44
Sicily, 414–413 BC
[The Sicilians] took particular measures to lead the Athenians into dread, noxious conditions.
This was the greatest Hellenic action that took place during this war,
and, in my opinion, the greatest action that we know of in Hellenic history –
to the victors the most brilliant of successes, to the vanquished the most calamitous of
defeats; for they were utterly and entirely defeated; their sufferings were on an
enormous scale; their losses were, as they say, total; army, navy, everything was
destroyed, and, out of many, only few returned. So ended the events in Sicily.
Thucydides, finale of Book 7, History of the Peloponnesian War, 7.871
MEANWHILE SICILY, ONCE AN ISLAND THAT most Greeks thought of as a distant, western outpost of civilisation, had become a killing field. The Athenians had overreached themselves.
The general Nicias, tense with the pain of kidney disease, asked to be recalled. He sent a message for reinforcements. He was told to stay put, and the reinforcements that arrived were sizeable but pitifully insufficient. Three years into the campaign, and city-states up and down Greece had begun to sense which way the military wind was blowing; now more and more were joining Sparta rather than Athens as allies. Nicias made the decision to return home. But then an unexpected omen: on the night of 27 August 413 BC the bright full moon was suddenly, fully eclipsed. Nicias was a deeply religious man. He sought the advice of a soothsayer, who hedged his bets. Don’t depart yet, the augur said. Lie low in the harbour for a few weeks – now is clearly not the time to sail. Nicias concurred. His enemies heard they had a sitting duck in Syracuse and launched a blistering attack. In a set-piece naval battle in the harbour of Syracuse the Athenians were resoundingly defeated, their triremes captured or burned.
But 40,000 survivors were still on dry land and Nicias tried to march them to safety. These men had watched their transport home vaporised – their sense of entrapment must have been suffocating. And the Sicilians not only had local knowledge, but paddocks full of fresh horses. In a terrible drawn-out game of cat-and-mouse the Syracusans and their Spartan allies stalked Athenians down, charging, then slaughtering, and then withdrawing. After eight days of marching the men were delirious with thirst and hunger.
Then they arrived in a steep valley. The Sicilian horsemen drove them to the riverbed of the wide Assinarus River. Desperate for water, the broken Athenians fell on the muddy pools. Allied Syracusan forces above and around them were closing in, but the Athenians needed to drink before they died. Many were butchered as they knelt to cup the water, others drowned in the crush. Their fellow soldiers lay slaughtered all around them, their blood spilling into the stream, but still the Athenians gulped to satisfy their thirst. One by one they were cut down, or staggered into their own spears. That armour which had been polished so extra-shiny bright for the showy departure from Piraeus two long years before was now dull and mired.
One source tells us that 18,000 men were killed in a single afternoon.2
And we must not forget what it means to be slain by a classical Greek sword. Pornographically graphic descriptions of ways for men to die in battle are riven through the corpus of Ancient Greek literature, and none of this is horror-fantasy. Witness Euripides:
He drew back his left foot but kept his eyes closely on the pit of the other’s stomach from a distance; then advancing his right foot, he plunged the weapon through his navel and fixed it in his spine. Down fell Polyneikes, dripping with blood, ribs and belly contracting in his agony.3
Xenophon reports simply that a maimed Arkadian ‘reached the camp in flight, wounded deep in his belly and holding his intestines in his hands, he told all that had happened.’4
A stone inscription tells us the Athenians had voted in the Assembly to force their allies to ‘love the demos of the Athenians’.5 In Sicily it became clear that this love was, blatantly, unreciprocated.
There were a few survivors, 7,000 or so Athenians, and their fate was, if anything, even more gruesome. The Syracusans had always had a love of the playwright Euripides. And so Athenian soldiers were marched to a natural quarry just outside Syracuse, where they were forced to barter verses of Euripides for the chance of freedom. Today you can still enter, as the site has become a national park, gently planted; the quarry itself has cathedral-esque proportions, flocks of white doves roost at its height and fill the space with a low, rumbling coo. Given no food or water, crushed so tight they could not lie down, the Athenian interlopers were forced to recite lines of their own premier dramatist until they dropped from exhaustion or were felled. The torture was calculating. Sicilian demagogues remembered Melos and called for no clemency.
All in all, after the Sicilian debacle, close on 50,000 Athenian troops and their allies were missing, all presumed dead; 216 triremes were lost.
The wailing women, mourning Adonis, whose cries had cankered the air that night back in Athens twenty-four moons ago, were suddenly believed prescient. Effigies of the dead boy-god, corpse-stiff like the corpses in the quarry at Syracuse, had been carried to the coast. The Athenian women had buried beautiful figurine boys in the Aegean Sea in order to safeguard real men. But now those flesh-and-blood heroes were coming home across the waves in body-bags.
The Athenian dream had been that the Sicilian campaigners would return from their western adventure wealthy and bathed in glory; a whole new land-mass would be waiting, arms open to welcome Athenian democrats and their families. As it was, a handful of traumatised hoplites limped back, amputated, violated, covered in shame.6 Socrates himself – as represented by Plato in the dialogue Ion, set just at the end of the Sicilian disaster in 413 BC – comments that the Athenians were now desperate for personnel. Their citizen population was mortally reduced: they would even recruit generals from the ranks of foreigners. It is a passing remark that has recently been backed up by inscriptional evidence.7
SOCRATES: My splendid Ion, you know Apollodorus of Cyzicus, don’t you?
ION: And what sort of person might he be?
SOCRATES: He’s someone whom the Athenians have often elected as their general, foreigner though he is; and Athens also appoints to generalships and the other posts Phanosthenes of Andros and Heraclides of Clazomenae, even though they are foreigners, because they have demonstrated their merit.8
As those tattered remains of an army began to pull into the port of Piraeus, the frightened men of Athens needed to impugn, they needed scapegoats. The Athenians would remember Socrates’ curious fascination with the Spartans. Well, now the Spartans had become their devils, and anyone associated with them the devil’s incubus.
FIRST HERALD: Founder of the most renowned City of the Sky, do you not know what great honour you have won among men, and how many of them you have who are passionate lovers of this country? Before you founded this city, in those days all men were Spartan-mad, all hairy, hungry and dirty, Socrates-y and carrying clubbed sticks.9 …
CHORUS: And near the Shadfeet there lies a lake where unwashed
Socrates charms up men’s souls.10
And while the Athenians slept uneasy in their beds, flailing around in nights of long nightmares, arms reaching out to try to find someone to blame, Alcibiades was busy.
Aristophanes said of Socrates’ one-time-lover:
Better not bring up a lion inside your city,
But if you must, then humour all his moods.11
A tricky, half-wild, half-domesticated rogue lion, with plenty of bite left, was precisely what Athens did not need roaming at the edge of its territories right now.
Alcibiades’ hubris boded well neither for Athena’s city nor for his brother-in-arms, Socrates.