The Athenians were, in fact, only some 75 miles away at Zacynthus, very likely because they had received word of the departure of the enemy fleet from Corcyra and were waiting to intercept it. Learning from Demosthenes’ appeal that the Peloponnesians had probably already slipped by them, they hastened back to Pylos.

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Pylos is a narrow, rocky promontory about three-quarters of a mile long, and in antiquity was connected to the mainland all along its eastern side (the lagoon of Osmyn Aga is a recent development). The natural defenses of the place are such that the Athenians had to augment them with stone walls at just three points–short stretches in the north and southeast, and a longer line covering several hundred yards of vulnerable beach in the southwest. Pylos was in many ways a ready-made fortress, but nevertheless the forces available to Demosthenes for its defense were a bit thin, even with the addition of two small Messenian vessels that "happened by" (according to Thucydides–or perhaps they were actually summoned from the Athenian? Messenian base at Naupactus). Theships’ crews provided perhaps 600 men, but most of them were poorly armed and carried improvised wicker shields. As for serious heavy infantry, Demosthenes had at least 90hoplites (10 marines from each of his ships and 40 brought in by the Messenians), though there were probably more, since his successful defense is otherwise hard to explain.

Thucydides says nothing about the number of Spartan troops, but it must have been well over 1,000, perhaps 2,000 or more, if they could station several hundred hoplites on Sphacteria while simultaneously assaulting Pylos. The Spartans were confident that, given their superiority in numbers and the quality of their soldiers, they could easily overwhelm the hastily built and poorly defended fortifications at Pylos before the Athenian fleet returned. As soon as their forces were gathered, they attacked Demosthenes’ defenses at all three points, a squadron of 43 ships carrying a landing force of hoplites toward the wall along the southwestern beach. The Spartan command, which included Brasidas, one of the rare clever leaders to emerge from Sparta’s military system, calculated that the Athenian fortifications along the sea beach would be the weakest, because the Athenians would as usual have assumed that they would be in control of the sea and thus need to face assaults only on the landward sides. Thucydides, in fact, commented on the oddness of the situation, in which an Athenian army was defending against a landing by a Spartan fleet, a complete reversal of the normal circumstances.

The Spartan assessment was correct, but Demosthenes could just as easily read the situation. He sent the bulk of his forces to guard the landward walls, where Spartan numbers could ensure steady, tiring pressure, but he himself led a detachment of 60 hoplites and a few archers to deal with the expected amphibious attack. That attack indeed came, but despite superior numbers and the exhortations of Brasidas, who was wounded and put out of the action early, the Spartans could not gain a foothold. Because of the rocky and difficult nature of the shore and the narrowness of the Sphacteria channel,they could bring in only part of their fleet at a time, while the Athenians took courage from the knowledge of how extremely hard it was to force a landing against a resolute hoplite force on the beaches. The assaults went on for all of one day and part of the next, when the Spartans called a temporary halt and began preparing for a more serious attempt with some siege equipment the following day. The Spartans now faced the imminent return of the Athenian fleet, but they had already taken measures that they thought would solve that problem.

Lying immediately to the south of Pylos and stretching almost three miles across the entrance of the Bay of Navarino, the island of Sphacteria is extremely rough and, in Demosthenes’ day, was wooded. The channel north of the island is very narrow, about 150yards, but the southern passage is some 1,400 yards wide and 200 feet deep. That latter fact made the Spartan contingency plan, as explained by Thucydides, very difficult to understand. According to the historian, they intended–should they fail to capture Pylos before the Athenian fleet returned–to block the entrances to the bay with their ships and thus deny the Athenians an anchorage and any significant access to their comrades at Pylos. A force of hoplites was stationed on the island in order to prevent the enemy from establishing a base there.

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