Indecision meant delay. Sickness in the camp worsened. Meanwhile Gylippus recruited a large army of native Sicels, and hoplite reinforcements arrived from the Peloponnese. Nicias’s resolution to stay put weakened. He now endorsed Demosthenes’ proposal that the expedition should sail away from Syracuse to open country where the army would be free to maneuver and attract supplies, which were running dangerously short. Orders to leave were to be given as secretly as possible.
On the night of August 27 between 9:41 and 10:30 the moon was totally eclipsed. As early as the seventh century Greek thinkers and scientists had put aside myths and looked for rational explanations of natural phenomena: Herodotus reports that Thales of Miletus predicted a solar eclipse on May 28, 585. However, many Athenians were superstitious and had laughed at the pretensions of science in The Clouds of Aristophanes. Panic-stricken, they saw the eclipse as a warning from the gods against their plan to withdraw from Syracuse rather than as an astronomical event.
According to Thucydides, Nicias was “rather over-addicted to divination and such things.” He consulted a soothsayer who recommended that the Athenians should wait “three times nine days” before departing. Not only was this a catastrophic piece of advice militarily, but it was unnecessary. A third-century seer called Philochorus judged that an eclipse “was not unfavourable to men who were fleeing but, on the contrary, very favourable; for concealment is just what acts of fear need, whereas light is their enemy.”
If Nicias had been mentally more nimble he would have promoted an interpretation à la Philochorus that would allow the army to leave. But the fact is that in his heart of hearts the commander-in-chief preferred inactivity and feared responsibility, as he had done ever since the invasion of Sicily was first mooted.
The Syracusans soon learned from deserters that Nicias intended to sail away, but was delayed by the eclipse. Sensing a collapse of enemy morale, they decided to force a sea fight in the Great Harbor. After some days training their crews, they sent out seventy-six triremes and at the same time launched a land attack on the camp walls. The Athenians fielded a fleet of eighty-six warships. The gamble paid off handsomely. Although the enemy hoplites were repelled, the Athenians lacked space for maneuver in the Great Harbor and were defeated. Some of their triremes were driven back onto the marshy northwestern shore of the harbor and the Syracusans dragged away eighteen of them. Eurymedon, who was in charge, fell.
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The eclipse was forgotten and everyone now wanted to get away as soon as possible. If the Athenians did not make their escape immediately they would be cornered.
But the jubilant Syracusans were not ready simply to let the invaders go. They were determined to capture and destroy the entire expeditionary force. “To conquer the Athenians by land and by sea,” they felt, “would win us great glory in Hellas.”
They started to block the harbor entrance with a line of triremes broadside on as well as other craft and boats at anchor. They chained them together and laid boards over them. As soon as the Athenians realized what was happening, they decided to leave a garrison onshore defending the smallest space possible and manned their entire fleet of 110 ships with every fit oarsman they had and a large number of archers and javelin throwers.
This was Nicias’s finest hour. Although half distraught by the crisis in Athenian fortunes, he behaved as a leader should. He took a boat through the fleet and spoke to each trireme captain individually, doing his best to cheer everyone up. He also arranged for the infantry to line the shore and give whatever vocal support they could to the fleet. Meanwhile elsewhere on the harbor’s edge Syracusan soldiers also gathered to watch the oncoming battle. Women and old men looked on from the city walls. Both sides shouted and cheered as if they were spectators at some great sporting occasion at the Olympic Games.
The paean sounded and the Athenians rowed across the bay to attack the barrier. Through sheer force of numbers their ships crowded around and began to cut the chains and break through. The Syracusans came out against them and pushed them off into the center of the harbor and the battle became a series of one-to-one duels. There was little room for ramming or the tactics of movement that had won Athens the mastery of the seas. Fighting was hand-to-hand as marines tried to grapple with and board enemy triremes.
Thucydides has left a famous description of the struggle, so vivid that it must have been based on the evidence of an eyewitness:
The two armies on the shore, while victory hung in the balance, were a prey to the most agonizing and conflicting emotions. The Syracusans thirsted for more glory than they had already won, while the invaders feared to find themselves worse off than they already were….While the result of the battle was in doubt all kinds of sound could be heard coming simultaneously from this one Athenian army, shrieks, cheers, “We’re winning,” “We’re losing” and all the other different cries one would expect to hear from a great army in great danger.
Eventually the Syracusan fleet had the better of it and chased the enemy across the harbor and back to land, to great shouts and cheers. It was a decisive setback. The panic-stricken Athenians ran as fast as they could from their beached ships. They could see that they had no hope of escaping by land, unless some miracle happened, but they refused point-blank to board the sixty viable triremes that remained and resume the struggle. Such a move would have taken the Syracusans by surprise and might well have succeeded.
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Escaping by land was now, in fact, their only if forlorn hope. The Athenians were still dangerous and the Syracusans feared, correctly, that the enemy might leave by night and steal a march on them. So they sent some horsemen who pretended to be renegades; they shouted into the enemy camp a warning not to march that night because the roads were already guarded. Believing the information to be genuine the generals put off their departure for a couple of days.
This was yet another blunder, which they compounded by lingering for a third day to allow time for the men to pack their most essential luggage. They burned some of their ships but left the rest for the enemy to drag away at will. Meanwhile the Syracusans had used the interval to build roadblocks on the likely escape routes. At last on September 11 the bedraggled expeditionary force set off inland on the third day after the sea fight. In all, they amounted to no fewer than forty thousand souls, allies as well as Athenians and oarsmen as well as hoplites.
The generals intended to march inland into native Sicel country before turning northwards for the port of Catana where they could expect a friendly welcome and supplies.
Nicias, ill and in pain, did his best to raise the men’s spirits. But they were so fearful and depressed that they left their dead unburied, a grave sin of omission, and abandoned seriously wounded comrades, despite their pleas to be taken with them. The two generals each commanded a hollow rectangle of troops surrounding civilians, camp followers, and the like.
The army fought its way successfully through enemy opposition, but was constantly harried by cavalry and javelin throwers. Food and water were in short supply. Eight miles northwest of Syracuse an obstacle stood in the way—the Acraean cliff, a large plateau accessible through a ravine. The enemy had already built a wall across the ravine, and it was impervious to attack. A torrential downpour soaked the Athenians. The Syracusans began building another wall behind them, threatening to trap them, so the Athenians turned around, prevented its completion, and pushed past to level ground where they encamped.