20 The Battle of Champions (§§82-83 and 9.26-27)

Herodotus uses Croesus’s urgent appeals to the allies as the occasion for a tale of another military operation by Sparta (1.82). The story involves one of the many “battles of champions” that occur in ancient history, always to the same effect. The story is suggestive of human nature and bears close study. The current tale, moreover, has some striking contrasts with a second such story Herodotus tells later (9.26-27).

Sparta and Argos, at war over Thyreae, decide to spare the mass of their respective armies by appointing three hundred men from each side to determine the fight. The greater part of each army withdraws (so as not to be tempted to help their side). As before, the fight itself does not interest the historian in the least; what matters are the results. Out of the six hundred warriors, only two Argives and one Spartan survived. The Argives assumed that they were the victors and returned to Argos; the Spartan stayed, stripped the bodies of the dead Argives, and carried the spoils to his camp. On the next day each side claimed victory, Argos because of its greater number of surviving warriors, Sparta because its soldier had remained to strip the enemy. The two sides fell to fighting, and, after a great battle with heavy losses, the Spartans won.

The first such battle of champions occurs perhaps in the Iliad, where Paris and Menelaus fight in single combat to determine the husband of Helen and the outcome of the war. The Iliadic battle may serve as a paradigm. The attractiveness of settling a dispute in this simple way is obvious: why have massive slaughter when the matter may be determined by less loss of life? If each side is choosing a representative of its strength, then the battle in microcosm ought to reflect the outcome if larger numbers were to fight and die. Who among us has not at some time thought about the desirability of having the leaders of warring parties fight among themselves to choose a winner? In sporting competition, cities choose athletic teams to represent them; could not the same work in military competitions?

The record of battles of champions suggests, however, that they are doomed to failure. The attempt to render Ares rational and subject to restraint is as hopeless as the attempt to rehabilitate Dionysus or Aphrodite. Unlike sports, where the outcome is contained within the closed system of the sport and does not—or, at least, should not—matter in life outside the activity, war does matter. Sport is game because it is removed from life’s reality, because it has a fixed system of limited rules, and because in sport expertise, skill, excellence, and victory are measured in terms of these rules. But there is no moral good and evil in a sport, no striving after lofty goals, no defending grand principles. Its morality is limited to observing the rules and rehearsing such virtues as sportsmanship, persistence, and discipline; for all practical purposes, it may be considered to exist outside of the sphere of meaningful activities: it is play, game; it is amoral. This, of course, is one source of its charm: while we are engaged in watching or playing a sport, we escape from the rigors and pains of life and withdraw into a carefree world of no significance to the real sorrows of our lives.^[1] In a war, however, nations are fighting for grand principles—freedom, justice, culture. In this sense, against William James, war may be said to be the moral equivalent of sport. In war everything matters; the consequences last into all time afterwards, affecting the lives of future generations.

So, despite the attractiveness of subjecting wars to restraint and, in a battle of champions, to the rules of sport, it doesn’t work: Ares will not be tamed by Apollo. Thus, the Achaeans and Trojans resumed their battle; thus, too, the Argives and Spartans, having lost nearly three hundred men apiece, continue the slaughter. The worst part of the arrangement, perhaps, is the total senselessness of the loss of champions. Each side had chosen its very best, the cream of its manhood, and these were all lost.

The surviving Spartan, ashamed to continue living when all his comrades had perished, slew himself in Thyreae, scene of the battle. There is great poignancy in this scene. One might expect Othryades, the survivor, to exult in his glory; instead, clearly realizing the waste of his comrades’ lives, he chooses to die. He may, perhaps, be compared to the survivors of the Battle of Thermopylae, to Aristodemus “the Coward,” who later redeemed himself at the Battle of Plataea, and to Pantites, who hanged himself (7.229-32). Once again, even in the details, Herodotus shows us the reversals of fortune in human life. The same reversal of fortune will befall Roman Horatius, who after his victory over the Curiatii, will stand trial accused of treason.^[2]

Much later in the History (9.26-27), we find a second battle of champions, when before the Battle of Plataea the Athenians and Tegeans quarrel over which city should man the left wing of the army (the right wing was manned, according to agreement, by the Spartans). The Tegeans claim the privilege because long ago, when Heracles’s son Hyllus was preparing to fight the Peloponnesians, he agreed to fight in single combat the appointed warrior of the Peloponnesians. Echemus of Tegea fought Hyllus and slew him, from which time the right to lead one of the wings has belonged to Tegea. In addition to discussing this ancient myth and history, the Tegeans remind the Spartans of their successful conflicts with the Spar­ tans, conflicts that prove their superiority to the Athenians, but they also promise to abide by Sparta’s decision.

The Athenians assert their claim in a speech deprecating the Tegean accomplishments while at the same time glorifying their own. They end by asserting the importance of present deeds over those of ancestors (9.27). They begin by questioning the entire morality of the Tegeans’ actions against Hyllus. Hyllus, after all, was trying to return to the Peloponnese, from which the Heracleidae had been driven by the villainous Eurystheus. The Athenians, in their appeal to Sparta for the left wing, say that they alone had kindly received the Heracleidae when they were fleeing slavery; moreover, they had destroyed the hybris of Eurystheus and had conquered those who were holding the Peloponnese. Thus, they quickly dispense with Echemus’s victory over Hyllus by questioning the very legitimacy of his aims: what right had the Tegeans to keep the Heracleidae from their land? At the same time, the Athenians have suggested that in conquering the whole Peloponnese they were mightier than Tegea, who conquered only Sparta. To quash Tegea’s claim even further, the Athenians also boast about their generous burial of the Argives who fell in the war against Thebes and about their services against the Amazons and Troy. The mention of distant Troy no doubt seems long ago even to them, and they conclude by discounting the services done in the far past and by mentioning their recent victory at Marathon, where they alone defeated forty-six Asian nations.

The speech of the Athenians thoroughly defeats the claims of the Tegeans, whose accomplishments seem puny in comparison. In the debate, I think, Herodotus is presenting a modern battle of champions. Instead of fighting, the combatants give speeches. “Thus the Athenians defeated the Tegeans,” Herodotus concludes. In this modern contest, the Athenians have stressed the importance of moral values in warfare; the claims of the Tegeans were undercut by the rectitude of their opponents’ cause. In addi­tion, stress was laid upon the importance of recent accomplishments. This is a claim that would certainly have resonated among Herodotus’s hearers, who were no doubt inundated with the Athenians’ own repeated tales of their accomplishments, especially the victory at Marathon-which had by then assumed the aura of “ancient history.”^[3] They might well ask whether Athens should continue to base her current rights to domination and abusive behavior on accomplishments two generations prior.

Despite the war with Argos, Sparta begins preparations to help Croesus. But before the preparations are far along, news comes that Lydia has fallen and that Croesus is taken prisoner. Thus, although Herodotus could have omitted any mention of the conflict between Sparta and Argos—it has no consequence at all for the fall of Lydia—he includes it because of the rele­vance of its message for the History as a whole—a message about the irra­tionality of war, about the peripeties that can befall even the most appar­ently glorious individual, like Othryades, and about the senseless deaths that often result from even the most rational plans.