Book 3, Chapter 9 — Fourth and Fifth Years of the War—Revolt of Mitylene
Athens votes to kill every man in Mytilene, sends the order by ship — then reverses the vote the next morning and sends a faster ship.
Summary
The revolt of Mytilene has been building since before the war. The Mytileneans, unlike most Athenian allies, were autonomous members of the alliance who provided ships rather than tribute; they had remained partners in the technical sense while chafing under increasingly imperial conditions. When the revolt comes in 428 BCE, they appeal to Sparta for military support and to the other Greek states for recognition of their cause as a liberation from Athenian tyranny. Sparta accepts them formally into the Peloponnesian League and promises a naval expedition. The expedition is repeatedly delayed by Spartan institutional inertia; the Mytileneans are left to hold out alone while Athens besieges them by land and sea.
When Mytilene falls in 427 BCE, the Athenian assembly's first response is the vote for general massacre: all adult male Mytileneans to be killed, the women and children sold as slaves. The order sails. The next morning, on reconsideration, the assembly reconvenes and the debate produces one of the History's most important opposed speeches. Cleon, the city's most effective popular politician after Pericles's death, argues that terror is the only reliable instrument of imperial control. A city that punishes revolt harshly will deter future revolts; a city that moderates its response on second thoughts signals weakness and invites more rebellion. The argument is internally consistent and was common among imperial administrators in all periods.
Diodotus's response does not argue from justice — he is explicit that the question of justice is irrelevant to a deliberation about imperial policy. He argues from interest: the moderates in every allied city, the people most likely to check rebellion and inform Athens of conspiracies, must be given a reason to believe that loyalty to Athens is safer than disloyalty. If Athens massacres the entire population when a revolt occurs, it removes the distinction between the complicit and the loyal, and gives every Athenian ally a reason to fight to the last man in any future siege rather than surrender. The second vote passes narrowly. The second ship rows through the night and arrives at Mytilene as the first decree is just being read — in time to prevent the massacre. The island is punished, but proportionately.
- 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.