Update 1 - March 421 to March 420
As soon as the Treaty was signed, the Megarans denounced the treaty, and called on the Boeotians to protect them, and help them to regain Nisaea; it was not right, they said, that the Spartans should abandon their allies, and allow them to be impoverished, and for their harbours to be taken, in order to come to terms with a people that had devastated their land and the land of their allies. The Thebans and Eleans declared that they too would not accept the treaty: the Thebans were unwilling to give back Panactum, a fort they had taken from Athens, and they also declared that to make peace would be a signal disgrace, if the men of Boeotia who had fought at Delium and who had driven off the Athenians were forced by the mere spiritlessness of their allies to surrender Panactum. The Eleans, on the other hand, had not settled the question of Lepreum, which they held a tribute-paying part of their territory, while the Lepreates contested that they were an independent ally of Sparta.
The Spartans also concluded a defensive alliance with the Athenians. The Athenians resolved to march out in full force against the Thebans if they would not accept the treaty, and, with no support from anyone else except the Megarans, the Thebans were forced to capitulate and handed over Panactum. The Athenians immediately sent back the prisoners, and Demosthenes left Pylos immediately, in accordance with the Treaty; the Athenians also handed over Methana, Cythera, and Atalanta to their previous owners.
Alcibiades's successful coercion of the Boeotians into accepting the treaty increased his popularity; his attempts to raise men to help the Mantineans generally met with little success, partly because he did not have the endorsement of the Assembly, partly because the battle that took place between the Mantineans and the Spartans took place relatively early in the summer, and partly because he only had private funds and so could only ever possibly have recruited as many as two hundred volunteers even for a campaign much closer to home. [Alcibiades gains and loses influence among the rich; Alcibiades gains influence among the poor; Alcibiades's wealth from high to moderate.]
------- ITALY -------
However, these were not the only troubles occurring in Greece as winter drew to a close, and in particular the city of Cumae, a Euboean colony, the westernmost Greek colony in Italy, came under attack from the Italian people called the Samnites.
The Samnites are a barbarian people who, it is said, are the fiercest and best fighters in the whole of Italy; their organisation and discipline is as remarkable as their prowess, and despite being organised, like a Greek army, in rows of sorts, they exhibit flexibility unmatched by Greek armies, which is admirably suited to the hilly lands in which they live, if not to the plain of Campania. The Samnite cavalry is also excellent, although not as renowned as the cavalry of the Lucanians. The Samnite army at Cumae was well-armed and equipped, and drawn from the picked men and the levies of all the Samnite peoples, who live throughout that area of Italy, and the Samnites had already subdued the Tyrrhenians who lived in the surrounding area, the men of Nola, Volturnum and Capua.
The Samnites had defeated the men of Cumae in battle several times, once outside their very walls, driving them back into the refuge of their city, and putting them under siege by land, and thereby cutting them off from any sort of help from their colony, Neapolis, a little to the east of Cumae. The Samnites are not, though, a naval power, and it was quite beyond their ability to besiege the Cumaeans by sea as well, and so Cumae was not on the point of starving, but rather on the point of being taken by storm, as the Cumaeans' weapons were mostly blunt, their missiles were exhausted, and all the best men were dead, while many of the rest were injured. However, the city had not yet fallen because of the hope the Cumaeans now entertained of relief from the other Greeks, which encouraged them to resist firmly, so that even though, on one occasion, a large party of Samnites breached the main gate of the city, they lost a considerable number of men and were driven back. The Cumaeans' emissaries to the various Greek states did not fall on deaf ears: the Tarentines were the first to begin raising a force, and the Metapontines joined them, as did the people of Posidonia and Elea, places on the coast south of Cumae, and the Spartans and Syracusans also pledged some assistance to the defence of the Greek against the barbarian.
The Spartans, at the beginning of summer, equipped several expeditions, of which the first and most urgent was one commanded by a regular officer named Pythodorus, bound for Cumae. The urgency of the expedition was clear, as Cumae was already under siege and reputedly on the point of falling, and it was quite impossible to find more than two
pentakontores and a small number of requisitioned merchant ships (found with great difficulty, as Sparta trades very little with the rest of Greece) to carry the force of Spartans and Perioeci to Cumae. Indeed, the dispatching of all but 500 perioeci on one expedition or another this summer rendered it quite impossible to construct as many ships as had been hoped for, and, in fact, only three triremes, whose crews had yet to be found, were constructed by the Spartans by the end of the year. At any rate, the small force of ships sailed from Gythium very soon, and sailed across towards Messenia, but as they were sailing up the Messenian coast they were struck by a severe storm, driving them back against the coast, and shipwrecking four of the merchantmen and one of the
pentekontores, and a number of Spartans died. The rest of the ships were actually driven into the harbour at Pylos, which Demosthenes and the Athenians had left shortly beforehand, and, sailing out again, the Spartans rescued the casualties and extracted the dead bodies from the water, and buried them before setting off home again, with their fleet in no real state to brave the dangers of the Ionian Sea. [-100 Perioeci; -30 Spartiates.]
The Tarentines, however, set out with a well-equipped fleet, and, despite a storm scattering the fleet, all but one ship reassembled at Elea when the armada stopped to provision itself there a few days later. They reached Cumae just after the middle of summer, and there disembarked from the ships company upon company of men; it seemed to the Cumaeans looking on more like an expedition of new colonists, sent to repopulate the city after the depredations of the Italians, rather than an army: indeed, the army, 2500 Tarentines and Metapontines along with 2000 Posidonians and Eleans, was larger than the city it was relieving, and yet still smaller than the besieging army, especially in cavalry, as the Tarentines had not been able to transport any horses, and there were less than a hundred horses inside Cumae ready for battle, whereas there were at least a thousand cavalry in the Samnite army, if not a good deal more. There were about 6000 Samnite heavy or medium infantry, all eager to carry off their individual share of the booty, although this was by no means the full strength of the Samnites.
When they arrived, the Samnites decided, nevertheless, to make another attempt on the town, trying to take it by storm: their enthusiasm for plunder was such that they acted without too much regard for the sudden increase in the numbers of their defenders. However, they realised, after two months and as many fresh attempts, suffering many losses and inflicting some casualties on the Greeks, that they would not succeed, and so they retreated along the road to Capua. [-250 Tarentines]
The Cumaeans were extremely grateful and delighted that they had been delivered from the hands of the enemy, and they used some of the funds recently brought from Taras and Syracuse for the construction of a shrine celebrating the victory; and they erected a large bronze figure of a personification of Taras, accompanied by smaller statues of Apollo and of the Tarentine general. They honoured the Tarentines among the founders of the city, and vowed a great Temple of Zeus if ever the Samnites were soundly defeated. Cumae accepted a large Tarentine garrison of 1000 men and made an alliance with them for fifty years, and took in willing colonists from all the peoples within the army, and also sent out an appeal across the Greek world for new colonists to come and join their city. [-500 Tarentines to Cumae; -600 Posidonians and Eleans to Cumae.]
Meanwhile, the Tarentines and Metapontines marched together in full force into the interior of Lucania in a bold attack on the barbarian Lucanians. The total force amounted to as many as 10,000 men. They marched right into the hills along the best available track to Grumentum, much to the surprise of the Lucanians, who rapidly gathered together an exceptionally large army, considerably larger than the large Greek forces. Upon reports of this reaching the Tarentines, they marched back to the border and ravaged the land there, not that that land was particularly rich, and when the Lucanians pursued, the Greeks withdrew to Heraclea. The Lucanians raided some of the farmland north of Heraclea before the Greeks marched out and blocked the road. In a vain attempt to encircle the Lucanians, they stretched their line surprisingly thin, and fought, perhaps, three deep most of the way along the line, but what might easily have been a tactical blunder turned out much better than it might have done, because the hoplites held their line with extreme ferocity and discipline; the Greek cavalry was victorious on the right but routed on the left. All in all, though, the battle was fought and won by the relative prowess of the men in the infantry ranks, and the Greeks came out of it far more creditably, and did not break ranks throughout the course of the battle. All the Lucanian assaults therefore came to nothing, and a good few barbarians were killed in the rout, although the Lucanian cavalry victory on their right meant that the Lucanian cavalrymen were able to safeguard the escape of most of the Lucanian forces. Victorious, the Greeks returned to their cities to bring in the harvest, and began the erection of a Temple of Zeus in Heraclea, a considerable project that would take much time and effort to complete, and was made more difficult by the disproportionate losses suffered by the Heracleans, who were on the left in the battle. [-100 Tarentine infantry, -100 Heraclean infantry, -50 Metapontine infantry, -100 Tarentine cavalry, -100 Heraclean cavalry]
Meanwhile, in Sicily, Bricinniae, not receiving any assistance from anyone else, surrendered to the Syracusans without much further resistance.
------- THRACE -------
In Thrace, upon the treaty being received by Clearidas, he sent a despatch to the Spartans to say that is was quite impossible to hand over Amphipolis to the Athenians without the citizens' consent; the Spartans replied that he should order them to do so, but failing that, that he should leave Amphipolis and march south immediately, by way of Heraclea in Trachis. Unfortunately, an Amphipolitan demagoge of the worst sort, named Thrasydaeus, mounted the platform, and, winding up the Amphipolitans into a fury at the Treaty, called on them to resist the Spartans, who, he said, were now quite as much their enemies as the Athenians were, and to prevent them from leaving, or to treat them just the same as any other enemy. When the Spartiates were all together in the agora, with Clearidas standing next to them by the side of the platform from which Thrasydaeus was addressing the Amphipolitans, they suddenly found themselves, each only carrying a sword, surrounded by a mob of armed supporters of Thrasydaeus. At this point, the agora suddenly broke out into frenzied panic, and the Amphipolitans ran to arms. Clearidas did the only thing he possibly could in the circumstances, short of fighting his way out into hostile territory with no armour or provisions and being surrounded in the countryside; mounting the podium, he cried that the Spartans would never abandon their allies against their will, and that the Spartans would certainly stay as long as the Amphipolitans needed them. At this point, the Spartans were able to slip out of the tense agora and go back to their quarters, thoroughly dismayed at this unprecedented situation.
At any rate, this was the situation when Lamachus arrived at Eion with 2500 infantry and 40 ships; when he arrived, he received a secret despatch from Clearidas explaining the situation and apologising for the circumstances. Lamachus decided to await further instructions from the Assembly, and devoted his attention to capturing Scione, which fell without much trouble. In the circumstances, he prevented the Peloponnesian troops left there by Brasidas from leaving, again waiting for the Assembly to determine an appropriate measure for dealing with them given that Amphipolis had not been restored. Instead, Lamachus confiscated their armour, and took them with him to Potidaea, where he spent the winter.
At the same time, the Hieraeans and Paralians, along with many of the Trachinians, made a move to drive the Spartans out of Heraclea, a staging-post built in Trachis some years earlier. Originally it had been prosperous, but now raids from the Malian tribes had rendered it poorer and less populous. The Malians had the support of many of the Thessalians, including that of the city of Larissa; the Aleuads indeed claimed that the threat posed by the Spartans to Thessaly was great enough that the extraordinary office of
tagos should be given to their head, but the Thessalians rejected this idea out of hand, as the circumstances did not appear to warrant it. While many of the Aleuads
themselves with
kleroi in Pelasgiotis were quite reluctant to leave their farms to fight, and the city of Pherae sent a contingent more than somewhat below their requisite quota, the Pharsalians were fairly eager to set out, with the result that a very large army of Thessalians, strong in infantry and cavalry alike, soon gathered at Pharsalus and marched into Malis. The army was, indeed, so large that it could scarcely be supplied in such a place as Malis, and a certain number of the Thessalians had to be sent home for want of supplies.
At any rate, the Thessalian army made as though to take the place by storm. As the Thessalian army was far too large for any Heraclean sally to even make a dent on, the Heracleans did not offer battle to the Thessalians and it was quite beyond the power of the Thessalians to force it. The Thessalians repeatedly tried for the rest of the year to take Heraclea by storm; but it was well garrisoned and fortified given the small size of the place, and the Heracleans had made sure of buying up food supplies beforehand. The Thessalians made several attacks on the city wall during the course of the summer, but they all failed, and, although the Heracleans are now beginning to run out of food, the Thessalians are even more short of it, and less numerous than they were before, as much of the besieging force left Malis to bring in the harvest in from the fields of Thessaly. Heraclea was still under siege by the beginning of the following summer, but the besiegers were much fewer in number and mostly Malians, Aenianians, and Dolopians, with a small remaining contingent of Pharsalians. [-200 Heracleans; -1000 Thessalian infantry of various types; 500 Trachinians defect to the Thessalians; sizeable decrease in Aleuad prestige throughout Thessaly.]
The Athenian officer on the spot at Pteleum was not relieved by any Spartan garrison, and consequently was unable to hand the place over to the Spartans, especially as relinquishing the city would have exposed it to an attack by the Thessalians.
------- THE PELOPONNESE -------
In the same year, at the beginning of summer, the Spartans, led by King Pleistoanax, marched into Parrhasia from the south, in order to destroy the fort at Cypsela. The Mantineans, marching out in full force, made to hinder the attack while they waited for reinforcements. In particular, they fortified certain narrow passes against the Spartans as they advanced into Parrhasia, with, indeed, considerable success: while each pass fell in turn, by the time that the Mantineans had fallen back on Cypsela, urgent appeals had been despatched to Elis and Argos, and it became known that large Elean and Argive forces were marching to join them, and, indeed, the Eleans had already reached Heraea, while the Argives were at Mantinea itself. The Spartans nevertheless laid siege to Cypsela, which, spurred on with the help of reinforcements, the Mantineans and their Arcadian allies defended valiantly. [-100 Mantineans; -100 Parrhasians; 250 Parrhasians defect from Mantinea to Sparta]
The Spartans were eager to give battle in wide open terrain: as it happened they had little difficulty in achieving this, as the Mantineans were also spoiling for a fight, and the two armies faced each other along a valley, across a brook named the Crysserus, whose spring was the water source for the garrison of the fort of Cypsela, which was on the hill to the west, overlooking the battle. Both armies were equally well positioned on the rocky ground which stretched between the brook and the hills; the ground sloped slowly towards the river from both sides, down to the riverbed, which was about a yard deep and two and a half yards wide, but, at the time of year, it only had a slight amount of water running at the bottom. The Spartans had to cross the brook in order to dislodge the Mantineans and continue to besiege Cypsela, which they did with formidable discipline, securing themselves their position on the opposite bank with no real difficulty; nevertheless, the Tegeans came to grips with the Argives with the back two rows of their phalanx still in the riverbed. However, their first attack pushed the Argives in the centre right back with considerable ease, with the result that they extricated themselves from the brook and faced the allies on more or less even terms.
On the Spartan left, the Sciritae were drawn up partly opposite the Eleans, but mostly opposite the Argives, as, in fact, the Eleans so far outflanked the Sciritae that the Eleans barely faced anyone at all. In the centre, the Tegeans were at the front, with the perioeci in the ranks behind them, drawn up against the Argives and Arcadian allies of the Mantineans. On the Spartan right, the Spartiates themselves, along with the Neodamodeis, were drawn up against the Mantineans; the end of the allied line was taken by the thousand picked Argives. Thus the best troops of the Spartans were drawn up against the best troops of the Argives.
On the Spartan right, the Spartans largely came face to face, then, with the Thousand, who fiercely attacked the Spartans drawn up 16 deep, and, much to the surprise of everyone, this actually succeeded; the normally unbreakable Spartiate line broke, and the Spartiates and Neodamodeis were driven back first into the river and then across to the other side, leaving quite a disturbance in the cohesion of the line between the Spartans and the Perioeci, which the picked Argives began to exploit enthusiastically. [-120 Spartiates; -100 neodamodeis.]
The Sciritae and Tegeans, though, held their ground excellently, and the Tegeans made such headway against the Argives that, in fact, this began to accentuate the gap between the Tegeans and the Spartans, which began to be filled with a - now rather confused - melée of intermingled perioeci, neodamodeis, and picked Argives. The Sciritae, who were completely outflanked and outnumbered by the Eleans, nevertheless held their ground very creditably.
The picked Argives, then, having pushed the Spartans onto the further river bank, sought to exploit the gap between the Spartans and Tegeans, and fought very effectively, inflicting significant casualties on the perioeci and neodamodeis, and significantly affecting the ability of the Tegeans to push further on against the other allied troops in front of them. [-400 perioeci; -300 neodamodeis; -50 Spartiates; -50 picked Argives.]
However, a point came where the Thousand pushed too far into the gap, and the offensive ended up fouling itself on the riverbank; soon enough, the Thousand found themselves trapped in between the Spartiates, who by now had recovered their cohesion as might have been expected from such a well-disciplined unit, and the perioeci to their rear, who, while forced to fight the other way round from the way they had been originally been standing, nevertheless attacked the Thousand ferociously. The Thousand were effectively surrounded, and they were shortly routed. Although some escaped to the hills, a massacre of the Thousand was shortly under way. Although the support of the perioeci vanishing caused considerable difficulties for the Tegeans, who were pushed back towards the river by the body of the Argives and Arcadians, the pressure was still not enough to force them to break, and, to the great credit of the Sciritae, they did not break either, and, soon enough, the picked Argive corps was no more. [-500 picked Argives.]
The Spartans recrossed the river to deal with the troops facing the Tegeans, and pushed in on the Mantinean flank. In the circumstances, it was simply a matter of time before the enemy broke; under pressure from better soldiers, the numbers of the allies were of little use. The Sciritae were practically entrenched by now and it was quite impossible for the enemy to displace them, despite the Eleans outflanking them by about 2500 men; the Mantineans, though, were completely demoralised by the Spartan flank attack, and so, in due course, the allied line broke and the army fled, reassembling eventually at Mantinea, although the Eleans went home instead to take in their harvest. Cypsela was immediately taken, and the Parrhasian cities were forced to capitulate to the Spartans. [-500 Argives; -500 Mantineans; -200 Eleans; -200 Parrhasians; -200 Tegeans.]
The Spartans then marched east. The Maenalians also joined them, and they reached Mantinea shortly before harvest. Some of the Mantineans had, in fact, reaped a small amount of corn in the course of their flight, and their poorer citizens and slaves had brought in a certain quantity of grain; but even that was not really ripe. Most of the harvest was carried off by the Spartans as they marched on Mantinea. The Spartans immediately sat down to a siege, but the Mantineans soon began to run out of food. By the end of winter, Mantinea's granaries were very nearly empty, although all direct attacks on the city have failed and it remains that the combined forces of the Argives and Mantineans are still sizeable. [-50 Spartiates; -50 perioeci; -50 Mantineans.]
IC:
The Athenian Boule will meet on Tuesday at 11pm GMT; the Athenian Ekklesia will meet on Wednesday at 11pm GMT.
To Syracuse
From the Leontinian democrats
Please show your mercy and spare us, and restore us to some sort of freedom.
To all Greeks
From Cumae
Our city is depopulated through the Samnites's depredations, but we have been saved! We therefore call for new colonists from throughout the Greek world to come to our still highly prosperous city and repopulate it and make it once more as great a city as it was.
To Sparta
From Gythium, Helus, etc.
We cannot afford to build any more warships until we have replaced our lost merchantmen. We hope you can understand this.
OOC:
You can't be in two places at once. Therefore, if you send all the people from your city out on campaign, they can't build you a new fleet at the same time. A significant temple or a new fleet takes manpower to build. I don't mind, though, if players want to give overly ambitious orders; bear in mind, though, that if you try to do two things at once with the same manpower, you need to prioritise or I will do it for you.
For invasions and actions, I could do with a time of the year. For example, das, I supposed you wanted to attack Mantinea at the beginning of summer, but you didn't say, so I might have been wrong, and Yui, erez, you should also have specified please.
If you were the victim of a unfortunate and improbable accidents, I apologise on behalf of my dice. I don't give them a very big role in my decision making, but in this update they were very insistent.
I resolved various battles and campaigns this update on #nes, which I always like as a way of doing that. All players are welcome to take advantage of the possibility of doing this (not that it necessarily
is to your advantage if you've written decent plans and contingencies) by being on #nes at the right moment.
If you see any mistakes in the stats, inform me please.
Gen.Mannerheim: Sorry you didn't get much of a mention compared to everyone else; your orders were good and the only reason you didn't get much of the update is because you didn't have any real problems in carrying your orders out.
Espoir: For the second part of your orders, nothing has come of them. If you wanted that to work, the way to do it would be to have spoken to an Athenian player and got them to pull a few strings.
The Strategos: I will reply to your orders-cum-diplo by PM separately later on.
Map:
