Book 4, Chapter 12 — Seventh Year of the War—Occupation of Pylos—Surrender of the Spartan Army in Sphacteria
A Spartan garrison trapped on a small island surrenders — something Spartans were not supposed to be able to do.
Summary
The Pylos affair begins almost by accident. Demosthenes, sailing to Sicily with Eurymedon and Sophocles, argues for stopping at the promontory of Pylos on the Messenian coast. The generals refuse; a storm forces the stop anyway; the soldiers, bored and idle, begin fortifying the headland for lack of anything else to do. When the generals prepare to leave, Demosthenes stays with five ships. The Spartans, who happen to be holding their annual invasion of Attica nearby, march back in alarm and attack by land and sea. Demosthenes, outnumbered and provisioned for days rather than weeks, holds the headland with a personal courage that Thucydides records explicitly. The Athenian fleet arrives and defeats the Spartan ships, trapping the Spartan garrison on Sphacteria.
The Athenians reject Spartan peace terms — terms that, Thucydides implies, would have been highly favorable and strategically wise to accept. Cleon, the popular politician who had argued most forcefully against settlement, is then put in the impossible position of either backing down or taking the command himself. He backs down. Nicias, another general, calls his bluff and formally offers him the command. Cleon, trapped, accepts — and takes Demosthenes as his co-commander. Demosthenes had been preparing a new assault using light-armed troops and fire; Cleon arrived to find the plan ready. They won in less time than Cleon had promised, which was already impossibly short.
The surrender of the Spartan force at Sphacteria reverberates through the rest of the war. Sparta had built its entire military reputation on the claim — and it was more than a claim, it was a structural feature of the Spartan state's psychology — that Spartiates did not surrender. They died. The news that 120 of them had laid down their weapons was, Thucydides says, astonishing above all else to the Greeks. The prisoners were held in Athens and used as a diplomatic lever: any future Spartan invasion of Attica would result in their execution. For three years the threat worked, and Sparta did not invade. The logic of the war, which Pericles had always said favored Athens in a long contest, briefly looked as if it might be correct.
- 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.