(...) mindful of the ultimate experience with Persians, Athens and the other poleis were equipped with more robust walls. instead of evacuating the territory from the enemy raids, now they merely entrench the people behind the walls up to the storm to pass.
Against the Attic.
In the Peloponnese, Sparta systematically applied the strategy of scorched earth against the people who refused to recognize her supremacy. when conflict broke out with Athens, Sparta coludn't find a better strategy than this against the Attic. In the spring of 431 BC, in the first military season, king Archidamus led an army of 60.000 Peloponnesians, whom only 10% were Spartans, in the territory of Athens, with the intent to destroy and burn farms and crops. by doing this he thought the Athenians would opt for an open battle or, alternately, they would start a riot inside the city because of the famine Pelop.s were provoking. at least Archidamus was convinced that Athens would suffer a loss of credibility in front of the allies, showing that they were not able to defend themselves.
Victor Davis Hanson however admits that eradicating the permanent crops is more difficult than eliminating people, especially in a place where there was the highest concentration of olive trees and vines in Greece: between 5 and 10 milions, on a 3.000 sq km area, with almost 80 thousands hectares of cultivation. definitively too much, even for a considerable army like the one Archidamus led. if we add the extensive cultivation of wheat in the Aegean coasts and in Asia minor, that the powerful Athenian fleet was able to reach, we wonder why the Spartans pursued such a unefficient strategy.
for how big the army of the king was, it was always temporary: most of the warriors were peasants taken from their fields and anxious to return back home. Supplying a large number of warriors, then, was very difficult at the time, and it could last only few weeks; it was calculated, in fact, that only in the first ten years of the conflict the Pelop.s had remained only 150 days in Attic! paying them was another problem: the cost of five raids -considering a soldier earning a drachma per day- consisted in 750 talents, for Athens this was bigger than the annual taxation.
the hard life of the raider.
in addition, all the effort was a Sisyphean task: the Spartans had to come back to Attic 4 times again, in the following years; Thycidides observes that the fourth time they finally realized they were cutting the same vines and the same trees they cut on the first raid.Next, the grain in the field was hard to burn as it is nowadays, comments Hanson. Neither it was easy choose the right moment to act: in the fifth expedition the Spartans came too early, when the grain was too green to be consumed or burned.
regarding the houses, they were made up of mud and brick, so it was hard to burn them down, especially when the refugees took way all the flammable materials.
So as we know, after the first raid almost 2/3 of Attic were safe and sound; the following 4 expeditions were composed by half the men Archidamus led the first time (30.000 men). we must conclude that the king settles for provoking the Athenians more than causing real damage to them. substantially the Spartans, having the most powerful weapon, the phalanx, continued acting like in the Messenian wars and not like they were attacking a modern and well organized empire; as the Corinthians said:" your methods, compared to the Athenians, are outdated!".
Pericles was conscious he should wait till the Spartans got tired, and in 424 his rivals gave up the raiding; also because, in the meantime, a worse enemy appeared in Athens, this time not expected by the great statesman: the plague. the gathering of a huge amount of people inside the walls, in fact, had caused the outbreak of the plague and, in the end, the Spartans saw more dead Athenians than than they would have died of hunger or battle.
Despite his foresight, when it came the time to react, Pericles tried to pay back the Spartans with the same coin. Athens applied the same strategy to Megara, the peloponnesian access corridor to Attica, conducting 14 punitive expeditions against it,and obtaining the same meager results of opponents.Megarians barricaded themselves inside the walls and remained loyal to Sparta.then he changed strategy, adopting another type of incursions with the flee: the coup in the Peloponnese, which could range from a simple looting, with the taking of hostages along the coasts, to the opening of bridgeheads in enemy territory from which to launch raids against the villages and rural communities.it was the most successful of these expeditions, the taking of Sphacteria in 424 BC, to induce the Spartans of the king Agis to come back precipitously from Attica and make peace.so they hit civilians directly causing more deaths than pitched battle.
137 treacherous and sudden attacks have been counted, that the Athenians did mostly at night and using hoplites and light troops, stormtroopers and spoilers called peltasts (because they wear the pelta, a little crescent shield), psiloi (lightly armed warriors), gymnoi (naked), anaploi (without armour). during the time these military operations went stabilizing with the use of a hundred ships, the choice of vulnerable and little manned targets, the adoption of the hit and run tactics, without restraining in looting and devastation. it was sufficient to find ways to offset the costs of the campaign, that often necessitated the distance of 1300 km round trip, and to demoralize the enemy preventing the naval and land trade.
bridgeheads.
However, in the meantime the Spartans had understood that the opening of bridgehead in enemy territory and among its allies could be more productive to lead an army 240 km away from home. the same Agis, ten years after his ill-fated foray,returned to Attica to establish a garrison in Decelea, a stronghold just 20 km far from Athens, it offered the opportunity to make raids throughout the year,and to take shelter from the counterattacks of the Athenian cavalry. equally, however, continued to make the Athenians, multiplying their bases on the coast to encircle their rival. this situation caused a stalemate in Greece: the two States tried to prevail in naval and land battles; the sea, the element element on which the Athenians based their strength and their domination of the Delian League, Aegospotami was the site of the last battle for Athens.
The Pelop. wars.
preceded by a first war of the Peloponnese (460-445 BC), the one defined as the Second Pelop. war or the Great Pelop. war is actually the clash between two Great empires, Sparta and Athens, for supremacy. Between the Peloponnesian League, captained by Sparta, and the Delian League, the Athenian empire;its definition comes from a historical perspective peculiar to Athens.the hostilities were decllared in 432 BC. the first phase is called Archidamic war, from the king who ruled Sparta and made the first raids against Attica. he was also responsible for the first peace, but the Athenians broke up after only one year.then Nicias succeeded in making another peace, the Nician peace (421 BC), but this did not last longer than the other. then there was another peace as fragile as the previous ones.
the expansionist policy of the Athenians led them to a disastrous campaign against Syracuse that exposed them even more offensive to the enemy. Athens still found the funds to rebuild the fleet: from 410 BC the continuous victories led Sparta to ask for a truce. Athens denied but admiral Lysander crushed the entire Athenian fleet near Aegospotami allowing the Spartans to conduct a siege and conquer the city in 404 BC.