Siege of Melos

Melos (purple), the Delian League (orange), and the Peloponnesian League (green)

The Peloponnesian War lasted from 431 to 404 BC. The war was fought between the Peloponnesian League, an alliance of Greek cities led by Sparta, and the Delian League, an alliance led by Athens. Athens had the superior navy and controlled nearly all the islands in the Aegean Sea. Melos was the only significant island in the Aegean Sea that Athens did not control.[2] The people of Melos were Dorians, the same ethnic group as the Spartans, but they were independent of the Spartan empire; the Athenians were Ionians.[3][4][5][6] In general, the Melians sought to remain neutral in the war,[7] although there is archaeological evidence that sometime between 428 and 425 BC, the Melians donated at least twenty minas of silver (about 12½ kg[8]) to the Spartan war effort.[9][10][11]

In 426 BC, Athens sent an army of 2,000 men to raid the Melian countryside, but the Melians would not be bullied into submission.[12][13][14] In 425 or 424 BC, Athens demanded of Melos a tribute of fifteen talents of silver[15] (roughly 390 kg[16]). This sum could have paid the wages of a trireme crew for 15 months,[17][18] or bought 540 metric tons of wheat, enough to feed 2,160 men for a year.[19] Given the relative size of Melos, this suggests that it was a prosperous island.[20] Melos refused to pay.[21]

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Melos, and the approximate location of the ancient city.[23]

In the summer of 416 BC, during a truce with Sparta, Athens sent an army of at least 3,400 men to conquer Melos: 1,600 heavy infantry, 300 archers, and 20 mounted archers all from Athens, plus 1,500 heavy infantry from other Delian League cities. The fleet that transported this army had 38 ships: 30 from Athens, 6 from Chios, and 2 from Lesbos. This expedition was led by the generals Cleomedes and Tisias. After setting up camp on the island, the Athenians sent emissaries to negotiate with the rulers of Melos. The emissaries demanded that Melos join the Delian League and pay tribute to Athens or face destruction. The Melians rejected the ultimatum. The Athenians laid siege to the city and withdrew most of their troops from the island to fight elsewhere. The Melians made a number of sorties, at one point capturing part of the Athenian line, but failed to break the siege. In response, Athens sent reinforcements under the command of Philocrates. The Athenians also had help from traitors within Melos. Melos surrendered in the winter.[24]

The Athenians executed the adult men[25] and sold the women and children into slavery. They then settled 500 of their own colonists on the island.[26]

In 405 BC, by which time Athens was losing the war, the Spartan general Lysander expelled the Athenian colonists from Melos and restored the survivors of the siege to the island. The once-independent Melos became a Spartan territory, which would mean that it had a Spartan garrison and a military governor (a harmost).[27][28][29]

In History of the Peloponnesian War (Book 5, Chapters 84–116), the contemporary Athenian historian Thucydides included a dramatization of the negotiations between the Athenian emissaries and the rulers of Melos. Thucydides did not witness the negotiations and in fact had been in exile at the time, so this dialogue paraphrases what he believed was discussed.

Thucydides explained that the purpose of conquering Melos was to demonstrate the strength and sternness of Athens so as to discourage its island territories from rebelling. Whether it was effective at discouraging rebellion is uncertain. Just a few years after the conquest of Melos, Athens suffered a devastating defeat in a military expedition to Sicily, after which rebellions happened throughout the empire. Whatever benefit the conquest of Melos produced was wiped away by the disaster that happened in Sicily.

Whether Melos was truly neutral is sometimes debated by scholars. Thucydides wrote that after the raid by Nicias in 426 BC, the Melians assumed "an attitude of open hostility",[31] but neither Thucydides nor any other writer of the era mentioned any specific offence that Melos committed against Athens.[32][33] There is archaeological evidence that Melos once donated some money to Sparta (at least 12½ kg silver), but it's uncertain whether this donation happened before or after the raid by Nicias.[10] Melos is typically regarded by scholars to have been an innocent victim of Athenian imperialism.[34]

The islands of the Aegean Sea provided valuable tax revenue for Athens, but what was probably more vital was naval access to their ports. Warships of the era (triremes) could carry little in the way of supplies and had no sleeping space for the crew, and thus needed to stop in port on a daily basis to buy supplies, cook meals, and camp for the night. Triremes were also not particularly seaworthy and thus needed harbors to shelter from rough weather. A trireme could normally travel around 80 kilometres (50 mi) in a day whereas a trip from Athens to Asia Minor is roughly 300 kilometres (190 mi). Thus, in order to control the Aegean, Athens needed to secure exclusive access to the islands' ports for its navy.[35][36][37] If Melos was neutral, enemy ships could resupply there, so capturing it denied that to Athens' enemies.[38]

The Athenians had shown mercy to their defeated enemies in the earlier years of the Peloponnesian War, and in preceding wars. For instance, after putting down the rebellious city of Potidaea in 429 BC, the Athenians spared the surviving Potidaeans and allowed them to leave the city.[39] As the war dragged on, the Athenians came to feel that leniency made them look weak and encouraged revolts.[40] The rising brutality of the Athenians was also a response to Spartan brutality, which had been extreme from the beginning.[41] In particular, it was after the massacre committed by the Spartans at Plataea in 429 BC that the Athenians habitually massacred their own prisoners.[42]

Even so, the massacre of the Melians shocked the Greek world, even in Athens.[43] The Athenian rhetorician Isocrates, in his apologia for Athens' conquests, mentioned the massacre at Melos as a major point of criticism against Athens, but he argued that it had been necessary and that the other warring states were just as brutal.[44][45][46] The Athenian historian Xenophon wrote that in 405 BC, with the Spartan army closing in on Athens, the citizens of Athens worried that the Spartans would treat them with the same cruelty that the Athenian army had shown the Melians.[47]

There is circumstantial evidence that suggests that the Melians surrendered only after enduring extreme starvation: the expression "Melian famine" entered the Greek language as a metaphor for extreme starvation. The first known appearance of this phrase is in Aristophanes' play The Birds (414 BC),[48] and its usage seems to have lasted well into the Byzantine era as it is mentioned in the Suda, a 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia.[49][50]

In March 415 BC, the Athenian playwright Euripides premiered a play called The Trojan Women, which explores the suffering of the inhabitants of a conquered city. Although Melos isn't explicitly mentioned (the setting is the Trojan War), many scholars regard it as a commentary on the massacre at Melos, but this is unlikely. Euripides was probably developing his play before the siege of Melos even began, and he had only a month or two after its fall to make revisions. It's also unlikely that Euripides would have dared to offend his Athenian audiences given how expensive the production was.[51]

It is uncertain whether the fate of Melos was decided by the government of Athens or the Athenian generals on Melos. A historical speech falsely attributed to the Athenian orator Andocides claims that the statesman Alcibiades advocated the enslavement of the Melian survivors before the government of Athens.[52] This account gives no date for the decree, so it could have been passed to justify the atrocities after the fact. Thucydides made no mention of any such decree in his own account.[53]

The treatment of the Melians is sometimes considered an example of genocide in the ancient world.[54][55][56]