The Year the Slaves Changed Sides

The Athenian catastrophe in Sicily in 413 BC broke the spell. From Thrace to Ionia, subject states began calculating. And Chios, the strongest and freest of them, moved first.

In 412 BC an oligarchic faction on the island opened secret talks with Sparta. The Spartan commander Chalcideus sailed east with a handful of ships, carrying with him Alcibiades — the exiled Athenian golden boy, now working for Sparta, and exercising all his usual combination of brilliance and total bad faith. They moved so fast that they were standing in the Chian assembly before the pro-Athenian party on the island knew there was a Peloponnesian fleet in the Aegean.

Chios revolted. Erythrae and Clazomenae followed within days; then Miletus; and the eastern Aegean began to come apart.

Athens' response was ferocious and immediate. The Athenians broke open the emergency reserve of a thousand talents which had been set aside at the very start of the war and touched by nobody since, on the explicit understanding that it was for the ultimate crisis. They judged that this was it. Fleets went east. Athenian forces landed on Chios, beat the Chians in the field, and then did the thing that ends islands: they built a permanent fortified base on Chian soil, at Delphinion on the east coast, and settled in to devastate the country at leisure.

And now the great Chian vulnerability came due.

Thucydides records — and it is the same fact that Theopompus had moralised about — that the Chians had more slaves than any Greek state except Sparta, and that in consequence they had punished them with a corresponding severity. When the Athenians fortified Delphinion, the Chian slaves deserted to them. Not a trickle: large numbers, continuously. And because they knew every path, spring, and hidden field on the island, they guided the Athenian raiding parties, and it was they, Thucydides says, who did the greatest damage.

This is precisely Drimacus's landscape, with the interior turned into a weapon and handed to a foreign army.

The island was systematically ruined over several years. The countryside was ravaged again and again; the city was blockaded; there was famine, and a failed pro-Athenian coup, and starvation serious enough that the Peloponnesian commander had to run food in. Chios stayed in the Spartan camp to the end of the war, and emerged in 404 a shadow of what it had been in 413.

Thucydides' judgement on the whole episode is unusually gentle for him and, read carefully, rather sad. The Chians, he says, were the one city besides Sparta to have prospered without losing its head; and when they saw their chance and took it, their preparations were thorough and their reasoning was sound, and it went wrong anyway. He is making a point he makes nowhere else: that prudence is not a guarantee, and that a state can do everything right and still be destroyed.

The lesson Chios drew was expensive and, one suspects, permanent. The island was rich enough to be worth destroying and never strong enough to prevent it. Two thousand two hundred and thirty-four years later, in March 1822, the notables of Chios would make exactly this argument to a Samian revolutionary who had landed troops on their beaches without asking, and they would be right, and it would not save them.