. After all, not more than a few thousand out of some 300 million Americans know what or where Delium is.
Hoplite fights in ancient Greece are ostensibly no more or less worthy of remembrance than the thousands of horrific battles of the pre-Columbian Inca or Aztec empires, whose generals, soldiers, and dead are of no import to the cruel laws of history, lost entirely to subsequent generations when there is not a Herodotus or Bernal Díaz del Castillo to write what he saw or heard. Thus most of the large Greek battles such as Mantinea (418 B.C.), Nemea (394 B.C.), or Delium, while important in the shifting balance of power of the classical city-states, were often not landmark historical events. They were nothing like Salamis (480 B.C.) that saved Greece from the Persians and prompted a play from Aeschylus. The Athenian disaster at Sicily (415–13 B.C.) wrecked the Athenian empire and was fodder for Thucydides’ observations of human folly. And Philip II’s victory at Chaeronea (338 B.C.) ended the free and autonomous Greek city-state and led to the end of Demosthenes’ career.
When the defeated Athenians trudged home, the neighboring state of Boeotia (pronounced “Beosha”) was as before—oligarchic and still free from the Athenian empire. There was not even the drama of Spartan militarism pitted against the liberalism of Athens that illuminated other battles of the latter fifth century. The Peloponnesian War itself was not shortened by the Athenian debacle, or perhaps even lengthened because of the Theban triumph. An increasingly beleaguered Athens would continue to be plagued by enemies north and south, and a victorious Thebes would mount no grand invasion of Attica to follow up its victory at Delium below the walls of Athens. Perhaps only an Athenian victory might have had any significance in the war, knocking Boeotia out of the conflict—as the general Hippocrates promised his troops in the moments before the battle—and thereby lessening the odds of an eventual Spartan victory.
No great generals of antiquity—a Themistocles, Pericles, Epaminondas, or Alexander—fought at Delium. Hippocrates and Pagondas are scarcely known outside of Thucydides’ brief mention of their respective commands for a day at the battle. Indeed, they vanish from his history as abruptly as they appear for their brief day. Even the tally of the dead was insignificant in comparison, say, to the nearly forty thousand Athenian casualties a decade later at Sicily (415–13 B.C.).
Nor is Delium near either a great city or an important road. Unlike the sites of many key battles, it had no intrinsic strategic value—no geographical importance of any kind. It is not a key pass like Thermopylae, which was fought over for twenty-five hundred years from the Persian Wars to World War II. Delium was not the natural meeting ground of great cultures, like Adrianople at the nexus of major rivers and the site of fifteen major engagements since Roman times, a city that guarded access to the Black Sea, southern Europe, and the Mediterranean and often seen as the demarcation line between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam. The landscape of Delium is not like the great battlefield of Chaeronea a few miles to the north, the critical bottleneck that opened onto the great plain of Boeotia and saw some of the greatest collisions of the classical, Roman, and medieval ages—and over the centuries with the likes of Philip II, Alexander the Great, Demosthenes, Sulla, and Mithradates on its soil.
There are no mute stone commemorations to the fight—no walls, castles, or even an occasional watchtower to be seen, no marble lion to mark the spot where the poor Thespians were slaughtered, no limestone plinth to memorialize the dusk run of the panicked Athenians. It is a hard battlefield to find today. Nature, the great leveler of the power of armies, played no macabre role at the battle: we are not horrified by the cruel seas of a Salamis (480 B.C.) that swallowed thousands of wrecked Persian seamen, or the horrible cold that froze entire armies at Stalingrad (1942–43). There was not even the horror of Okinawa’s (1945) or Shiloh’s mud (1862). Delium was mostly warm, flat, and mild. The suspense of this battle is not augmented by men falling into the sea as happened at Thermopylae (480 B.C.) or slipping off peaks tending Hannibal’s elephants in the Alps (218 B.C.).
Yet what went on for about an hour or so in that nondescript plain changed the life of ancient Greece and the nature of European civilization itself—a Euripidean tragedy inspired, Socratic philosophy preserved and altered, an artistic renaissance launched, a community nearly erased, a monster at Athens spawned, and Western infantry tactics themselves created. The ripples of Delium have lapped even upon us, the unsuspecting, nearly twenty-five hundred years later—in ways that we can scarcely imagine.