Battle of Pylos
- Date:
- July 425 BCE
- Context:
- Peloponnesian War
In the Peloponnesian War, Athens, Sparta, and their respective allies contested supremacy in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. Sparta was usually stronger on land and Athens at sea. At Pylos in July 425 bce, an Athenian naval success led to the surrender of a Spartan land force, an almost unprecedented event.
From around 460 bce, Athens and its allies in the so-called Delian League—mainly island and coastal states around the Aegean—fought a series of wars against Sparta and its allies, based predominantly in the Peloponnese and other parts of mainland Greece. Backed by its great trading wealth, Athens was dominant at sea and the city itself was strongly fortified. Athens thus held out against repeated Spartan land invasions.
Pericles, the Athenian supreme commander, had long counseled a defensive war meant to maintain the power of Athens rather than to expand it. From around 426 bce, three years after Pericles’s death, a new Athenian leader, Cleon, began a more aggressive strategy, stepping up raids on the coast of the Peloponnese. In the course of these operations, having put in there to escape a storm at sea, a small Athenian force under the command of Demosthenes set up a base in the summer of 425 bce at Pylos, on the Bay of Navarino, on the southwest coast. Faced with this threat less than 70 miles (110 km) from their home city, the Spartans attacked.
A three-stage battle followed. At first, superior Spartan forces under the command of Brasidas attacked the Greek camp on land, but were soon forced back. Next the main Athenian fleet arrived, defeated the Spartan fleet, and captured a number of its ships. This left a small Spartan army cut off on the island of Sphacteria in the bay. After peace negotiations failed, the Athenians attacked the island and forced the Spartans to surrender. Those surrendering included more than one hundred of Sparta’s elite warrior class, an outcome that was a shocking blow to Spartan prestige and an inspiration to Athens and its allies as the war continued.
Losses: 300 Spartan and allied troops surrender; other losses unknown.