Thespian Tragedies
Not all the mourning was on the Athenian side. Across the battlefield, Delium would prove to be equally dreadful for hundreds of Boeotians from the hamlet of Thespiae, who would nearly be exterminated before the day was out. Thucydides believed five hundred Boeotian hoplites fell in all, but most of these were yeomen from the small town of Thespiae. It was their fate to be assigned on the weak Boeotian left wing opposite the crack Athenian troops. As we shall see, their deployment by the Thebans before battle was not accidental and their destruction thus came as no surprise.
Ancient Greek hoplite infantry battle is usually interpreted as a decisive collision of roughly equally sized armies, fights that the historian Herodotus once characterized as “most irrational,” yet to be waged on the “fairest and most level plain.” But in the age before the great Macedonian mercenary armies of Alexander, the Successors, and the legions of Rome, in nearly every major classical battle both sides were almost always composed of coalition forces. These were temporary alliances of small city-states whose militias occupied various places along their respective battle lines—mutually visible fronts that were usually not more than a mile or two long. Often they were only a few hundred yards apart. Literally dozens of small communities might send most of their manhood to line up to form one horn of a phalanx, and themselves be joined by additional allied contingents. Even apparently homogeneous armies were rife with tribal and class rivalries. While every ancient infantry force was eager to arrange its particular corps to find effective matches against an enemy for the good of the army at large, in the classical Greek practice of mustering militias from rival villages, the order of battle took on much greater political and cultural significance.
In theory the right wing of a Greek army was the place of honor. It was usually occupied either by those troops with the greatest military prestige or (in the case of armies on the defense) by local militias whose native ground was the scene of the engagement and warranted them preference. There were a variety of reasons why stronger forces were stationed on the right. But a primary consideration was tactical—to guard against the inevitable rightward drift of hoplites seeking protection in their comrades’ circular shields for their own bare right spear-side. The furthermost file on the right of the phalanx—which had no shield protection for their vulnerable flanks—exacerbated the drift, seeking their own cover either in cavalry or rough terrain to their right. As entire companies shuffled crablike to their right to cover their right shoulders, armies such as the Spartans’ might through careful drill develop this natural hoplite drift into a deliberate outflanking movement from the right side.
Consequently, less adept troops were usually stationed on the left wing, and perhaps the weakest of all corps in the center of the line—effectively reducing a hoplite battle like Delium to a contest where an army sought to win on the right before its own inferior left and center collapsed. Of course, the best fighters welcomed posting on the right where they could lead the charge. But they also realized that they would be butchering the poorest contingents of the enemy. Delium, then, was a classic instance where the crack troops of the Boeotian confederacy—the Thebans on the right—attempted to rout the weaker contingents of the Athenian army across the battlefield before their own suspect troops—the Thespians—collapsed and let the enemy into their rear.
The overall interest of an allied army was not always the paramount consideration of ancient generals. After all, the strong contingents on both sides of the battlefield customarily had a much greater chance of surviving the battle than did their own respective weaker left wings. There was constant tension—both ethnic and political—within a coalition when respective allied states were allotted their particular assignments, deployments that quite literally might mean survival or annihilation. Because of the close physical proximity of ancient armies before battle, and the usual decision to fight during the day and in summer, infantrymen always could view quite clearly the nature of the troops arrayed against them. Even in the confused opening charges at Delium, the Athenians were aware that the weakest Boeotians were on the enemy left wing—because they too had likewise placed their own suspect files in precisely the same place on their own line.
Once the fighting began, Greek hoplite battle was never a simple and simultaneous collision between two uniform armies. Instead it was a series of flash points as the two battle lines in places often collided haphazardly and sometimes not at all—given disparities in numbers, uneven terrain, and sheer confusion. As a result, casualties were usually not shared proportionally among allied participants. A century in the life of the small Boeotian community of Thespiae was quite literally determined by what befell its adult male citizens in no more than a collective few hours of fighting at Delium.
Nothing much remains of Boeotian Thespiae today. However, any modern visitor who surveys the rich Thespian countryside and the numerous small valleys of the immediate environs, the relative proximity to the Gulf of Corinth, and the access both to Attica and the Peloponnese via routes over the mountains of Pateras and Cithaeron can understand why Thespiae grew to be the second largest and most important polis in Boeotia—and thus a constant irritant to the aspirations of its larger and more powerful neighbor, Thebes. This rivalry between the two Boeotian city-states explains much of the tragic Thespian experience in hoplite battle for nearly two centuries. No wonder that in November 424 B.C., the Thespians drew the unenviable assignment of facing the elite right wing of the Athenians under Hippocrates.
We first hear of the ill-fated Thespian army over a half century before the battle of Delium, during the Persian Wars, when a contingent of seven hundred hoplites marched north with the Spartan king Leonidas to bar the Persian advance at Thermopylae. When the pass was turned, the Thespians along with some Thebans chose to stay with King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans. We should assume that they were annihilated to the man. Of the fourteen hundred Greeks who stayed behind with Leonidas, the Thespian dead represented 50 percent of the total allied casualties! This is a remarkable proportion when we remember that they composed only about 10 percent of the original Greek force of seven thousand hoplites. Posterity remembers the Three Hundred Spartans; few recall that over twice that number of Thespians died on the same day. Far fairer it would be for us moderns to associate the last stand at Thermopylae first with the “Seven Hundred.”
Thespiae’s larger contribution and smaller resources make its sacrifice for Greece even more remarkable than that of Sparta. We all remember the poet Simonides’ famous ode to the Spartan dead under Leonidas (“Go tell the Spartan that here we lie obedient to their commands”; yet few of us recall the epitaph for the Thespian dead composed by the poet Philiades: “The men who once dwelled beneath the crags of Mt. Helicon, the broad land of Thespiae now boasts of their courage”).
In the aftermath of the defeat, Sparta itself was safe from Persian attack. Thespiae, however, was in the immediate path of the invaders. Sparta lost at Thermopylae a little under 4 percent of its landowning citizen body; Thespiae probably most of its own. The victorious Persians, then, in the days after the pass at Thermopylae was breached, marched south and with Theban guidance demolished Thespiae. The surviving dependent population fled south to the Peloponnese. Thus, Thespiae as a material community of several generations ceased to exist once its army of hoplites was annihilated in a few hours to the north at Thermopylae.
Events the year after Thermopylae at the great infantry battle at Plataea (479 B.C.) confirm the unfortunate consequences of the Thespians’ decision to stand fast the year before—and reveal how a single afternoon can doom an entire people. Herodotus says that the Athenian hero Themistocles made his child’s tutor, Sicinnus, a citizen of Thespiae. Ostensibly he wished to help rebuild their community after the loss of the seven hundred at Thermopylae and the diaspora to the Peloponnese. Nevertheless, the exiled community sent its remaining scattered manhood—eighteen hundred strong—to join the Greeks at Plataea.
Interestingly enough, Herodotus remarks that the Thespians came without hoplite armor, confirming the notion that their city’s hoplite yeomen and their arms and armor had been lost the year before at Thermopylae. A rough estimate would suggest that out of between two and three thousand adult males in Thespiae, a third (i.e., seven hundred) qualified for hoplite infantry service, and these had all perished at Thermopylae. The decision on day three at Thermopylae to stay with the Spartans resulted in the obliteration of the city, the death of most property-owning adult males, and the temporary evacuation of the surviving population to the Peloponnese.
Sometime in the two decades between 470 and 450 B.C., Thespiae would have rebuilt its walls and with new citizen musters reconstituted its citizenship to levels approaching its prior status before Thermopylae. But we do not hear of its army again until the battle of Delium in 424 B.C. There Thucydides says the Thespian left wing was encircled by the Athenians and “those Thespians who perished were cut down as they fought hand-to-hand.”
The Thespian hoplites at Delium were additionally vulnerable on their flanks as a result of the massing of the Theban right wing to the unusual depth of twenty-five shields. More fighters taken out of the initial ranks and stacked to the rear shortened the overall battle line, making it vulnerable on the flanks. Was there a general Theban consensus that if there were to be casualties at Delium, better that they be from Thespiae? The left wing of the Boeotian army—Thespians, and men from the villages of Tanagra and Orchomenos—was not a natural geographical cluster that might explain these regiments’ close proximity to one another on the battlefield. All three city-states, however, at times had shown open hostility to Thebes and even entertained pro-Athenian sympathies, perhaps explaining their deployment together against the enemy’s better units: they would either kill Athenians or be killed. Either way Thebes benefited.
Thucydides does not give us a precise breakdown of the aggregate Confederate dead—only that five hundred Boeotians fell, of whom the vast majority must have been Thespians and perhaps also men from the town of Tanagra. Modern scholars, reviewing the epigraphical and archaeological evidence of casualty records on stone and burials from the battle, surmise that at least three hundred Thespians were killed at Delium, perhaps again from a militia present that day numbering six to seven hundred—or about two-thirds of the hoplite census of roughly one thousand landowning Thespians.
Somewhere near 50 percent of the Thespians present at the battle were killed in an hour or so of fighting—a third of all the small farmers at Thespiae were now dead! Of the roughly seven thousand Boeotians present at the battle, perhaps 60 percent of the fatalities were from a group that made up 10 percent of the army. So roughly three generations after Thermopylae, Thespian hoplites had once again suffered a holocaust. Once more there were to be immediate consequences of an hour at Delium to the city, as the result of those losses would prove traumatic to Thespiae, both politically and spiritually.
Of the few archaeological remains we have from Thespiae the most prominent are the fragments of a public casualty list on stone most likely from Delium and partial remains of an elaborate common grave of the battle dead, who were apparently honored in the city center by the dedication of a proud stone lion. We have the names of dozens of those killed at Delium, but not a shred of information about their lives. Who was Samichos? Did Polytimidas farm? Did the death of Philteros leave his family destitute? Was Suateles a poet? Damophilos a musician? Or Aristokrates a builder? And what was Antigenidas thinking when he was surrounded and killed on the left wing, perhaps speared by Socrates or ridden down by Alcibiades? And were Antanoidas, Anphicrates, and Euchoridas friends? Relatives? Neighbors? Perhaps fathers and sons? If not, why for posterity are they listed together on the inventory of the dead?
Thucydides reports that a few months after the battle, in the summer of 423, “The Thebans destroyed the walls of the Thespians, on the allegation of pro-Athenian sympathies. They had always wished to do this, but now they found an easy opportunity since the flower of the Thespians had been annihilated in the battle against the Athenians.” Thespiae thus sacrificed its manhood at Delium, forgotten men like Pythias, Diakritos, and Chabas, to protect Boeotia from Athens—only thereby ensuring its own subsequent destruction by Boeotians from Thebes. Nine years later the Thebans helped put down an uprising of Thespian democratic sympathizers—not difficult since the city’s fortifications had long since been dismantled in the ripples that followed the disaster at Delium.
Presumably in the three decades after Delium and ninety years after Thermopylae, a new generation of Thespians for a third time had brought infantry strength back up to normal levels of seven hundred to a thousand hoplite infantrymen. Whether the walls of Thespiae had been rebuilt after the destruction of 423, we do not know, but it is unlikely given the traumatic losses at Delium. Yet, tragedy struck Thespiae at the battle of Nemea in 394 B.C. during the war of allied Greek states against Sparta.
At Nemea the entire Boeotian confederation was placed on the favored right wing while the Athenian allies took up the far more dangerous left horn opposite the crack Spartans. The historian Xenophon provides us with little detail about the action, noting only that all the Boeotians were successful against their Peloponnesian enemies—except the Thespians. Unfortunately they were stationed opposite the doughty Peloponnesian Achaians from the town of Pellene. Xenophon states that while other Peloponnesians fled and were pursued by Boeotians, the hoplites from Pellene and Thespiae “kept fighting and were falling in their places”—an unusually vivid observation in an otherwise succinct narrative, suggesting a general slaughter at this point of the battle line on both sides.
What were the consequences of yet another catastrophic loss of landowning hoplites at the battle of Nemea? For the next twenty-three years until the fight at Leuctra (371 B.C.), an impotent Thespiae was at odds with the Boeotians in general and Thebes in particular, offering assistance to either Athens or Sparta, depending on the two states’ respective hostility to Thebes at any given time. Thespiae may have still remained unfortified after Delium, and apparently lacked the strength to rebuild her walls until 378—and then only with aid from the Spartans.
Tragic consequences that follow hoplite battles were not always the results of large numbers killed in action. The Thespians learned that in 371 at the battle of Leuctra, when Epaminondas expelled their hoplites from the Boeotian army that was to face off against the Spartans—another indication that the presence and deployment of Thespian troops on the Confederate battle line was always rife with political implications. Not allowed to fight and without walls, Thespiae’s only hope was a Theban defeat. But when the general Epaminondas instead achieved a stunning victory, the Thebans moved quickly to finish their earlier attack on Thespiae. Sometime after Leuctra her buildings that remained were razed for at least a third time and her population expelled from Boeotia altogether. Given a century and more of continual destruction in the aftermath of hoplite battles, it is no wonder that the present-day traces of classical Thespiae are essentially nonexistent.
The history of the Greek city-state cannot be understood apart from the histories of pitched battles. The fate of entire communities literally depended on where, how, and against whom their landowning hoplite soldiers were deployed in particular engagements. In some sense the entire history of the people of Thespiae is the story of little more than three or four tragic hours of fighting. The community that had nearly been wiped out by Thermopylae was lost at Delium—a disaster that itself led to yet another half century of additional misery. What were the ripples that followed the fallen Thespians whose names we now read on broken stones? From what little we know, their untimely destruction led to the complete end of all that they held dear—in a tragic chain of misery that ended at last when the ill-fated hamlet of Thespiae was no more.