Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The Public Sphere 253
Euripides’ tragedies eventually earned their freedom and returned
to Athens.
Not until the Peloponnesian War did the Greek world experience
anything akin to the modern notion of total war. Thukydides constantly
emphasizes the decline in moral standards that this brought
about. In 413 b.c.e., a contingent of Thrakian mercenaries, who had
been hired by the Athenians, ran amok and killed all the inhabitants
of the town of Mykalessos in Boiotia, slaughtering “even the
livestock and whatever other living creatures they saw,” including
all the pupils at a boys’ school (7.29.4).
It was not only the barbarians whose standards declined, however,
as Thukydides is at pains to emphasize. When the town
of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos revolted from the Athenian
confederacy and was forced to surrender in 427 b.c.e. , the Athenians
decided to execute all the men and enslave the women and
children. The next day, however, they revoked their decision and
opted instead to execute only the ringleaders, one thousand in
number (3.50). Just over ten years later, the island of Melos (the
most southwesterly of the Cyclades), which was neutral, declined
to join Athens’s “alliance.” After a short siege, the Athenians
did not think twice about carrying out the punishment that they
had originally intended for the Mytileneans. They slaughtered
the men, enslaved the women, and repopulated the island with
500 of their own citizens (5.116). Thukydides’ point is that the
decade-long war had brutalized the Athenians: acting initially
with restraint when a trusted ally revolted, they later acted with
none when a neutral state refused to toe the line. Thukydides sees
this decline in moral standards extending to daily life, notably, as
a we have seen, as a result of the plague that ravaged the city from
430 to 426 b.c.e.
Disposal of the Dead
Peter Krentz (quoted in Sekunda, Greek Hoplite 480–323 B.C. , 30)
has estimated that, on average, 5 percent of victors and 14 percent
of the defeated died on the battlefield in any single engagement,
though sometimes the percentage of casualties was considerably
higher. It was a universally upheld, albeit unwritten law to allow
the defeated side to return to the battlefield to retrieve its dead. The
law is already observed in The Iliad. In fact, the return of one’s dead,
which was made through a herald, was an acknowledgement of
defeat. Only very rarely was this law violated, because sensibilities