The Isle of Stone

7

The Athenians were hard-pressed to find places for their guests. As criminal penalties at the time more often included death, fines, or exile, prison space was minimal in the city. The likelihood of another Lacedaemonian invasion discouraged the keeping of captives in camps outside the city walls. High-ranking Spartiates like Antalcidas and Frog were therefore kept in a small jailhouse near the marketplace, while less valuable prisoners, such as the under-thirties and the handful of surviving helots, were boarded out to the storage pits and basements of wealthy citizens. The latter, though scattered, did not want for company: it became a popular amusement for hosts to cap the entertainment at their drinking parties by showing their guests the shackled Spartans in their cellars. Cleon kept no fewer than six in his fine home in Scambonidae; Demosthenes a token two. Nicias took none, though his basement was the biggest in town.

Demosthenes earned the military victory on the island, but Cleon reaped the success. The latter’s jingoist populism became the dominant political force in the city. The prisoners, he argued, could be used as a check on Lacedaemonian aggression: if the enemy dared invade Attica again, they would watch their countrymen’s throats slit and their bodies strung up on the walls. Sure enough, the Spartans sent no invasion the following summer. Instead, they sent a procession of envoys, each newcomer prepared to concede a little more than the last. Cleon-who most now believed could do no wrong-enjoined the Assembly to dismiss the negotiators. With the Athenians holding what they believed were almost three hundred trump cards, they were content to wait for even greater rewards.

Though the Spartans sought the return of their prisoners, their more immediate concern was the Athenian navy. The Athenian ships, based now in Pylos, struck more freely than ever, sacking and burning from the borders of Argos in the east to Helus in the south to Messenia in the west. The Athenians introduced more Messenian exiles into Pylos, encouraging them to ravage the land and free as many of the natives they could find. The Spartan response betrayed their desperation: they organized companies of roving cavalry and archers. Naturally, with no proper citizens willing to do such dishonorable duty, only low-caste Nigh-dwellers and indigent Spartiates joined the new forces.

Meanwhile, Nicias burnished his reputation by leading a successful invasion of Cythera. The loss of this island, where Ramphias had once been governor, cost the Lacedaemonians any semblance of control of their seacoasts; they could hardly spare the troops to protect their territory, much less another adventure to Attica. Yet the Athenians would not negotiate. The mood in Laconia fell to its lowest ebb since Xerxes the Persian threatened Greece with a million men, fifty years before.

The gods have a taste for intervening in such times. On this occasion, during the tenth summer of the war, they puffed Cleon up with such confidence that he coveted another, more ambitious military command. Bringing his powers of persuasion to bear on the Assembly, he was rewarded with a force of thirty ships and several thousand Athenian and allied troops. The green conqueror sailed Thraceward and, after some early successes at Torone and Galepsus, erected trophies to his glory; proceeding around the treacherous waters beneath Mount Athos, he next took it upon himself to liberate the Athenian foundation of Amphipolis, a strategically set town then occupied by allies of the enemy.

This was a harder nut to crack. Opposing him for this siege was Brasidas, son of Tellis, who was a new sort of Spartiate commander-bold, resourceful, comfortable with operating far from home with foreign allies. Against such an adversary, Cleon grew timid, refusing to attack until he could gather all the reinforcements he could. Sensing weakness, Brasidas seized the initiative, storming out with inferior forces to rout the Athenians. In the battle the Spartiate and the demagogue were both killed: Brasidas in delayed fashion after suffering a mortal wound; Cleon cut down from behind as he ran away from the battlefield. Thus ended the remarkable career of a tanner’s son.

The antagonists were alike in being little mourned in their home cities: in Laconia, Brasidas’ freelancing was viewed with suspicion by his elders, while most Athenians found the manner of Cleon’s death-a career politician pretending to be a soldier, meeting his end with a javelin in the ass-as compellingly ridiculous as his oratory. The most important consequence of the battle, however, was that the jingoes were out of the way of a peace settlement. Nicias and the Agiad king Pleistoanax took the lead among their respective cities, negotiating a treaty and joint alliance that was supposed to last for fifty years. One of the key provisions of the agreement was that all prisoners, including the Spartans captured at Sphacteria, were to be let go at last.