Book 3, Chapter 11 — Year of the War—Campaigns of Demosthenes in Western Greece—Ruin of Ambracia
Demosthenes loses an army in the mountains of Aetolia, then rebuilds his reputation in a single afternoon at Olpae.
Summary
The Aetolian disaster is one of the early war's sharpest lessons about terrain and the limits of conventional tactics. Demosthenes, operating in western Greece without his board of generals' authorization, conceived an ambitious plan to attack Boeotia through the interior — marching overland through Aetolia, gathering local allies, emerging to threaten Boeotia from the west while Athenian forces attacked from the east. The plan assumed Aetolian acquiescence or at least passivity. The Aetolians offered neither. They were hill fighters, armed with javelins, expert in the broken wooded terrain of their country, and they refused pitched battle while cutting off the Athenians at every turn. When the Athenians' guide was killed and the column lost its way in dense forest, the Aetolians used fire and arrows from the heights. The rout killed a third of the force.
Demosthenes did not return to Athens. Knowing the failure would lead to prosecution, he remained in the west and spent the autumn and winter rebuilding his relationships with the Acarnanian cities. When the opportunity came — a large Ambraciot and Peloponnesian force moving through Acarnania — he set an ambush in the narrow pass at Olpae. The battle that followed was a tactical masterpiece: the Ambraciot line, extending beyond the Peloponnesian center, was taken in flank and rear while the center held. The majority of the Ambraciot force was destroyed; the Peloponnesian officers escaped under a secret agreement with Demosthenes that, when its terms became public, caused the allies to suspect each other of treachery.
The destruction of Ambracia — or rather the destruction of Ambracia's army, since the city itself was not taken — was so comprehensive that Thucydides provides one of his rare editorial comments: in his judgment, no city suffered as great a disaster in proportion to its population during the entire war. He reports that when the Acarnanians captured the additional contingent that was marching to reinforce the original force — which had already been destroyed — and the messenger arrived from the city to ask about them, he was shown the captured armour and could not believe so many Ambracians were dead. When convinced, the generals refused to show the report to the Acarnanian assembly, for fear that the assembly, seeing how completely Ambracia was now defenseless, would vote to destroy it entirely.
- Book 1Book 1 opens not with battle but with argument.
- Book 1The immediate causes of the war begin with Epidamnus — a small colony on the Adriatic whose civil strife triggers a chain of interventions that pulls Corinth against Corcyra and Corcyra toward Athens.
- Book 1The congress at Lacedaemon is the Peloponnesian War's diplomatic overture.
- Book 1The Pentecontaetia — the fifty years between the Persian Wars and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War — is Thucydides's compressed account of how Athens turned from war-leader to empire.
- Book 1Chapter 5 is the last diplomatic chapter before war breaks out.
- Book 2The war formally begins with the Theban attack on Plataea.
- Book 2The plague of Athens is the History's most famous sustained passage outside the Funeral Oration.
- Book 2Chapter 8 covers the third year of the war across multiple theatres.
- Book 3Book 3 opens with the revolt of Mytilene, the largest and most strategically significant of the Athenian allied cities.
- Book 3Two episodes in Book 3's second half illustrate what civil and inter-state war does to the norms that normally govern violence.
- Book 3Chapter 11 follows the Athenian general Demosthenes through a remarkable arc: from the catastrophic defeat in Aetolia, where he led light-armed Athenian troops into wooded hill country they were utterly unequipped to fight in and lost the greater part of them, to the brilliant campaign in Acarnania, where he used his knowledge of irregular warfare, learned at severe cost, to ambush and nearly annihilate a Peloponnesian and Ambraciot force.
- Book 4The Pylos campaign is the tactical and psychological turning point of the war's first decade.
- Book 4Chapter 13 moves across multiple theatres in the war's seventh and eighth years.
- Book 4Book 4's final chapter belongs to Brasidas — the one Spartan commander who combined military brilliance with political intelligence, the qualities Sparta as an institution consistently undervalued.
- Book 5The tenth year of the war produces one of history's more striking coincidences of elimination.
- Book 5The peace after Cleon and Brasidas is a peace in name only.
- Book 5The Melian Dialogue is ten pages in most editions and has been discussed for two and a half thousand years.
- Book 6Book 6 opens with the debate and vote on the Sicilian Expedition — one of the History's great scenes of collective irrationality.
- Book 6While the Athenian expedition crosses the sea, Syracuse holds its own debate about whether to believe the threat.
- Book 6With Alcibiades gone and Lamachus increasingly the operational commander, the Athenian force finally moves seriously against Syracuse in the expedition's second year.
- Book 7Book 7 opens with the Athenian position deteriorating on every front simultaneously.
- Book 7Demosthenes arrives with the reinforcements and immediately does what Nicias had been unable to do: he assesses the situation, decides on a bold stroke, and acts.
- Book 7Book 7's final chapters are the most sustained tragic narrative in classical literature.
- Book 8Book 8 opens with Athens after Sicily — a city that could not believe what it had done to itself, then could not stop the consequences.
- Book 8Chapter 25 covers one of the strangest episodes in Athenian history: the oligarchic revolution of 411 BCE, in which a conspiracy of four hundred men overthrows the Athenian democracy at the city's moment of maximum strategic vulnerability.
- Book 8The History's final chapter covers the collapse of the Four Hundred, the restoration of a modified democracy in Athens, the recall and rehabilitation of Alcibiades, and the Athenian naval victory at Cynossema — a victory that demonstrates Athens's ability to recover even now.