The Sicilian expedition (415–413 BC)

In 415 BC, during the uneasy Peace of Nicias, envoys from Egesta (Segesta) in western Sicily asked Athens for help against the Selinuntines. The assembly voted sixty ships under three generals, Alcibiades, Nicias and Lamachus (Thucydides 6.8.2). The stated aims were to help Egesta and restore Leontini, but Thucydides says the truest motive was to rule the whole island (6.6.1). Nicias, who opposed the plan, asked for a far larger force in the hope of discouraging the voters. It had the opposite effect: «ἔρως ἐνέπεσε τοῖς πᾶσιν», a passion fell on them all (6.24.3).

The force that crossed from Corcyra had 134 triremes (τριήρεις) and 5,100 hoplites (6.43). No single Greek city, he writes, had yet sent out one so costly and splendid (6.31.1). In classical Greek στόλος could mean an expedition as well as a fleet; Modern Greek στόλος means the fleet. Before the departure the herms of Athens were mutilated in one night (6.27), and suspicion turned on Alcibiades. Summoned home for trial, he escaped at Thurii (6.61) and advised the Spartans to send a commander to Syracuse (6.91.4).

Syracuse was a colony of Corinth (6.3.2). In 414 BC the Athenians held the heights of Epipolae and built walls to cut the city off: a πολιορκία, a siege. Lamachus was killed in a fight near the marsh (6.101.6), which left Nicias as the only remaining commander of the three. The walls were almost finished when the Spartan Gylippus arrived, and Thucydides says that Syracuse had been in real danger (7.2.4). Nicias then wrote to Athens: recall the army or send another as large, and relieve him, because of a kidney disease (7.15.1).

Athens did not relieve him. It sent Demosthenes and Eurymedon with about 73 ships and nearly 5,000 hoplites (7.42.1), although in spring 413 BC Sparta had begun to fortify Decelea in Attica (7.19.1), which Thucydides counts among the main causes of Athens' ruin (7.27.3). A night attack on Epipolae failed (7.43–44), and the generals prepared to leave. Then the moon was eclipsed. Nicias, whom Thucydides calls too given to divination, refused even to discuss departure until the “thrice nine days” had passed (7.50.4). NASA's catalogue of historical eclipses lists a total lunar eclipse on 28 August 413 BCE under the siege of Syracuse. Many other accounts give 27 August.

The Syracusans closed the mouth of the Great Harbour with moored ships (7.59.3). The Athenians tried to break out and lost the ναυμαχία, the sea battle, while their army watched from the shore (7.70–71). They left by land, not less than 40,000 people on Thucydides' figure (7.75.5), abandoning the sick and wounded. At the river Assinarus men died in the water while still trying to drink it (7.84). Nicias surrendered to Gylippus (7.85.1); he and Demosthenes were killed against Gylippus' wishes (7.86.2).

The other prisoners were sent down «ἐς τὰς λιθοτομίας», into the quarries (7.86.2); Diodorus calls them λατομίαι (13.19.4). Thucydides describes a crowded, roofless pit, burning days and cold autumn nights, and the dead heaped among the living. Each man received one κοτύλη (a small measure) of water and two of grain a day for eight months (7.87.1–2). After about seventy days all were sold except the Athenians and the Greeks of Sicily and Italy (7.87.3). He gives at least 7,000 prisoners and admits that an exact count is hard (7.87.4); Diodorus has 7,000 captured and 18,000 killed (13.19.2). Plutarch says most Athenians died in the quarries and reports, as hearsay, that some were saved by reciting Euripides (Nicias 29). Thucydides does not name the quarry: Livius points to the Latomia dei Cappuccini, and a Sicilian education site simply to the latomie of the Neapolis park.

Thucydides calls this the greatest action of the war, glorious for the victors and most calamitous for the defeated: «ὀλίγοι ἀπὸ πολλῶν», few out of many, came home (7.87.5–6). In Athens people at first refused to believe the news, then turned on the speakers and soothsayers who had encouraged the voyage, although they had voted for it themselves (8.1.1). There were not enough ships, money or crews, and subject allies were eager to revolt (8.1.2, 8.2.2). Sparta made a treaty with the Persian king (8.18). Even so, Athens fought on until it surrendered in 404 BC.

Why did it fail? Thucydides gives a verdict at 2.65.11: the expedition was not so much an error of judgement about the enemy as a failure by those at home, whose private quarrels over leadership of the people gave the force no proper support. Yet his narrative also stresses Nicias' delay (7.42.3) and the eclipse (7.50.4), and Athens did send a second army (7.42.1). H. D. Westlake (1958) notes that the unclear wording of 2.65.11 has led modern scholars to disagree. An exam answer should quote the passage and test it against books 6 and 7 instead of treating it as settled.