The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [163]
Cleverly they waited until winter. These were men, remember, who from their earliest memory had been trained to endure dreadful extremes: weeks out in the cold, survival all year round in nothing but a summer cloak. While the Athenian garrison guards shivered, Spartans tensed their muscles for the attack.
The Spartans first ringed the settlement and then stormed it. Their success was absolute. A slightly later source, that arch-conservative Isocrates, writing in the fourth century BC, exaggerated when he said that 10,000 men died here, but clearly there was mass slaughter at Decelea.
And now the Spartans had a permanent base in Attica just 13 miles from Athens’ walls. They could do more than just intimidate, than just burn vines and olives. From this vantage point they could disrupt the flow of trade, they could intercept communications. Here they started systematically to catalogue the loot they had taken from Attic territories and commandeered local farmers, forcing them to feed Spartan rather than Athenian mouths.
King Agis commanded. In 412/11, Miletus, Aspasia’s home-town, revolted and went Spartan.3 As the months yawned into years, Agis persuaded allies to provide 100 new triremes and now in 408 or 407 BC his Navarch, his admiral-in-chief, Lysander, could begin to harry the Athenians from the sea too. Sparta had always been timid around the sea, but now she had taken a leaf out of Athens’ book and was embracing naval technology with all the verve of a fresh convert. Without ruling the waves, democratic Athenians could guarantee the safety of neither their own city-state nor their empire.
This was not something the ruling democrats could cover up or sweet-talk away. The people of Athens smelled disintegration, and then, shockingly, devastatingly, more than 20,000 of their slaves in clusters or singly revolted and deserted.4 A number of these one-time ‘human-tools’, these ‘man-footed things’, ended up throwing their lot in with the Spartans at Decelea. The majority of the women and men should have been down in those coastal mines at Laurion, harvesting Athens’ cash-crop. But instead they chose to serve masters whose mission was to humiliate and to destroy Athena’s city.
It is a two-day walk from Laurion (south-east of Athens) to Decelea (in the north). But the alacrity with which the slaves joined Spartan ranks suggests this was a distance the ex-slaves covered in half that time. These rebels had lived their lives as subhumans. Men and women had been kept separately. The cramped boxes close to the Laurion minefields were all that they had ever called home. When the Spartan slave population revolted, it was said that they wanted to ‘eat the Spartans even raw’,5 We have no first-hand accounts of those who cut themselves loose from Athenian shackles, but every reason to believe the hatred of their masters was as prodigious, as dangerous.
In terms of sheer muscle and man-power, the foundations of democratic Athenian society had been removed. Without their slaves, the Athenians would no longer be able to scrape silver out of the earth, no longer stimulate the market, no longer sustain their position as ‘the envy of all Greece’. Now the Spartans really had Athens in their sights. Always scorning coined money (coinage was banned in the Spartan state), the Spartans must have rubbed their hands with glee at the thought