Book 2, Chapter 8 — Third Year of the War—Investment of Plataea—Naval Victories of Phormio—Thracian Irruption into Macedonia under Sitalces
A single Athenian admiral shows how audacity and formation can defeat a fleet twice your size.
Summary
The siege of Plataea is one of the History's sustained moral episodes. A small city of perhaps four or five hundred fighting men, bound to Athens by old alliance, holds out against the full power of Sparta and Thebes combined. The Peloponnesians try fire, battering rams, siege mounds, counterworks; the Plataeans respond with ingenuity — cutting through the mound from below, building a second inner wall when the outer is threatened, maintaining their defiance with a stubbornness that Thucydides records without explicit praise but with evident respect. Plataea will eventually fall in 427 BCE, and its fate — the trial and execution of its defenders — will be one of the History's most pointed moral episodes.
Phormio's campaigns in the Gulf of Corinth are tactical masterpieces on a small scale. In the first engagement, outnumbered twenty to twelve, he orders his ships to circle the Peloponnesian fleet at dawn, drawing them into a tighter and tighter formation until the wind rises and the crowded ships begin to collide with each other — at which point his disciplined squadron attacks and takes twelve ships. In the second engagement, outnumbered again, he feigns retreat up the gulf, then turns to fight when the Peloponnesians pursue in disorder. Thucydides's account of both battles is the most technically precise naval narrative in ancient literature.
The Thracian episode involving Sitalces and Macedonia illustrates a recurrent theme in the History: the gap between military capacity and logistical reality. Sitalces commands the largest army that had ever been assembled in Thrace or Macedonia; the force is enormous, its diversity remarkable, its initial progress rapid. But it lives off the land, and when the land is stripped and the Macedonians refuse pitched battle, the army has nothing to do and nothing to eat. Sitalces withdraws after thirty days, having accomplished nothing strategic. The episode is a small-scale version of the same dynamic that will destroy the Athenians in Sicily twenty years later.
- 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.