Exhausted, blinded by the dust and beginning to take serious casualties, the Spartans regrouped and undertook a harrowing retreat north to the old fort. There, they were able to establish a viable defense, the fort and cliffs providing them a position where they could not be outflanked and taken from all sides.

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The battle raged on, but heat, thirst and exhaustion were taking their toll on both sides, and it seemed a stalemate had been reached. Actually, Demosthenes had already won, since the Spartans now had no water supply, and their defeat was consequently only a matter of time. A Messenian commander, however, convinced Demosthenes to allow him to lead a small force of archers and light-armed troops through the rough cliffs that protected the Spartan rear. The climb was extremely difficult, but because of that fact the Spartans had left this route unguarded, and the force soon appeared on high ground behind the Spartans.

Trapped now like their ancestors at Thermopylae and with Epitades dead, the Spartans lost all hope. Cleon and Demosthenes, realizing the immense value of live Spartan prisoners, called a halt to the fighting and asked the Spartans to surrender. Probably to their surprise–certainly to the shock of the Greek world–the surviving Spartans did exactly that, breaking a two-century-old tradition of death before surrender. Seventy-two days after the siege had begun with the Athenian naval victory, 292 Spartans, about 120 of them full Spartiates, entered captivity.

The military and political repercussions of the Athenian victory at Sphacteria were far-reaching. The Spartan prisoners gave the Athenians, who threatened their execution, a guarantee against further Peloponnesian incursions into Attica and a powerful bargaining edge in any peace negotiations. That Sparta did not write off the captives as dishonorable cowards, as an earlier generation would have done, reveals just how far the gradual breakdown of her system and the decline in manpower was undermining traditional Spartan values. Further, the base at Pylos, garrisoned after the victory with free Messenians, remained a serious thorn in Sparta’s side, sending guerrilla raids into the Messenian countryside and serving as a magnet for rebelling helots. More than anything else, the captives and the Pylos base would lead Sparta to the negotiating table and the ultimately unworkable Peace of Nicias in 421 bc.

Athens, of course, went wild with joy. She was now free from the threat of invasion, had eliminated the Peloponnesian fleet and, through Pylos, could carry the war virtually into the heart of Spartan territory. Morale shot sky-high–who else had ever forced Spartans to surrender? The victory was not, however, an unqualified benefit for the Athenians. Cleon, with his aggressive imperialist policies, now enjoyed more influence than any other Athenian leader since Pericles. Nicias and the conservatives saw their hopes for a quick peace dashed as their countrymen, delirious with power, followed Cleon into increasingly dangerous expansionist schemes.

In the year after Sphacteria, Athens would send armies west into Megara and northwest into Boeotia. The Boeotian expedition would quickly culminate in the disaster at Delium, a recapitulation of the Athenian defeat at Coronea in 447, and the troops lost there might have been better employed guarding the strategically vital city of Amphipolis, which revolted in 424. Only the loss of Amphipolis and Cleon’s death in a failed attempt to recover it in 422 would finally lead the Athenians to the peace negotiations that the Spartans had desperately desired since Sphacteria. And in those negotiations, Nicias would foolishly throw away the prize of Sphacteria by trading the prisoners for promises that the Spartans had little hope of fulfilling.

For Thucydides, history was made by human beings. And if one understands human nature and how people, especially large groups of them, act in given sets of circumstances, one can to a great extent calculate future events; that is the prime quality of a great statesman like Pericles. But Thucydides also understood the role played by chance (tyche), which consists of those random occurrences that are outside human control, or purely accidental, such as the storm that drove the Athenian fleet into Pylos and the forest fire on Sphacteria. Such occurrences are usually minor and unimportant, but should they happen at a critical moment, they can have a dramatic effect on the course of events. That is true of all human affairs, but especially so during wartime, because war produces many more critical moments, when chance can powerfully swing events in one direction or another. Pylos in 425 was clearly one of those moments.

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