Battle of Olpae in 426 BC

Olpae was a stronghold near Amphilochian Argos. The battle of Olpae (426 BC) was an Athenian victory that ended a Spartan campaign aimed at the conquest of Acarnania and Amphilochia.

In the winter of 426 BC the Ambraciots invaded Amphilochia and took Olpae. The Acarnanians hastened to the defense of Amphilochia and asked Demosthenes to come from Naupactus to join their central command.

It has been suggested that the Acarnanians were impressed with Demosthenes’ military skills. Soon after the arrival, Demosthenes took part in the battle of Olpae.

Demosthenes gave battle to the enemy between Olpae and Argos and by skillfully contrived ambuscade annulled the advantage which they had in superior numbers.

According to Thucydides, Demosthenes’, generalship was responsible for the major victory of the Acarnanian-Athenian force over the Ambraciot-Peloponnesian enemy.

The victory cost the conquerors about three hundred men. On the other side the loss was great; and Menedaius (Spartan), on whom the command devolved after the death of his colleagues, found himself reduced to the embarrassing alternative of sustaining a blockade both by land and sea.
Battle of Olpae in 426 BC

 

Peloponnesian War

The history of the Peloponnesian War is an account of the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece, fought between the Peloponnesian League (led by Sparta an d the Athenian league (led by Athens).

In the second half of the 5th century BC the two leading powers in Greece were Athens, which was democratic and innovative and whose navy built up an empire in the Aegean Sea and Sparta, which was oligarchic and conservative and whose army of heavy infantry enabled it to dominate the southern part of the Greek mainland.

It was fought between 431 and 404 BC, Athens foresaw the war, and knew they could not defeat the Spartan Army in a straight up battle.

So they constructed a walled corridor between Athens and their port of Piraeus. When the Spartans invaded, the Athenians withdrew behind their walls and the Spartans could not successfully storm the long walls.

War came on a winter in early March 431. Some three hundred men from Thebes, a city allied with Sparta’s Peloponnesian League, made a treacherous attack upon neighboring community of Plataia an ally of Athens.

The Thebans were natural enemies of the Plataians,since they had long been striving to bring all the Beotian towns under their direct overlordship.

This neighborly clash quickly touched off hostilities all around Greece, and soon a Spartan was marching on Athens, while Athenian fleets were sailing and raiding around the Peloponnesos.

At the same time that Athens was under attack from Sparta, the city state also suffered a terrible plaque, beginning in 430s BC.

The plaque killed about a third of Athens’s citizens, This contributed to Athens’s eventually defeat at the hands of its Spartan rivals during the Peloponnesian War.

The conflict marked the end of Athenian command of the sea. The war between the two city-states ended in a victory for Sparta.

Peloponnesian War