They gave up their original plan to make for Catana and decided to march south. They lit many fires and crept away under cover of darkness. Unfortunately, during the night Demosthenes’ contingent became confused and fell behind. The Syracusans caught up with it by midday and encircled it, as it stood huddled in an olive grove surrounded by a wall. They rained missiles on the Athenians from every direction. There was nothing they could do in response and on September 16 Demosthenes capitulated on condition that none of his men was to be put to death. Once the detailed arrangements for surrender had been agreed, he tried to take his life, but only wounded himself with his sword before it was removed from him. Of the twenty thousand men who had set out from Syracuse under his command only six thousand were left.
Meanwhile Nicias, six or eight miles ahead, was plowing on. A Syracusan herald broke the news to him about the fate of Demosthenes, which at first he refused to believe. He proposed terms of surrender, but they were not accepted. On the following day, the eighth of their march, the Athenians pressed forward under constant Syracusan attacks until they arrived at the river Asinarus (today’s Falconara). The men were exhausted and were longing for water.
Many of them broke ranks and ran to the river to slake their thirst. They crowded in so closely that some men were trampled underfoot or killed with their own spears. The water became muddy and full of blood, but they went on gulping it. Syracusan and allied troops were stationed on the far bank and rained missiles onto the confused mass of Athenians and their allies. Some then came down and slaughtered anyone they could find.
Nicias saw that this was the end. He surrendered personally to Gylippus, whom he trusted more than the Syracusans. Of his troops only one thousand survived the Asinarus. Athenian citizens were imprisoned throughout the winter in the city’s stone quarries. In this early concentration camp, they were “forced to do everything in the same place.” Most of them perished from sickness and a wretched diet (half a slave’s rations of meal and water). Some were sold and branded with the sign of a horse on their foreheads.
Against the wishes of Gylippus, who wanted to show them off in Lacedaemon, the ailing Nicias and the half-dead Demosthenes were put out of their misery and executed. Their bodies were thrown beyond the city gates and lay there in plain sight for all to see.
The Sicilians were great poetry lovers. They were especially fond of Euripides and used to treasure any scraps of verse visitors from mainland Greece could repeat to them from memory. Apparently some of the very few Athenians who returned home safely made a point of calling on the author of The Trojan Women to thank him. They told him that they had received their freedom after teaching their masters whatever they could recall of his poetry. Others, after the final battle, had been given food and drink in return for reciting some of his lyrics.
—
One day in mid- to late September 413, a stranger landed at Piraeus and took a seat in a barber’s shop. He began to talk about the defeat in Sicily as if it were common knowledge. In fact, not a word had reached Attica and the shocked barber ran at top speed to the city. He rushed up to the Archons and blurted out the news in the agora. Uproar followed and an emergency meeting of the ecclesia was called.
The barber was cross-examined, but he could not explain clearly who his informant had been (no doubt the stranger had very sensibly made himself scarce). He was condemned as an agitator and tortured on the wheel until messengers arrived and gave chapter and verse of the disaster. Even then for some time people did not believe what they were told. It had to be an exaggeration. It could not be true.
—
It is tempting to regard the Sicilian Expedition as an example of pride before a fall, of overreaching ambition justly punished. But terrible as the narrative is even for the casual reader, there was nothing inevitable or even likely about the catastrophe. In fact, it was a catalogue of if-onlys. If only Alcibiades had been allowed to retain his command; if only Nicias had put his shoulder to the wheel, had not sought to shuffle off responsibility, had not delayed, had not been foolishly superstitious; above all, if only old Lamachus had been allowed to launch an attack on Syracuse immediately on arrival, as he wished—with a reasonable degree of diligence all would have been well.
That said, there was something deeply irresponsible about the project. It diverted energy and treasure to a policy that was, strictly speaking, unnecessary. The defeat of Syracuse would not help Athens, one way or another, to resolve its broken relationship with Sparta and its allies. What is more, even if the demos could reasonably assume victory, how did it propose to govern Sicily once it had conquered it? It is unlikely that it would be able to keep a humbled Syracuse permanently down. Athens would almost certainly collide with the fabulously rich maritime power Carthage, which had a foothold in the west of the island and would certainly have given it a run for its money.
Underlying the Sicilian Expedition lurked an ambition to unite all Hellas under an Athenian banner. The fact was that Athens did not have a large enough population, nor dispose of sufficient and sustainable wealth, to capture and control the Greek world, the lands that stretched from Segesta in the west to Miletus in the east, from Cyrene in northern Africa to Thrace or the frontiers of Macedon. The failure of the Egyptian campaign in the long-ago days of Pericles had convincingly demonstrated that the reach of Athens exceeded its grasp. His successors in power had forgotten the lesson. They learned it again in Sicily.
Counterfactuals are risky, but, if it had vanquished Syracuse, Athens might well have achieved overall dominion of the Greek world, but surely not for long. There would have been endemic instability and revolts. So maybe the incapacity of Nicias saved everyone a deal of trouble in the longer run.
As it was, Athens now had its back to the wall. Thucydides had no doubt of the importance of the disaster. He wrote:
This was the greatest achievement during this war, or in my opinion the greatest we know of in Greek history. For the victors it was the most brilliant of successes. It was the most ruinous debacle for the losers, for they were defeated comprehensively and in every way. Their sufferings were on a vast scale. Their destruction was, as they say, total. Their fleet, their army, everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home.
20
The End of Democracy?
After so many false starts, the Athenians at last had victory in their sights.
In March or April 410 news arrived at Athens of a glorious engagement at sea off Cyzicus, a polis on the southern coast of the Sea of Marmara. A complete Spartan fleet had been eliminated. The Athenian admirals had captured all the enemy’s warships, and taken many prisoners (shades of Sphacteria) and a vast quantity of booty.
Although the Spartan commander, Mindarus, was brave and experienced, this had been his third major maritime defeat in a row and he himself had been killed. Within the space of a few months the Peloponnesians had lost between 135 and 155 triremes. Athens had complete control of the seas and had secured the sea routes for food imports from the Ukraine and the Crimea, the wheat that, post-Decelea, was vital for the city’s survival.
The Spartan vice admiral had written with laconic brevity to Lacedaemon, pleading for help, for orders, for anything: “Ships gone, Mindarus dead, men starving, don’t know what to do.” As a final stroke of bad luck, the letter was captured by the Athenians and greatly entertained the demos.