Chapter 8
In This Chapter
● Identifying the war’s causes
● Waging the First and Second Peloponnesian Wars
● Surviving the plague in Athens
● Engaging in siege warfare
Thucydides the Athenian wrote the history of the war between Athens and Sparta. . . in the belief that it was going to be a great war and more worth writing about than any of those that had taken place in the past.
-Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
The Peloponnesian War lasted for more than 30 years. When it started in 431 BC, Athens and Sparta were pretty much unchallenged as the two dominant city-states in the whole of Greece. Athens had its international empire and dominant fleet, and Sparta had control of large sections of mainland Greece and its famous army.
By the end of the war, both sides were in a position from which they never really recovered. Essentially, their time had passed. The Peloponnesian War brought one era of ancient Greece to an end, and this chapter examines how.
Engaging in the First Cold War
A clash between Athens and Sparta was always likely. Ever since the final defeat of the Persians in 478 BC, the various Greek states had struggled for supremacy. Of all the states Athens and Sparta were the best placed to grab power. The states were rivals for several reasons:
● Historically, the Spartans were the military leaders of the Greeks, and the Athenians were the founding force behind the Delian League (see Chapter 7) and used this political entity to build an empire.
● Politically, Athens was a participative democracy (see Chapter 7), but Sparta was ruled by a dominant aristocracy and had two kings and a group of ephors (supervisors) that ran the state (see Chapter 4).
● Culturally, Athens had developed into the artistic capital of the Greek world, and Sparta was an austere, war-like civilisation that held fast to its strict and disciplined rules.
Athens and Sparta had a lot of differences but what they had in common was an aggressive foreign policy towards the other Greek towns and cities and they gained control over more and more of them when they could.
Like the US and USSR in the 20th century, Athens and Sparta had become too big to not be rivals. And just like the Cold War in the last century, any confrontation between the rivals had the potential to be brutal, final, and come at a massive human cost.
Sparta in the doldrums
The Athenians had done very nicely out of the Persian Wars - establishing the Delian League and creating a vast empire - but the years that followed 478 BC weren’t as kind to Sparta.
The Spartans were the big players in what was known as the Peloponnesian League. This loose group of cities including Corinth and Elis banded together to face the Persian threat in the 480s BC. After Persia was defeated in 478 BC the league drifted apart, and the Spartans weren’t able to call on league members for support in the way that the Athenians did with the Delian League.
In many ways 464 BC was Sparta’s annus horribilis (awful year). During this year Sparta suffered a tremendous earthquake, resulting in massive damage to the town and the death of many people. Following the earthquake, the long-suffering helot population (see Chapter 4) took its chance to revolt. The Spartans managed to recover and pin down the revolting helots on Mount Ithome where they’d built a fortified encampment that eventually became a town. This was a huge problem for the Spartans because the helot population was massive - at least five times the number of Spartan citizens.
At this point the Spartans appealed to their fellow Greek towns - including Athens - for help to launch a final attack on the helot camp.
Kimon: A big fan of Sparta
Kimon was such a fan of Sparta and its constitution that he named his son Lakedaimonios, which literally means 'of Sparta' or 'Spartan'. Being sent back to Athens was a tremendous blow to him because he'd worked so hard for the campaign to be approved. He suffered the consequences on his return being ostracised (sent into exile) for ten years. Kimon tried (unsuccessfully) to return two years later but was eventually recalled in 451 BC when the Athenians needed his experience to help them negotiate a peace treaty with Sparta, and he resumed his leading role in the political life of the city.
Decision time in Athens
The dominant political figure in Athens in the fifth century BC was Pericles (see Chapter 7). He encouraged policies that saw the Athenians expand their empire and turn the city into a cultural centre. But Pericles wasn’t a king and there were other speakers in the ekklesia, or general assembly, who disagreed with his reforms. (Chapter 7 has more info on ekklesia.) One of these was a man called Kimon.
Kimon was pro-Spartan in outlook, meaning that he felt the Greek states should work together for their own mutual interests. He believed that the Persians were still the biggest threat to all Greece and that the Athenians should seek to form an alliance with the Spartans that protected both cities from foreign, non-Greek threats like the Persians without coming into conflict with each other.
When the call for help came from Sparta in 464 BC, Kimon managed to persuade the Athenian ekklesia to vote him commander of an expeditionary force that would go and help Sparta. Kimon was hugely pleased with his new role, but his actions unwittingly kicked off the chain of events that started the brutal Peloponnesian War.
Things didn’t turn out as Kimon expected. Although he was pro-Sparta many of his troops were Athenian democrats. When they arrived at Mount Ithome they upset the Spartans by expressing sympathy for the helots and their plight. The Spartans grew suspicious and sent the Athenians back home, saying that they were no longer needed. After all the debating, the Athenians never even lifted a sword in anger!
This incident at Mount Ithome was fatal to the relationship between Athens and Sparta and the divide between them became permanent. A few years later in 460 BC, the Athenians signed a treaty with the town of Argos, a sworn enemy of Sparta.
Thucydides: News from the frontline
Historians are very well informed about the Second Peloponnesian War, partly because of the work of the Greek historian Thucydides. Thucydides was born around 460 BC and lived through nearly the whole war and actually served as a commander for the Athenians. He was a relative of Kimon (see the sidebar 'Kimon: A big fan of Sparta') and a supporter of Pericles. Thucydides's book The History of the Peloponnesian Waris the first real work of history ever written and it's written by somebody who was actually there, fighting in a war that took place 2,500 years ago. Amazing!
Enduring the first Peloponnesian War (460-446 BC)
By signing the treaty with Argos the Athenians officially became the enemies of Sparta. Over the next 15 years a war of sorts took place. Athens and Sparta attacked each other’s allies on mainland Greece and close by. The war involved a lot of manoeuvring for position and short-term captures of territory.
Neither side managed to gain the upper hand, and victory was usually quickly followed by defeat. After early victories for Athens, the initiative gradually slipped away, with Sparta’s allies the Boiotians and the island of Euboia revolting against Athens. In 446 BC, Pericles and the Athenian army were perilously cut off in Euboia when the Spartan king Pleistoanax had a chance to attack Athens itself. Pleistoanax didn’t attack, and the war petered out. Pericles began negotiations, and eventually both sides signed a treaty declaring 30 years of peace. Unfortunately, the Thirty Years Truce, as it was known, was never likely to hold for that long. Fewer than half the 30 years elapsed before the beginnings of the Second Peloponnesian War.
Fighting the Main Event: The Second Peloponnesian War
Greek historian Thucydides was clear on the causes of the second, bloodier Peloponnesian War:
War began when the Athenians and Peloponnesians broke the Thirty Years Truce. . . What made the war inevitable was the growth in Athenian power and the fear that this caused in Sparta.
Historians largely agree with Thucydides’s assessment; fear of Athenian power had been partly responsible for the First Peloponnesian War (see the preceding section ‘Enduring the First Peloponnesian War’.)
However, the incident that prompted the breaking of the Thirty Years Truce was a bit more interesting and took place on the island of Kerkyra.
Initiating a crisis in Kerkyra
Kerkyra was a colony of the city of Corinth. In 435 BC, the Kerkyrans revolted against Corinth, and a war raged for two years. In 433 BC, the Kerkyrans asked Athens for help, and the Athenians, sensing an opportunity, said yes and immediately became an enemy of Corinth.
Corinth was a member of the Peloponnesian League (see the section ‘Sparta in the doldrums’), and when the Athenians clashed with them again over the small city of Poteidaia in northern Greece in 432 BC, Corinth complained to the Spartans about Athenian aggression. Surely, the Corinthians argued, the Peloponnesian League would defend its members’ interests?
The problem was that the Athenians hadn’t actually broken the peace treaty they signed with Sparta because they hadn’t done anything against the Spartans’ interests, so the Spartans would be the ones breaking the agreement if they took any action against Athens. During the winter of 432-31 BC, the Spartans spent days debating whether to move against Athens. One of their kings called Arkhidamos argued long and hard that the Spartans should hold back from confrontation, but the momentum was already behind war.
Really the start of the war had nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the Athens and Corinth situation. As Thucydides wrote, the Spartans feared Athens’s growing power.
Actually, in the end, neither Athens or Sparta officially started the Peloponnesian War - rather it was the city of Thebes, another influential and aggressive Greek state who were at the time allied with Sparta. Ironic really, because the Thebans ended up doing rather well following the war (see Chapter 9).
In the spring of 431 BC, a group of Thebans managed to take hold of the town of Plataia. The Plataians were allies of Athens and had refused to go over to the Spartan-dominated Boiotian League, a small group of towns allied with Sparta in the east of Greece. The Thebans’ actions were a direct attack on Athenian territory and broke the peace treaty. The Plataians managed to kick out the Theban force, but it was no good. The war had started.
This early stage of the Second Peloponnesian War (the first ten years, 431— 421 BC) is often known as the Arkhidamian War. Rather unfair given that Arkhidamos was a leading Spartan general who argued against fighting in the first place. After the war began though, Arkhidamos had to lead the Spartan troops.
Figuring out how to fight
Athens and Sparta fighting each other presented difficulties. In addition to the contrasts I describe in the earlier section ‘Engaging in the First Cold War’, the Spartans were the superior force on land, whereas Athens had a supposedly undefeatable navy.
These differences made actually fighting each other very difficult because:
● Pericles proposed a strategy in which Athens avoided engaging the Spartan army directly but used its fleet to harass and attack Sparta’s allies, like the small towns in the Boiotian League.
● Sparta spent a great deal of time invading Attica without ever going as far as to lay siege to Athens.
The Spartan attacks in Attica were very harmful. The Spartans would attack and kill farmers and their livestock and destroy any crops. This had two big effects: First, food became scarce, and second, all the homeless people from the countryside (with the encouragement of Pericles) came to Athens.
Dealing with the plague
As the Spartan attacks continued in Attica and the area surrounding Athens, people began to pour into Athens looking for shelter and safety. The effects of this population increase soon took its toll. In 430 BC, a terrible disease took hold in the city. Many people at the time blamed the illness on a ship from the east, but the immense overcrowding and unpleasant conditions in the city can’t have helped.
Thucydides, who caught the plague but survived, gives an unpleasant firsthand account:
The bodies of the dying were heaped one on top of the other, and half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about in the streets or flocking around the fountains in their desire for water. The temples in which they took up their quarters were full of the dead bodies of people who had died inside them.
Life in Athens must have been absolutely horrific. Around 30,000 people died of the plague and its after-effects. The population in Attica didn’t really recover for several generations.
The Athenian people put all the blame on Pericles because it had been his strategy to fight the war abroad and bring many people in Attica inside Athens’s walls. He was suspended from his position as a strategos (general) and fined.
Then in 429 BC Pericles himself caught the plague and died. By this point the Athenians had already reinstated him as a strategos (due to a lack of alternatives). Death by plague was a sad end to the life of a great man - and Pericles’s death left Athens facing a very uncertain future.
Responding to the Mytilenean revolt
The war pressed on regardless of Pericles’s passing. With Athens doing badly some of her allies began to jump ship. In 428 BC, the town of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos (see the Cheat Sheet map) revolted against Athens.
The Athenian response was savage. First, an Athenian fleet was sent to blockade the island. After Mytilene surrendered, the Athenian ekklesia voted to execute all the male citizens and sell the women and children into slavery.
Athens had previously done everything possible to nurture its relationship with its allies. So why the drastic change in dealing with Mytilene? Well, the death of Pericles left a vacuum in the ekklesia, and it was filled by what Athenian aristocrats referred to as the ‘new men’. These new men weren’t descended from ancient aristocratic lines like Pericles, and they rose to positions of influence through their ability to rabble-rouse and speak impressively in the ekkleisa (see Chapter 7).
Chief among the new men were Kleon and Hyperbolos. Hyperbolos was so famed for his speaking that the word ‘hyperbole’ derives from his name which literally meant ‘throwing beyond’ (that is, exaggerating)! Both of these new men frequently gave inflammatory speeches that encouraged Athenians to take the harshest action. The response to Mytilene was a case in point.
Although Kleon had argued that Mytilene should be punished harshly, Athens was uncomfortable with this judgement. The issue was debated again the following day, and a majority voted for a lighter punishment. A ship was dispatched to take the news and arrived at Mytilene just in time to stop the massacre. Phew!
Athens’s new men are mercilessly mocked by the comic playwright Aristophanes in his play Knights. Aristophanes had a particular hatred for Kleon, whom he called ‘The Tanner’, mocking his background in the trade of leather goods. In Wasps he went even further, naming characters ‘Procleon’ and ‘Anticleon’. Procleon is written as a total braggart but a real wimp when it came to fighting:
‘Here, here, what's coming over me? I’ve gone all limp, I can’t hold the sword up any longer! All the fight’s gone out of me!’
Going international: A situation in Sicily
The Peloponnesian War from 431 to 428BC was so far, so Greek. But after 427 BC, the effects of the war began to spread around the Mediterranean. Other countries getting involved in fighting between Sparta and Athens may sound weird, but think about the way that the Second World War ended up being partly fought in North Africa, Japan, and the South Pacific as well as in Europe itself.
Additionally, a long history of Greek influence affected the region. For example, the Greeks had founded colonies in Sicily several hundred years prior to the Peloponnesian War (see Chapter 3). The island’s many towns had close relationships with the Greek cities from which they’d originated through trade and population movement.
One Sicilian town was Leontinoi. In 427 BC, Leontinoi appealed to Athens for help against the attacks by Syracuse, and the Athenians agreed to assist. You would have thought that the Athenians had better things to do, what with the Peloponnesian War going on and everything, but Athens had hidden motives for wanting to help and got involved in another war that was entirely separate from their campaign against Sparta.
Unlike Attica and much of the Peloponnese, Sicily was rich and fertile, producing a huge amount of grain. In fact, a lot of the grain that the Greek cities consumed was imported from Sicily. Athenians probably saw aiding Sicily as a chance to get to grips with the grain supply - either by taking it all for themselves or stopping grain ships from reaching Sparta and its allies.
Perhaps the Sicilians worked out that Athens was likely to be a bigger threat than a help. When the small Athenian fleet arrived in Sicily it was sent back home again because Leontinoi and Syracuse had managed to settle the dispute themselves.
Nevertheless the Athenians kept an eye on Sicily and planned to return. (See the later section ‘Attempting - again! - to take Sicily’.)
Putting up a fight for Pylos
While the Athenians were messing around and interfering with Sicily, almost by accident they struck a blow against Sparta. Incredibly, when a small group of Athenian ships on their way to Sicily passed the harbour of Sparta’s ally Pylos in south western Greece, they found it virtually undefended.
The orator Demosthenes was on ship with the Athenian generals because he’d been sent to use his rhetorical skill in Sicily to negotiate terms for help with Leontinoi. He argued that they should take advantage of the situation and was dropped off and left behind with a small force to build a fort at the edge of the bay. The Spartans panicked and sent their army to fight against the Athenians. A land and naval battle ensued, and the Athenians won.
Athens established a base at the closest point to Sparta. Also, 420 Spartan hoplites were left marooned on the nearby island of Sphacteria.
The immediate response of the Spartans was to negotiate peace - an offer that the Athenians rejected out of hand. A bit of a mistake really, as the Athenians were never able to really make the most of the advantage that they had gained.
The reaction in Athens was hugely critical; the populace accused the generals of not making the most of things. Chief among the critics was the demagogue Kleon, who claimed that he could’ve done a better job. In a shock move, one of the chief strategoi called Nikias said that Kleon should go and do it then!
Annoyingly, Kleon was quite successful the following year. Taking the experienced Demosthenes with him, Kleon and his men headed for Pylos and managed to capture nearly 300 Spartan prisoners at the battle of Sphacteria, who became a hugely useful bargaining tool for the rest of the war.
Swaying the north-east cities: Brasidas
Although the Athenians had an advantage through the capture of the Spartan prisoners, Sparta had been pursuing another strategy that was proving quite successful. In 424 BC some towns in north-east Greece that had previously been loyal to Athens decided to revolt. With Athens’s resources stretched, it must have seemed a good time to try.
Sparta sent a large force to north-east Greece under the command of a leading aristocrat called Brasidas. He went on the equivalent of a PR tour, winning over many of these cities with his personal charm - combined with the presence of around 1,500 heavily armed hoplites.
Thucydides: Warfare's loss is literature's gain
Thucydides was one Athenian who was given command during the action against Brasidas. He was sent to defend the town of Amphipolis and prevent it from going over to Sparta. He failed to keep the city under Athenian influence - more through bad luck than anything else - and on his return to Athens he was sent into exile for an indefinite period as punishment. He resolved to travel around Greece as a result.
At this point in his life, Thucydides began collecting material for The History of the Peloponnesian War, which he spent the rest of his life writing. The book wasn't published until after his death by which point those who had expelled him from Athens had fallen from power. It immediately became a standard work of history that was much admired by other Greeks for its detailed style and focus on accuracy rather than rumour. Just think, if he'd won at Amphipolis, historians probably wouldn't know nearly as much about the war!
Brasidas’s campaign was hugely dangerous to Athens because when cities defected from the empire the Athenians lost both their revenues and the opportunity to call on them for military support.
The Athenians set out to stop Brasidas, and the end result was a truce that lasted for one year in 423 BC. Neither side could keep to the truce, however, and in 422 BC, Kleon took a force to the north to attack Brasidas. At a big battle outside the town of Amphipolis, the Athenians were heavily defeated and both Kleon and Brasidas killed.
Brokering a precarious peace deal: Nikias
After nearly ten years of conflict, both Sparta and Athens began to realise that neither side was going to be able to win the war - every victory came at too great a cost for the winning side to be able to take advantage.
Thus, in 421 BC, peace negotiations began, led by the Athenian strategos Nikias. The two sides managed to agree to a 50-year peace and also the return of the Spartan prisoners in exchange for Amphipolis. So that was all sorted then, wasn’t it? Sadly, no.
Although the peace of Nikias was an excellent deal for Athens and Sparta, it enraged the other cities, including Boiotia and Corinth (see the section ‘Initiating a crisis in Kerkyra’) that had supported the Spartan side during the years of fighting. As far as these Spartan-supporting states were concerned, the peace deal offered nothing for them - all their grievances against Athens were unresolved.
With so much discontent the peace brokered by Nikias couldn’t last.
Complicating the mix: Argos and Alcibiades
The cities that felt hard-done-by in the peace of Nikias deserted Sparta and looked to make a deal with the ancient city of Argos. Argos hadn’t been involved in the Peloponnesian War up until this point; the discontented cities believed that an alliance with Argos was in their best interests. But dealmaking with Argos added a third potential power to the mix and made a complicated situation even worse.
At the same time Athens was falling under a new and exciting influence in the ekklesia-a man called Alcibiades. This young, charming, and apparently immensely handsome aristocrat possessed a tremendous talent for swaying popular opinion. (See Chapter 26 for more on this complicated fellow.)
In 420 BC, Alcibiades managed to convince the ekklesia that Athens could profit from what was happening with Argos. He argued that the cities were flocking to join with Argos because Sparta was now their enemy. By logical extension, these discontented states were now Athenian allies. Brilliant!
Alcibiades won the day, and Athens made an alliance with the cities of Argos, Mantineia, and Elis. Although this technically didn’t break the peace of Nikias, it certainly strained it.
Of course, confrontation soon happened. In 418 BC, the Spartan king Agis attacked Argos, which the Spartans now saw as their main threat. This attack meant that the allies of Argos had to come to the city’s defence - and those allies now included Athens!
The result was a battle outside the town of Mantineia. The Spartans soundly defeated a combined force of Argos and its allies. The victory was a massive confidence boost to the Spartans, reinforcing their reputation for invincibility.
Engaging in siege warfare in Melos
After losing at Mantineia, Athens quickly fell back into the policy that Pericles had proposed - attacking Spartan allies and adding them to its empire. In 416 BC, Athens’s focus turned to the island of Melos, part of the Cyclades.
The siege wasn’t an arduous one, but when Melos finally broke, the Athenians did to Melos what they had threatened to do to Mytilene years before: All the men were put to death and the women and children sold into slavery.
(See the earlier section ‘Responding to the Mytilenean revolt’.)
The Athenians’ actions sound absolutely barbaric today (and have unpleasant echoes of the ‘ethnic-cleansing’ that took place during the last century). No excuse can justify the barbarous destruction of an entire community, but in the ancient world it wasn’t unusual for a siege to end like this.
Laying siege: The waiting game
In Chapter 5, I talk about the infantry battles, cavalry, and naval warfare of ancient Greeks. The other major form of military engagement during this time was the siege. A lot of siege warfare occurred during the Peloponnesian War, and Alexander the Great (see Chapters 10 and 11) was a devil for a siege. In essence, a city that was being attacked had two choices: come out and fight, or lock the gates and try to sit it out. Consequently sieges happened very often.
Generally speaking, laying a siege was a long process. The attacking army blockaded the enemy town and then essentially sat there and waited. The siege came to an end either when the attackers managed to get in, or either party gave up.
In any siege the attacking side needed to be confident that they were able to starve out those inside the city. Thus, the attacker’s supply lines needed to be excellent. They had to have enough troops to surround the city and prevent supplies getting in. When laying siege to ports, this blockade activity, known as circumvallation, was often done by using a fleet to intercept supply ships and guard the harbour.
Sieges were very time consuming and never guaranteed success. An attacker could waste months on a siege that then had to end because the troops were required elsewhere. The process was also grim, boring work for the attackers, and armies often became ill-disciplined.
Developing new tactics
By the time of the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks had developed some new tactics to go on the offensive. Following are five popular options:
● Mounds: This approach was quite simple really. The attackers constructed a very large earth mound with an underlying structure of timber against a wall of the city. The timber ensured that the mound wouldn’t be ground down by the thousands of feet pounding on it. The attackers then used the mound as a ramp for mounting infantry charges, bringing archers closer to their targets, and manoeuvring battering rams. Walls could be 25-30 feet high so it was often easier to bash a hole in them than climb over!
● Towers: The attackers built siege towers, which were large wooden constructions from which archers provided covering fire to troops attacking the walls. The towers would normally be slightly higher than the walls so that the archers could shoot down onto the defenders (although the height would depend how much timber was available). Check out Chapter 12 for the ultimate siege tower - Demetrius’s ‘Heliopolis’.
● Mines: For this tactic, the attackers literally dug under the other side’s protective walls sometimes 10 or 15 feet deep. Digging mines was an incredibly dangerous job because those doing it were liable to be crushed by the mine collapsing or the walls themselves falling on them.
The defenders often poured water into the mines, flooding them and drowning the attackers.
● Battering rams: This tactic was mostly used in conjunction with mounds.
Teams of men continually charged a wall, striking it with a ram made of wood, until the wall fell. Siege towers and archers often provided cover for battering ram teams.
● Treachery: By far the simplest way for an attacker to gain victory was to get a message to a traitor within the town who then opened the gates.
Often these traitorous actions were in return for money or simply the promise that the traitor and their family would be spared when the town was taken. Of course, often the promised safety or compensation didn’t happen in the melee that followed.
Following a siege
After a siege broke and a town was in the possession of the enemy, what followed was often terrible. The massacre of all prisoners became increasingly common during the Peloponnesian War, as the war itself became more and more brutal. These killings were often prompted by a shortage of food; limited resources meant keeping prisoners was impossible. On other occasions, the killings were to prevent the town involved from ever seeking revenge.
If a deal could be struck between attacker and the besieged citizens, it often was. For example, the Spartan prisoners taken at Sphacteria by Kleon and Demosthenes (see the previous section ‘Putting up a fight for Pylos’) were taken only because they were a really useful bargaining tool.
Sometimes the defending city won of course. Laying siege was a lengthy, arduous process and sometimes the attackers ran out of supplies (and energy) first. However, more often than not it was the attackers that won and the defenders who suffered the consequences.
War, like life itself in the ancient world, was a harsh and brutal business. The Athenian plague of 430 BC is a good indication of how death was an ever-present possibility for the ancient Greeks. While the difficulties of just staying alive don’t in any way excuse the cold-blooded murders that frequently took place, considering the difficult daily lives of the ancient Greeks does help cast a light on the type of mindset that made the life-or-death decisions on the battlefield.
Attempting - again! - to take Sicily
Soon after the Athenians’ brutal siege on Melos they suffered one of the most humiliating defeats ever as part of a failed Sicilian Expedition.
Amazingly, despite his role in the policy that had ended in defeat in Mantineia, Alcibiades (see the previous section ‘Complicating the mix: Argos and Alcibiades’) was still extremely influential in Athenian politics. When the Sicilian city of Egesta asked for help in a local war with their neighbours Selinous in the winter of 416 BC, Alcibiades enthusiastically championed the cause.
The older statesman Nikias was more circumspect, but because the war with Sparta had eased since Mantineia, the ekklesia happily voted to support Egesta. The Athenians also voted that the generals in charge of the fleet would be Nikias, Lamakhos, and Alcibiades himself.
Scandal and drama: Alcibiades
Just as the Athenian fleet was about to leave for Sicily, scandal hit the city. First, people inflicted damage on some hermai, which were small statues of the god Hermes that were associated with bringing good luck to travellers. These hermai were sculpted with erect penises and vandals had snapped them all off - ouch! The connection between the statues and the upcoming Sicilian Expedition must have been obvious to the Greeks who interpreted it as an attempt to curse the mission by desecrating images of the god of travel. It was both sacrilegious and also considered a bad omen for those going to Sicily, as it proved to be.
At almost the same time, in the ekklesia Alcibiades was accused of the crime of mocking the Eleusinian Mysteries (a very strange, sacred ritual that I describe in Chapter 22). Alcibiades’s actions seem to have merely been the result of rich, young aristocrats living it up, but the consequences were very serious. Before the Athenian fleet even reached Sicily, a messenger caught up with them to announce that Alcibiades was being recalled to face prosecution. His reaction was to leave the fleet and sail to Sparta where he became an adviser to his ex-enemies! For more on Alcibiades’s colourful life, see Chapter 26.
Disaster in Sicily
The Athenian fleet did eventually arrive in Sicily - commanded by Lamakhos and Nikias. Their first move was to lay siege to the great city of Syracuse that was supporting Selinous, the town that had attacked Egesta. Lamakhos was killed in early 414 BC, leaving Nikias in sole control.
Things were progressing well for the Athenians until the Syracusans were relieved by a group of Spartans who’d been sent to Sicily on the advice of - you guessed it - Alcibiades!
The Athenians now found themselves blockaded into the harbour of Syracuse and eventually the Athenian fleet was defeated. The Athenian soldiers tried to retreat across land but were outmanoeuvred and defeated by the Syracusans in 413 BC.
The results of the defeat were catastrophic for Athens. The commanders (including Nikias) were executed and all the remaining prisoners forced to work in the stone quarries of Syracuse. The existence was appalling with death coming as a merciful release. Altogether, about 7,000 Athenian soldiers and sailors were lost to death or slavery.
Thucydides firmly believed that the failure of the Sicilian Expedition was probably the biggest catastrophe that Athens had ever suffered:
. . . 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.
Pondering the end of Athens
The defeat in Sicily was a real turning point in the Peloponnesian War. From 413 BC onwards, the war ceased to be a struggle between Athens and Sparta and became an opportunity for others to get involved and get rich pickings.
The fat (Athenian) lady hadn’t sung yet, but she was certainly warming up. However, in the end Athens’s final defeat was really prompted from within - as I explain in Chapter 9.