The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [160]
And while the Athenians, spring-trapped within their own walls, let anxiety and paranoia foment and take the place of religious and intellectual exploration, Alcibiades walked wide in the city of Sparta that had no boundaries. This was the man, remember, with a Spartan name, a Spartan wet-nurse – in many ways it must have felt as though he had come home. The Athenians raged. Athena’s city was now fighting on three fronts: against Sparta, against a rejuvenating Persia and against the enemy within.
An inspired system, which had harnessed the competitive instincts of the aristocrats for the benefit of the people, had turned into a regime that drove some of its greatest talent into the arms of the enemy. Maybe it does not always work, to rule and be ruled in turn. Jealousy was a new god in Athens. Jealousy now ruled the Golden City.
44
RIVERS OF BLOOD
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