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The naval Battle of Pylos took place in 425 during the
Peloponnesian War
at the peninsula of Pylos, on the present-day Bay of Navarino in Messenia,
and was an Athenian victory over Sparta. An Athenian fleet had been driven
ashore at Pylos by a storm, and, at the instigation of
Demosthenes, the
Athenian soldiers fortified the peninsula, and a small force was left there
when the fleet departed again. The establishment of an Athenian garrison in
Spartan territory frightened the Spartan leadership, and the Spartan army,
which had been ravaging Attica under the command of Agis, ended their
expedition (the expedition only lasted 15 days) and marched home, while the
Spartan fleet at Corcyra sailed to Pylos. Demosthenes had five triremes and
their complements of soldiers as a garrison, and was reinforced by 40 hoplites
from a Messenian ship that happened to stop at Pylos. In total, Demosthenes
probably had about 600 men, only 90 of which were hoplites. He sent two of his
triremes to intercept the Athenian fleet and inform Sophocles and
Eurymedon of his danger.
The Spartans, meanwhile, had 43 triremes and a large land army. Finding himself
thus outnumbered, Demosthenes pulled his remaining three triremes up on land
and armed their crews with whatever weapons were at hand. He placed the largest
part of his force at the strongly fortified point facing the land. Demosthenes
then hand-picked 60 hoplites and a few archers and brought them to the point
where he anticipated the Spartans would launch their amphibious assault.
Demosthenes expected that the Spartans would hit the south-west corner of the
peninsula where the defensive wall was the weakest and the land was most
suitable for a landing. The Spartans attacked where Demosthenes had expected,
and the Athenians were faced with simultaneous assaults from land and sea. The
Athenians held off the Spartans for a day and a half, however, causing the
Spartans to cease their attempts to storm Pylos and instead settled in for a
siege. While the Spartans' siege preparations were underway, the Athenian
fleet, 50 triremes strong, arrived from Zacynthus. The Spartans failed to
blockade the entrance of the harbour, so the Athenians were able to sail in and
catch the Spartans unprepared; the Spartan fleet was decisively defeated, and
the Athenians gained control of the harbour. In doing so, they trapped 420
Spartan hoplites on the island of Sphacteria, off of Pylos. 120 of these were
from the Spartiate class, and their peril threw the Spartan government into a
panic. Members of the government were dispatched to the scene, and negotiated
an armistice on the spot; the entire Spartan fleet was surrendered to the
Athenians as a guarantee for Spartan good conduct, and ambassadors were sent to
Athens to seek a permanent peace. When these negotiations failed, the Athenians
retained possession of the Spartan ships on a pretext, and settled in to
besiege the hoplites on Sphacteria; eventually, in the Battle of Sphacteria,
those hoplites were captured and taken as hostages to Athens. Pylos remained in
Athenian hands, and was used as a base for raids into Spartan territory and as
a refuge for fleeing Spartan Helots.
Prelude In the summer of 425, an Athenian fleet commanded by Eurymedon and
Sophocles, with Demosthenes aboard as an advisor, sailed from Athens to
campaign in Sicily and assist Athens' democratic allies at Corcyra. Demosthenes
held no official position at the time, but was a strategos-elect for the
Hellenic year that would begin in midsummer 425, and the two generals had been
instructed to allow him to use the fleet around the Peloponnese if he wished.
Once the fleet was at sea, Demosthenes revealed his plan, which he had
previously kept secret; he wished to land at and fortify Pylos, which he
believed to be a particularly promising site for a forward outpost. (Pylos was
a good distance from Sparta by march, and commanded an excellent harbour in the
Bay of Navarino.). The generals rejected this plan, but Demosthenes caught a
stroke of luck when a storm blew and drove the fleet to the shore at Pylos.
Even then the generals refused to order the fortification of the promontory,
and Demosthenes was similarly rebuffed when he attempted to appeal directly to
the troops and subordinate commanders; only when the boredom of waiting out the
storm overcame the Athenians did they set to work building fortifications. Once
they began, however, the Athenians worked hard and quickly, and the promontory
was fortified and defensible within a few days. The fleet sailed off towards
Corcyra, where a Spartan fleet of 60 ships was operating, leaving Demosthenes
with five ships and their complements of sailors and soldiers to defend the new
fort. The Spartan government was initially unconcerned with the Athenians'
presence at Pylos, assuming that they would soon depart. Once it became clear,
however, that Demosthenes and his men intended to hold the site, the king Agis,
who was at the head of an army ravaging Attica, turned for home, cutting his
invasion short after only 15 days in Athenian territory. Once he reached home,
Spartan forces immediately moved towards Pylos, the fleet at Corcyra was
ordered to sail there immediately, and a summons was sent out calling allied
states around the Peloponnese to send troops. The Spartan fleet managed to slip
past the Athenian fleet at Zacynthus, but Demosthenes anticipated its arrival
and dispatched two of his triremes to inform the Athenian fleet of Pylos'
plight; that fleet set out for Pylos as soon as it received the news. Pylos,
meanwhile, had been reinforced by the arrival of a privateer with a cargo of
arms, which were distributed to the sailors, and by a Messenian pinnace, which
brought 40 more hoplites to defend the peninsula. To meet the imminent Spartan
attack, Demosthenes divided his force, placing most of his men at the point
where the promontory touched the mainland, while he with 60 hoplites and a few
archers waited at the point facing out to sea where the Athenian wall was
weakest. When the Spartan fleet arrived, the Spartans prepared to blockade the
entrance to the harbour by placing hoplites on the island of Sphacteria, which
was in the middle of the entrance, and planned to place ships in the gaps on
either side of that island when the Athenian fleet arrived.
Battle:
The Spartans assaulted the Athenian fortifications on Pylos from both land and
sea. The sea attack came exactly where Demosthenes had expected it would, and
he was thus in place to meet it with his men. The landing was difficult at the
point of attack, so only a few of the 43 triremes were able to approach the
beach at a time. The Spartan captains, following the example of
Brasidas, drove their
ships into the rocky shore to give their men a chance to disembark and drive
the Athenians back, but the defenders refused to give, and repeated waves of
attacks failed to break them. The tactic of trying to land troops on a beach
facing stiff hoplite resistance was known to be notoriously difficult during
this era. These attacks continued for an entire day and then part of the next,
but after that the Spartans resigned themselves to a siege and dispatched
several ships to bring wood for building siege engines. On the day after the
cessation of attacks, however, the Athenian fleet arrived from Zacynthus. It
was too late that day to attack, so the Athenians spent the night on a nearby
island, hoping to draw the Spartans out into the open sea to battle. The
Spartans refused to take this bait, but the next morning the Athenians sailed
in both entrances to the harbour, which the Spartans had failed to block, and
quickly routed the Spartan fleet
Pursuit was limited by the size of the harbour, but the Athenians captured some
triremes at sea and then landed to attempt to seize the Spartan ships once they
reached land. A fierce fight ensued, in which the Athenians were eventually
unable to seize more than a few ships, withdrawing after heavy casualties had
been suffered by both sides. At the end of the battle, the Athenians controlled
the harbour, and were able to sail freely around the island of Sphacteria; they
guarded the island closely, ensuring that the hoplites trapped there were
unable to escape. News of the crisis at Pylos shocked the government of Sparta,
and members of the government were immediately dispatched to the scene to
negotiate an armistice. This reaction to the potential capture of a mere 420
soldiers may seem extreme, but is explained by the fact that the 120 Spartiates
on the island composed probably one tenth of that elite class, on which the
Spartan government was based. The Spartan negotiators met with the Athenian
generals at Pylos and quickly arranged an immediate cessation of hostilities.
The Spartans were permitted to take food to the men on the island, and sent an
embassy to Athens immediately to negotiate for a more permanent peace; all the
Spartan ships, meanwhile, were surrendered to the Athenians as security for
Spartan good conduct. When the negotiators reached Athens, they made a speech
to the Athenian assembly in which they argued that the Athenians should take
advantage of the opportunity they had to make peace. The Spartans, they
claimed, had suffered a misfortune not through incapacity or overreaching, but
through mere bad luck; the Athenians should seize this opportunity to have
peace with them on good terms. This proposal, however, met with derision from
the Athenian statesman Cleon;
he demanded far harsher terms, which would have given Athens control over
Megara and compelled Sparta to abandon several important allies. In his speech,
he recalled the concessions Athens had been forced to make in the Thirty Years'
Peace of 445, when the Athenians had been at a similar momentary disadvantage.
Cleon's terms, Donald Kagan has argued, represented a recognition that the
Athenians had little to gain from a peace which surrendered the advantage they
had just won without impairing the Spartans' ability to make war, while they
might secure far better terms in the future by pressing their advantage. When
the Spartans asked to discuss these proposals in private, Cleon demanded that
they say whatever they had to say in public. By doing so, he guaranteed that
the Spartans would be forced to cut off the negotiations (since they could
hardly discuss betraying their allies in public), hastening the moment when the
Athenians would be free to move against Sphacteria. The Spartan ambassadors
returned home, and the armistice at Pylos came to an end. The Athenians,
alleging that the Spartans had violated the terms of the armistice by attacking
their wall, refused to hand the Spartan ships back over. Both sides settled in
to fight out the fate of the men on Sphacteria; the result would be decided
later at the Battle of Sphacteria.
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