The battle of Delium was the last gasp of a failed Athenian offensive into the neighboring state of Boeotia, the region surrounding the ancient city of Thebes. The fighting itself broke out near the sanctuary of Delium in 424 B.C., between the phalanxes of Athens and the Theban confederacy in a treeless, open plain, only a few thousand yards from the vaguely demarcated border between Attica and Boeotia. The ancient site is probably near the lovely modern hamlet of Dilesi, once rolling hills of grainfields by the Euboean Sea, but now a growing cluster of seaside vacation homes that serve as weekend retreats for harried Athenians.
There were always long-simmering disputes over the serpentine and mountainous boundary. This traditional Boeotian-Athenian enmity was fueled also by Thebes’s past role during the Persian Wars. Nearly sixty years earlier she had led her Boeotian confederacy shoulder-to-shoulder with the Medes against her fellow Greeks. Indeed, at the Panhellenic victory over the Persians at the battle of Plataea (479 B.C.)—a few miles from Delium—the Athenians on the left wing of the Greek allied phalanx had plunged bitterly into the Theban turncoats and swept them in retreat along with their foreign overlords. In the bitter aftermath of the Theban humiliation during the Persian Wars (490–79 B.C.), raids and plundering expeditions by both neighbors continued throughout the fifth century B.C. as a series of stone towers and forts along their border was frequently captured, demolished, and rebuilt. Boeotia and Athens shared a history similar to France and Germany during much of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In the thirty years since the Persian Wars (479–47 B.C.), control of Boeotia had been decided on at least three occasions in its territory through dramatic pitched battles on the plains at Tanagra (457 B.C.), Oenophyta (457 B.C.), and Coronea (447 B.C.)—Athens first losing, then gaining, and finally losing for good its reign over her neighbor’s land in the space of a few hours over the decade. Boeotians had grown quite accustomed to the efforts of Athenian imperialists to cross the borders in order to spread radical democracy among their own rural satellite villages.
But in 424 B.C. the battle was purportedly more than an outward fight over a few acres or even control over Boeotia itself. Rather, in the seventh year of her exhausting twenty-seven-year war with Sparta, now a major effort ensued by Athens to eliminate her “northern” front with Thebes so she might turn her attention southward exclusively to her Peloponnesian enemies. Only with a neutralized and largely democratic Boeotian confederacy would Spartan ravagers be prevented from marching on through Attica to rest in Boeotia. If the Athenians won a major battle inside Boeotia, raiding across the border would cease, and Athens might gain valuable Confederate troops from their newly pacified northern neighbors.
A few other factors fueled the Boeotian-Athenian hatred. Seven years earlier (431 B.C.), Thebes’s unprovoked and unsuccessful nighttime attack on the nearby small village of Plataea, an Athenian protectorate, had marked the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. Add to these considerations that Thebes and her Boeotian confederacy were governed by a moderate oligarchy and so were despised by the democrats at Athens. And in general Boeotians were habitually lampooned on the Athenian stage—backward rustics in comedy, and unbalanced inbred killers of Greek tragedy. Indeed, Boeotians shared a Panhellenic reputation as “pigs,” rustic dullards who were both strong and stupid. For the Athenians the key to fighting these hardy farmers was to avoid a head-on collision of just the sort that took place at Delium. Later the historian Diodorus recorded that much of the Athenian defeat at Delium could be simply explained by “the superior bodily strength of Thebans.”
How did the Athenians in late 424 B.C. end up at the obscure valley near Delium in an unwise hoplite fight against such formidable people? To invade Boeotia, the Athenians, in the spirit of the volatile war making of the Peloponnesian War, had devised an overly ambitious plan of combined naval and infantry maneuvers to deploy troops at the front and rear of the enemy—an impractical scheme, and one, like her other similar fiascoes to come at Amphipolis (422 B.C.) and Sicily (415–13 B.C.), doomed to failure given the poor logistics, communications, and general absence of secrecy among ancient militaries. The Athenian general Demosthenes had sailed three months earlier, intending to raise a democratic insurrection through the southern Boeotian countryside by an unexpected amphibious landing. Then, aided by partisans, he was in theory to move east toward Delium on the very day Hippocrates and his Athenian hoplites marched northward to the border. The outnumbered Boeotian army would scatter between the pincers and the surrounding countryside arise in open revolt. Or so it was thought.
Victory was possible only if the superior infantry forces of the Boeotians would face two simultaneously advancing Athenian armies. But unfortunately Demosthenes’ naval assault to the west at the Boeotian town Siphae was timed too early. Once his plans were betrayed to the Boeotians, he was of little value in drawing off opposition from the Athenian land troops marching up from the south. Diodorus says that Demosthenes then sailed away “without accomplishing anything.” In fact, he had ensured by his failure that a ragtag Athenian army of reservists would meet by themselves the finest infantrymen in Greece.
At first it seemed that there would be no fighting at all. On the news that Demosthenes had failed, the rather motley army of mostly older Athenians and foreigners merely trudged to the border to occupy the sanctuary of Apollo at Delium. The worst they had done was to cut down surrounding vineyards and in general cannibalize nearby farmhouses for the flotsam and jetsam of the barricade. This Athenian occupation and dismantling of the temple at Delium, in addition to the fouling of sacred waters and grounds of the precinct, was a clear violation of the unwritten “laws of the Greeks,” which even in times of war purportedly protected the Panhellenic sanctuaries. But like so many Greek protocols, religious forbearance was continually eroding in the escalating barbarity of the Peloponnesian War. By war’s end the killing of prisoners, the massacre of civilians, and the defilement of sanctuaries were commonplace on both sides.
Consequently, in lieu of his intended but failed grandiose invasion of Boeotia, the Athenian general Hippocrates scaled down his plans considerably. In the end, after a two-day march out of Athens, he left only a small garrison at Delium. There is an aura of the carnival about Hippocrates’ thirty-five-mile march out to Delium, reminiscent of the Union spectacle at First Bull Run. The Athenian levée en masse was an odd, unorganized, and motley group—frontline infantry bolstered by resident aliens, the poor, and the elderly. Later accounts suggest that there may have been well more than 20,000 Athenians at Delium, although Thucydides recorded that only 7,000 were hoplite infantrymen. The past idea that the hoplite phalanx of the Greek city-states reflected the exclusive agrarian makeup of the citizenry was no longer true at Athens. Her navy, empire, foreign trade, and radical democracy ensured that native-born farmers of Attica were not a majority of the citizens, much less entrusted with the exclusive defense of the polis. Add to that seven years of war, five enemy invasions of Attica, and the great plague of 431–26 B.C. (nothing, says Thucydides, so weakened the power of Athens), and it is remarkable that Hippocrates could field this second force at all.
With their own naval counterparts incommunicado and now sailing home, the overblown plans of the Athenians under Hippocrates immediately fizzled. Reduced to a little ravaging of the countryside, Hippocrates left a contingent at the now-garrisoned Delium and sheepishly took his throng a few thousand yards back toward Attica. In fact, when the main Theban army finally caught up to him, some of the Athenians were already nearly safe in their native Attica and about ready to disband. Under the normal protocols of Greek warfare, the crisis was now apparently over. The battle should not have been fought in the obscure valley near the sanctuary.
Most of the eleven boeotarchs—elected Boeotian generals of the state confederacy—had seen no reason to fight. These leaders, faithful to past conservative tradition, likewise urged demobilization of the army and a prompt return to their nearby villages. But a single boeotarch resisted—the Theban Pagondas, son of one Aeolidas, a gifted commander in his sixties and no doubt a veteran of the Theban triumph twenty-three years earlier at Coronea (447 B.C.). Through sheer force of personality and fiery speeches to the assembled rank and file, he convinced his colleagues to recommit the entire army and pursue the Athenians. Quite remarkably they were won over and agreed immediately to break camp and march after the Athenians.
Who was this strange man who alone had ensured that the battle at Delium was fought? We know almost nothing of him, except his mention as a well-bred youth in an ode of praise to his family by the Boeotian lyric poet Pindar (born 518 B.C.). Perhaps his noble birth and experience in the liberation of Boeotia one-quarter century earlier had given him the clout necessary to galvanize his reluctant colleagues. Later we shall see that his blueprint for the Theban attack at Delium was a landmark breakthrough in the science of tactics, suggesting a prior military precocity that remains shrouded to history. In any case, Pagondas’s ardor and military ingenuity are good reminders that history is not merely the faceless story of larger economic and social currents at work that alone determine man’s fate. Gifted individuals do count and by their very brazenness prove we are not pawns of forces beyond our control. In some sense the entire battle of Delium was fought because of a single old man’s anger—and won because of his tactical acumen.
Such unusual initiative, nevertheless, posed psychological problems for defensive-minded troops of classical Greek armies. When pressed, hoplites battled superbly to protect their own land, but less so when attacking those of others. Sensitive to this reality that his men were no longer to defend Boeotia but were now on the offensive against an army soon to be on the opposite side of the border, Pagondas sought to reassure his men as the autumn afternoon waned. Since his agrarians had now left their defensive posture, Pagondas addressed bluntly the problem of morale:
Boeotians! The notion that we should not give battle to the Athenians, unless we catch them right in Boeotia, is one that none of your generals should have entertained. It was to ravage Boeotia that the Athenians crossed our frontier and built a fort in our territory. Therefore they are enemies of ours. . . . Between neighbors in general, freedom means simply the will to hold one’s own. And with men such as these Athenians on our border, who are trying to enslave near and far alike, how can we not fight it out to the bitter end?
In perhaps the first recorded defense of the strategy of preemption—of attacking an enemy that posed a long-term rather than immediate threat—Pagondas also set down the general principles of forward defense that have been enshrined in Western military thought from Vegetius to President Kennedy’s speech urging a blockade of Cuba and the Bush administration’s argument to strike at Iraq in early 2003. “Furthermore,” Pagondas went on, “those who in confidence of their strength have a habit of attacking their neighbors, as the Athenians are now doing, are emboldened to march out against an adversary who is keeping quiet and will only defend itself inside its own land; but they are less ready to take him on when he is willing to fight outside his borders, and if opportunity arises, to strike the first blow.”
Thucydides, who later may have heard parts of Pagondas’s speech from Boeotian veterans of the battle, was keenly aware of the advantage in convincing offensive troops that they were in fact on the defensive. He records a startlingly parallel prebattle harangue by the Athenian general Hippocrates, who attempted to convince the Athenians that they too were fighting on the border not so much to annex Boeotia as to defend Athens from the yearly incursions of Boeotian horsemen. So in the minutes before the battle commenced, both sides claimed that they were fighting reluctantly on the border for the sake of their home ground.
Pagondas concealed his Confederate forces behind a small hill, arranging the phalanx by Confederate villages. His own Thebans, of course, were on the honored right wing of the allied Boeotian battle line. After a second harangue, the Boeotians suddenly ran pell-mell from the slopes. They caught most of the Athenians off guard. Those surprised were still listening to the speech of Hippocrates. The entire battlefield at Delium of gently curving hills could momentarily hide troops in valleys and depressions. That may well explain why the Athenians had little idea that the enemy was near, much less had occupied a superior position. On both sides of the plain, large gullies prevented the cavalry and the substantial auxiliary forces on the extreme flanks of both armies from even meeting.
Caught unaware, the Athenians had few choices. It was either lumber uphill into the Theban mass or retreat—or, if to stay put, to be bowled over. After hearing the fiery speech of Hippocrates, the Athenians chose to charge ahead. Hippocrates may also have thought that the confined battlefield offered some advantages in limiting the use of the enemy’s feared horsemen, and he probably had no idea of the greater depth of the Theban right wing that was soon to smash his weak left. Thucydides’ description of the actual fighting is brief—less than three hundred words to be supplemented by a mere one hundred words from our only other extant source, the historian Diodorus of the Roman era. Despite the uphill run, the Athenian right wing nevertheless quickly cut down the Boeotian Confederates opposite. Here all along the Boeotian phalanx on the left, the allies fell back in face of the Athenian upward assault.
The unfortunate villagers of Thespiae on the extreme left of the Boeotian phalanx soon were at the point of annihilation by the Athenians under Hippocrates. The allied contingents at their side had wisely, but less courageously, backed off from the charging Athenians. This abandonment sealed the fate of the Thespians, ensuring now that they would be cut off, detached from the main phalanx, encircled, and then butchered in toto.
Only confusion saved the Boeotian army as a whole, as the victorious Athenians mistakenly began attacking themselves—like some enormous renegade missile about to return course to obliterate its launch crew. In their bloodlust of butchering the enemy Thespians, the elated Athenians at the cutting edge of the phalanx now bizarrely began to shuffle in the wrong direction and collide with their own advancing troops from the rear. Before these enraged spearmen of the phalanx could be pulled apart, dozens must have been impaled by their own brothers, fathers, and friends. “Some of the Athenians,” Thucydides dryly notes of this misadventure, “becoming confused because of the encirclement mistook and killed one another.”
Such tragic mishaps are, of course, common in the modern mechanized warfare of explosives, internal combustion engines, and automatic weapons. Killing is accomplished anonymously across great distances, accomplished almost by mere thought and intent without the need of either physical proximity or muscular strength. A mere flick of the trigger finger can kill from afar unseen thousands where once “the work of war,” to use Homer’s words, was drudgery requiring hours to butcher a few hundred foes face-to-face. During the Cobra offensive of July 1944, shortly after the Normandy landings, American B-17s inadvertently bombed and killed in seconds over 135 Americans, in addition to wounding more than 500. Stonewall Jackson himself was fatally wounded by his own men in the aftermath of the Confederate victory at Chancellorsville (1863). Shiloh (1862) saw dozens of instances where Southerners fired upon each other in the dense thickets. Such examples are understandable and could be repeated thousands of times in the centuries—most recently during the war in Iraq in spring 2003—since the spread of gunpowder weapons in the fifteenth century. But how was accidental killing possible in the preindustrial world of classical antiquity, when men battled not with triggers and buttons, but during the day, face-to-face, and with handheld edged weapons? Cannot a man easily identify his foe a few inches away before he plunges a spear into his groin?
Not always. The apparent cause of the Athenians’ calamitous blunder was the erosion of almost all sense perception during the melee of battle that allowed blood-drunk hoplites in column to stab blindly at anything at their front. When the fighting broke out, it was nearly dusk on the Boeotian border. Athenian hoplites, like all Greek infantrymen, wore ponderous helmets. At least some had on the old-fashioned Corinthian type with mere slits in the bronze plate for the eyes—and no cutouts at all for the ears. Thousands of heavily armed men on both sides of the battle line were also kicking up the early autumn dust of the rolling plains around Delium, no differently from the blinding clouds that follow a herd of hoofed animals on the run. Within minutes after the initial charge, no one—Athenian or Boeotian—could see much of anything at all. Thucydides remarked that under the best of conditions most hoplites had no idea of the fighting anywhere but in their own immediate vicinity. The tragedian Euripides a few months after the fighting at Delium has his character Theseus also lament of Greek infantry battle, “When a man stands face to face with the enemy, he is scarcely able to see what he needs to see.” No one saw much of anything at Delium.
Nor could the combatants hear. The cacophony of thousands of wood shields banging against iron spear points, metal weapons in turn hitting bronze armor, wood spear shafts rattling on wood shields, mixed with the war cries of killers and their victims sobbing in extremis only added to the disorientation of the helmeted and heavily armed infantrymen. Euripides called all that “the great clouds of dust that reach the heavens”—heavy armament, the shock of massed columns colliding with like formations, and the sheer frenzy of killing. All explain why at the moment of greatest success the Athenian right wing began to encircle their Boeotian enemies, then gradually completed their turn back into their own advancing ranks.
Near these doomed Thespians, the other more self-interested Boeotian allies of the left and center had no easy retreat from the Athenians. They too were confused and in disorder prior to the Athenian uphill charge: some trying to flee, others attempting to fight and hang on. We should imagine that nearly all the five hundred Boeotian dead infantrymen of the battle were the surrounded Thespians or the trampled and smashed corpses of their disoriented and stampeding neighbors. Diodorus says at this point the Athenian right wing “slew great numbers” of the enemy.
What of Pagondas and his selected phalanx of Thebans a thousand yards away on the right wing? “Gradually at first,” Thucydides says, they pushed the Athenian left downhill, clearing the battlefield through the advantage of favorable terrain and superior muscle. Their success was also due to the superior physical strength of the Theban hoplites. Only when the Thespian slaughter on his own left horn threatened to pour Athenian hoplites to the rear did Pagondas dispatch a reserve of cavalry to the left to come up over the hill to the rear of the victorious Athenians.
For thinking men at the moment of their victory, the mere appearance of two companies of horsemen need not have caused much alarm—radical as was the use of both reserves and integrated cavalry forces at this time. Armor-clad spearmen in column could always withstand wealthy aristocrats perched on ponies without stirrups. But to the victorious and exhausted Athenians, the idea that cavalry would play a decisive role in phalanx battle was startling—even more so the notion that such fresh troops on the horizon were still uncommitted and appearing seemingly out of nowhere over the hill. Busy spearing Thespians, flush with the revelation that the battle was won, the Athenians suddenly conjured up an entirely new army—and thus no rest for their labors, however heretofore successful. And so they simply disintegrated.
At this juncture, Pagondas on the Theban right took his cue, pressed on, and completed the destruction of the Athenian line before him. Soon the entire Athenian army was “in panic”—its once victorious and savage right wing now nonexistent, the left wearied, beaten down, and fragmented by the pressure of the accumulated shields of Pagondas’s mass. All took off at a run to the rear for nearby Mount Parnes, the fortified sanctuary at Delium proper, the safety of Athenian ships, or the woods in the Oropus along the border in Attica. Some opportunistic Locrian horsemen arrived for the spoils and now joined the Boeotian predators in an open-ended killing spree.
Somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 warriors fought at Delium, making it the largest battle of the so-called Archidamian War (431–421 B.C.), which marked the first decade of fighting of the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. For all its obscurity, Delium was one of the larger hoplite clashes in classical Greek history—and the first large one between Greek states for which we have an adequate historical account. Besides the 7,000 hoplites in each army, thousands more lightly armed troops and ad hoc skirmishers were present on the Athenian side and probably far more numerous than those present among the Boeotians (10,000+?). In any case, we know from our ancient sources that about 500 Theban hoplites together with 1,000 Athenian heavy infantrymen and an unknown but “great” number of lightly armed Athenians perished.
The pursuit of the Athenians from the battlefield must have gone on for much of the early evening until darkness and rough terrain put an end to the slaughter. Customarily after Greek hoplite battles, the victors immediately erected a trophy from the spoils of the battlefield—baggage and equipment abandoned by the defeated in addition to arms and armor stripped from the dead. Then, with acknowledgment of defeat, both sides exchanged the corpses for proper burial. The dispute was thus considered settled through occupation of the battlefield by the victors and the withdrawal of the defeated.
But at Delium the Boeotians soon learned that at least a few of the terrified Athenian fugitives had retreated to the garrison at Delium. Not only did the defeated occupy Boeotian ground, but they were ensconced in a precinct sacred to Apollo. Faced with this anomaly in traditional hoplite battle—the conquered were not entirely willing to sulk home in acknowledgment of their loss—the Boeotians themselves decided to hold the Athenian dead “hostage” until the sanctuary at Delium was completely cleared of its garrison.
After seventeen days in the open air most of the corpses were a putrid mess. In Euripides’ tragedy The Suppliants, which was inspired by Delium, the recovered bodies from Thebes were described as “bitter to behold.” Thucydides was struck by such blasphemy shown on both sides—a good example of the larger theme in his history that war broke down traditional custom and soon created a new barbarity in Hellenic relations—and thus gave a moving description of the formal Athenian reply to the Boeotian demand to exit the sanctuary: