Hello, Χαίρετε, and welcome to this bonus episode of Epic Greek History: The Truly Major Historical Greek War — Maybe. I’m Scott Emmons. 

I’m throwing in an extra episode this month, because after I’d already locked in my plan for the rest of the year, I realized there was one event I wanted to cover that didn’t quite fit in any of the upcoming episodes. That event is the Lelantine War, and it’s notable because it’s the first recorded conflict between city-states in Greek history — as opposed to legend. That is, if it happened at all. 

I’ve mentioned before that what we call the historical period in Greece begins in the 8th century BCE. The conventional start is 776, supposedly the year of the first Olympiad, although not many people would take that seriously as a precise date. A key factor in the transition is that from this time on, we have Greek writing. Homer and Hesiod tell us a lot about the Greek world that we wouldn’t know without them. Also, from the 7thand 6th centuries we have scraps of poems by various authors who sometimes refer to events going on in their own times. But it’s always good to keep in mind that there’s no historical writing from this era. The first Greek historian was Herodotus, who wrote in the 420s BCE. That means most of the information we get from before his time is essentially oral history. Accounts of events that have been passed down from one generation to the next, until finally a historian writes them down. That’s not to say we have no accurate information about this early period, but we all know how stories can morph over time, especially when someone has a political point of view that they want to support. So we can see events of the early Archaic Period as in a sort of halfway zone between history and legend. And that’s very much the case with the Lelantine War. 

So what was this war? It was a conflict that took place sometime in the late 8th or early 7th century BCE, between two neighboring cities, Khalkis and Eretria, on the island of Euboea. Euboea, you may remember, is the long, narrow island just off the eastern coast of central Greece and running roughly parallel to it. It played a big role in the episode on the Early Iron Age, because this part of Euboea had an unusual level of wealth and was a leader in overseas trade. As we move into the Archaic Period, these cities, Khalkis and Eretria, were two of the most important in Greece. They were wealthy, very active in trade, and they were the first to send out overseas settlements, kicking off a huge trend that will be the topic of the next episode. 

So here you have two prominent, neighboring towns at a time when Greece has been undergoing major changes. The leadership in both places would be in the hands of powerful aristocrats. The population is growing, and to feed those extra mouths, there’s been a gradual shift away from pastoralism toward more reliance on agriculture. That has an effect on the nature of fighting, or at least what people fight for. Back in the Early Iron Age, war was often a matter of raiding a rival chief’s territory and carrying off some livestock. Now it’s more about who controls the best land for growing grain and other staples. That’s the basis for this conflict. Between Khalkis and Eretria is the lush, fertile Lelantine Plain, so called because it’s watered by the river Lelantos. So a dispute arises over claims to that valuable farmland. 

Now, this kind of dispute was very common between neighboring cities. If it had been just another quarrel over a fertile plain, we probably would never have heard of it. What makes the Lelantine War different is that on both sides it involved allies from different parts of Greece. The historian Thucydides mentions it briefly near the beginning of his work. In this passage, he’s arguing that his main topic, the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, was the greatest conflict in Greek history, so he’s downplaying all the wars that came before it. As translated by Richard Crawley, Thucydides tells us, quote:

There was no union of subject cities round a great state; no spontaneous combination of equals for confederate expeditions; what fighting there was consisted merely of local warfare between rival neighbors. The nearest approach to a coalition took place in the old war between Khalkis and Eretria. This was a quarrel in which the rest of the Hellenic world did to some extent take sides. Unquote.

 And that’s all he tells us. It was a bigger war than others, involving more states. Other authors don’t give us much more. Our information about the Lelantine War amounts to a few scattered references from various sources. One of the more solid pieces of information comes from Herodotus, writing a few decades before Thucydides. Like Thucydides, he mentions the Lelantine War only in passing. He’s describing the Ionian revolt of 499 BCE, when the city of Miletus, over on what’s now the coast of Turkey, led the other Ionian Greek cities in a rebellion against the Persian Empire. Athens sent a naval contingent to help the Ionians, and Eretria sent a few ships to join them. Here’s what Herodotus tells us in the translation by Andrea Purvis. Quote:

 The Athenians came to Miletus with their twenty ships and brought along with them five triremes of the Eretrians. The Eretrians participated in this war not for the sake of the Athenians, but in order to repay a debt they owed to the Milesians, who had earlier helped the Eretrians wage war against Khalkis at the very time when the Samians had rushed to the aid of the Khalkidians. Unquote.

 This is already feeling like quite a bit to unpack, but the upshot is that Herodotus mentions two specific states that got involved in the fight between Khalkis and Eretria. Miletus allied with Eretria, while Samos sided with Khalkis. So those two alliances seem pretty certain — that is, if Herodotus is talking about the Lelantine War and not some other conflict between the same two cities.

 Outside of that, historians have tried to compile lists of allies on both sides, but a lot of the evidence is extremely flimsy. Just to cite one example, the much later author Plutarch, writing in the 1st to the 2nd century CE, says in one of his essays that when the Corinthians established a settlement on the island of Corcyra, they drove out some Eretrian settlers who’d been there before. On that basis, some have speculated that the Corinthians, as the enemies of Eretria, must have been Team Khalkis in the Lelantine War. That’s the kind of evidence we’re dealing with.

 Archaeology can shed a little more light on the matter. It doesn’t tell us anything about the alliances, but excavations on the outskirts of Eretria have turned up a burial of a prominent warrior who may have fought in this conflict. This was obviously someone of very high social rank, because his burial is like something out of Homer. His body was cremated, wrapped in a cloth, and placed in a bronze urn along with some jewelry and a Phoenician scarab in a gold setting. His grave also held swords, spearheads, and even a late Bronze Age staff that would have been an heirloom passed down through generations. To top it off, there’s even evidence of a horse sacrifice as part of the funeral rites. This burial dates from about 720 BCE, and over the next few decades, six more cremated warriors were interred at the same site. The archaeological record shows that sacrifices and ritual meals continued to be held there at least until the 5th century BCE, so these warriors were clearly worshipped as heroes.

 Now, with this Homeric-style burial, we’re in rarefied, aristocratic air. And one way to look at the Lelantine War is to see it as a kind of swan song of the aristocratic warrior culture. Over the next century there will be a shift to a different kind of warfare that relies on a tight formation known as the hoplite phalanx, and that in turn will have a leveling effect, limiting the power and prestige of the aristocrats. But for now, the fighting is old school. Which means, at least in part, that cavalry plays an important role. Aristotle, in his Politics, mentions early Khalkis and Eretria as states that relied on cavalry for warfare. Which for Aristotle means a narrow oligarchy is in power, since only the wealthiest people can afford to keep horses. Plutarch also tells a story that the Khalkidians were concerned about the Eretrians having superior cavalry, so they brought in horsemen from the region of Thessaly — which was the place for horse breeding in Greece. The Thessalians sent a general by the name of Kleomachos, who died fighting valiantly, and received the very unusual honor of being buried in the agora at Khalkis. According to Plutarch, Kleomachos’s grave marker was still there in his time.

 Another hero on the side of Khalkis may even get a shout-out in Hesiod. In his long poem “Works and Days,” which I’ve quoted several times in this podcast, Hesiod tells us that he once went to Khalkis to compete in a poetry contest at the funeral games for a man named Amphidamas. Funeral games are another strong signal that we’re in the world of the aristocracy. That’s all Hesiod says about it, except, of course, that he won. But our friend Plutarch tells us that many famous poets attended those games, and he adds that the deceased, Amphidamas, had done a lot of damage to the Eretrians and died in the battles over the Lelantine Plain.

 Well, a lot of these anecdotes are probably the result of stories being told and retold, picking up additions along the way. Plutarch wrote over 700 years after Hesiod, and that’s a lot of time for a story to be embellished. Still, the overall picture is one of a conflict between aristocratic warriors. What does that mean for the style of fighting? Well, the geographer Strabo, who lived in the late 1st century BCE into the 1st century CE, gives us a fascinating clue about that. Strabo tells us about an inscription he saw at a sanctuary of Artemis near Eretria. And this inscription supposedly recorded an agreement between Khalkis and Eretria that neither side would use any missiles like arrows or slings. There was always an idea in Greek culture that the noblest, bravest kind of fighting was hand-to-hand combat. Archers and slingers had their place as light-armed combatants, but really honorable men did their fighting at close quarters with the enemy. On a side note, if you’re wondering how this hand-to-hand fighting squares with the emphasis on cavalry, there may not be all that much of a contradiction. Much of what’s called “cavalry” in this period amounts to “mounted infantry.” In other words, warriors show up to the battle on horseback but then dismount and fight on foot. 

 To get back to Strabo’s story of the pact that neither side would use missiles… We don’t really know what he saw or whether it was genuine, but his account may get some support from a fragment of a poem by Archilochus, who wrote in the early 7th century BCE. As translated by M.L. West, Archilochus says, quote:

There won’t be many bows drawn, nor slings in use,

when men fight this war, nor long-haired men’s

bows: it will be the work of swords.

For they are skilled in this kind of fighting,

the Euboeans, masters of close combat.

Unquote

 So the sense we get from these sources is of an aristocratic style of warfare with strict rules of engagement, something like a code of chivalry. And that aristocratic ethos may shed some light on the tradition of alliances from all over the Greek world. Aristocrats in ancient Greece had strong ties with their peers in other communities through a system called “guest-friendship.” These were connections between families that were maintained through generations. If I’m an aristocrat in Athens and I have a guest-friend in Corinth, that means anytime I travel to Corinth, I have a place to stay and I can expect to be treated warmly as a guest. If he visits Athens, I have a responsibility to provide hospitality. It’s a system of reciprocal favors. Khalkis and Eretria were two of the most important cities in their time, and their leaders would certainly have had guest-friends all over the Greek world. So many of those alliances may have been a matter of a guest-friend having influence in his own city and arranging for that city to send support.  

 Well, as we get closer to the end of this episode, there’s a big unanswered question. Who won? Strangely, no ancient author mentions that. We have these short references to the conflict, but no surviving work gives us a narrative of the war or tells us the outcome. It’s possible that what was dimly remembered as the Lelantine War was really an ongoing series of skirmishes that lasted over decades, with no decisive end. We have some slight evidence that Khalkis might have come out ahead. In the early 8th century, the two cities worked together in overseas actions, founding settlements in southern Italy. As you’d expect, that cooperation comes to a stop at the time of the Lelantine War, and then Khalkis is the one that continues those ventures in the west. But Eretria doesn’t seem to have gone into rapid decline at this time. There’s really no way to determine a clear winner.

 Now, you may have noticed how often I’ve used words like “may,” “might,” and “could be” in this episode. Just about every bit of information we have comes with a “maybe” attached. So what can we make of all this? A lot depends on how much trust we want to put in our sources. The late professor Donald Kagan, whose lectures on Greek history are available in podcast form, talks about practicing the “higher naivete.” Meaning essentially that you’ll believe what an ancient author says, unless there’s a compelling reason not to. If you take that approach, it’s possible to put together a fairly cohesive narrative of the Lelantine War. That’s essentially what the historian Oswyn Murray does in his book Early Greece. He produces a list of allies on either side and talks about the epic character of the war as embodied by heroes like that Thessalian general, Kleomakhos. On the more skeptical side, there’s Jonathan M. Hall in his book, A History of the Archaic World. He goes through the motions of constructing the history only to turn around and deconstruct it, pointing out how tenuous each scrap of information is. He sums it up by saying, quote: “In short, we do not know when — or even whether — the Lelantine War occurred.” Unquote

 Hall is right that we can’t be certain about any part of it. But for those of us who aren’t professional historians or who don’t approach history quite so scientifically, there’s something to be said for Kagan’s higher naivete. I’m inclined to believe what Herodotus and Thucydides tell us. Intuitively, I think there probably was a Lelantine War that involved alliances with other cities, although except for the two that Herodotus names, I wouldn’t try to guess which cities fought on either side. If we accept that it happened, we can look at the Lelantine War as a last great example of Greek warfare in the aristocratic, quasi-heroic vein before the Greek city-state went in a more egalitarian direction. But one of its lessons is how elusive historical truth can be.

 That’s it for this bonus episode. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and if you did, I’d love to hear from you. Or if you want to correct me or point out something I’ve missed, I’d be happy to hear that too. Just shoot me an email at scott@epicgreekhistory.com or leave a comment on Facebook or Instagram. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for my theme song was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork are by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well!