Book 4, Chapter 14 — Eighth and Ninth Years of the War—Invasion of Boeotia—Fall of Amphipolis—Brilliant Successes of Brasidas
A Spartan general who talks instead of orders, wins instead of dies, detaches Athens's northern empire in a single campaign.
Summary
The failed Athenian attempt on Boeotia in 424 BCE sets the context for Brasidas's northern campaign. Athens had a carefully coordinated plan: multiple simultaneous attacks on Boeotia from different directions, combined with internal treachery by oligarchic cities' democratic factions. The plan required perfect coordination across multiple independent forces, and it failed in the way such plans almost always fail — one element moved early, giving the Boeotians time to concentrate. At the battle of Delion, the Athenian hoplites who should have been the plan's reserve force were defeated in open battle by the Boeotian army; Demosthenes's western force had already withdrawn; the plan collapsed.
Brasidas's march north in the same year, 424 BCE, is a strategic tour de force conducted with minimal resources. He takes seventeen hundred hoplites, including a thousand freed Helots, through Thessaly — negotiating passage from Thessalian cities that are formally neutral but inclined to Sparta — and arrives in Thrace. His method is not the Spartan method: he negotiates, promises, persuades, treats surrendered cities with conspicuous moderation. Allied cities that had been considering revolt see in Brasidas a Spartan general unlike any they had imagined. The offer of liberation from Athenian tribute, backed by a Spartan guarantee, proves sufficient in city after city. Torone, Acanthus, Stageira, Argilus fall to him in sequence.
Amphipolis is the strategic prize of the northern Aegean — a city controlling the bridge over the Strymon, the gold mines of the Pangaeum range, and the timber supply for Athenian shipbuilding. Thucydides held a naval command at Thasos, seven hours' sailing from Amphipolis, when Brasidas demanded the city's surrender. He sailed immediately on receiving the news, but arrived to find the city already surrendered. Brasidas had offered generous terms and moved faster than Thucydides's relief could. The historian records his own failure with his characteristic refusal to excuse himself. He was tried for the failure on his return and exiled. From the exile, Thucydides writes, he had the opportunity to observe both sides of the war — the benefit, as he puts it without visible irony, that his disgrace provided.
- 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.