Assaulting cities is the oldest, and often the most brutal, expression of warfare. The earliest Western literature begins with the biblical siege of Jericho and the Achaeans' attack on Troy. The most moving passages in Thucydides' entire history of the war—the Plataeans' pleas for mercy, the debate between Cleon and Diodotus over the fate of the Mytileneans, the Melian Dialogue, the butchery of the boys at Mycalessus, and the great siege at Syracuse—revolve around the assault on communities of men, women, and children when war came to the very doorstep of the Greek family. Indeed, Mycalessus proved horrific precisely because the Thracian mercenaries sought no real military objective other than the psychological terror of slaughtering children at school—the ancient version of the Chechnyan terrorist assault on the Russian school in Belsan during early September 2004, which shocked the modern world and confirmed Thucydides' prognosis that his history really was a possession for all time, inasmuch as human nature, as he saw, has remained constant across time and space.
There is something surrealistic about storming a city. Sieges are final, ultimate verdicts about not merely the fate of soldiers but of a very people. Nothing is more chilling, for example, than the final hours of Constantinople—10,000 people huddled under the dome of St. Sophia, praying in vain for the angel of deliverance on the early afternoon of May 29, 1453 [C.E.], as the sultan's shock troops burst in to end for good the thousand-year culture of Byzantium. In sieges, women and old men fight from the walls. Ad hoc genius is manifested in countermeasures—history's array of missiles, flame, cranes, and flying roof tiles—as the fate of thousands sometimes depends solely on their own collective intelligence and resolve. In the age of bombers, whose aerial weapons can make walls superfluous, sieges might seem a thing of the past, until one recalls that Leningrad and Stalingrad were two of the greatest and most costly sieges of the ages.
Sieges also reflect a breakdown in the ability of soldiers to conduct war or, rather, a failure of one side to offer resistance in the field and thereby to keep the killing far distant from civilians and their homes. True, there are so-called statutes of war; at least there were in the quieter times before the escalating violence of the Peloponnesian War. The "laws of the Greeks," for example, assumed that upon the arrival of the enemy, besieged civilians in the ancient world would usually be offered free passage out of their city, with the acknowledgment that they must leave behind their property, their homes, and indeed their very existences. Upon their refusal to submit, all bets were off as if it suddenly became a moral act to kill adult males and enslave their womenfolk because they either were not willing at the outset to give up or in the end could not protect all that they had held dear.
What was the moral calculus in the mind of the defenders? They had only four options once the enemy ringed their city: surrender, resistance from the walls, counterattack with sorties, or escape. The Plataeans adopted all four strategies at different times as their strength waxed and waned. During the initial Theban attack, the Plataeans rushed out and killed the intruders. Then they refused terms for some four years. Half of the garrison broke out at night and escaped. The rest finally capitulated and were either executed or enslaved.
What, then, was the degree of culpability of civilians inside the walls for their own fates? If they did not actively fight on the ramparts, were they therefore considered noncombatants, and thus to be spared after capitulation or simply executed by their peers as traitors as long as the walls held firm? Was there a moral difference between supplying food for the defenders and actually fighting from the parapets? Was it treason to offer no resistance, and did such noninvolvement mean anything anyway once enemy soldiers poured into the streets? Being besieged often had an ostensible effect of unifying the population for better or for worse; since the victor might well apply collective punishment to the defeated, most inside the walls grasped that he must be resisted at all costs. For all the bickering at Athens, both Pericles and his successors were able to keep the population together as they watched ravagers from the walls, battled plague, and put up with overcrowding.
The ethical questions do not end there. Was a defending army morally culpable should it retreat back to its civilian base, as if deliberately to draw noncombatants into a war that it could not win on the field of battle? Or was it wise to shepherd soldiers inside ramparts rather than have them perish against overwhelming odds on the battlefield and so leave their cities defenseless, when instead they might otherwise have crafted a viable defense from the walls?
— Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other, pp. 179-82
