Book 7

1 Gylippus and Pythen, after refitting their ships at Tarentum, sailed along the coast to Epizephyrian Locri.¹ There they learned more clearly that Syracuse was not yet completely walled off, and that an army arriving by way of Epipolae could still get in; and they debated whether to keep Sicily on their right and risk the run into the harbor, or to keep it on their left, sail first to Himera, and then, taking along the Himeraeans themselves and any other force they could persuade to join, go by land. They decided to sail for Himera, especially since the four Attic ships were not yet at Rhegium; Nicias had sent them off nonetheless when he learned that the enemy were at Locri. Getting ahead of this guard, they crossed the strait, touched at Rhegium and Messana, and reached Himera. While there they persuaded the Himeraeans to join the war, both to march with them in person and to supply arms to those sailors from their ships who had none (for they had beached their ships at Himera); and they sent to the Selinuntines and told them to meet them in full force at a certain place. The Geloans and some of the Sicels also promised to send them a force, not a large one. The Sicels were ready to come over much more eagerly than before, because Archonidas had recently died, a king of some of the Sicels in those parts, a man of some power, and a friend of the Athenians, and because Gylippus seemed to have come from Lacedaemon in earnest. Gylippus took the armed men among his own sailors and marines, about seven hundred; Himeraean hoplites and light-armed troops together, a thousand, and a hundred horsemen; some light-armed troops and horsemen from Selinus, and a few Geloans; and Sicels, about a thousand in all; and he marched for Syracuse.

2 Meanwhile the Corinthians from Leucas were hurrying to the rescue with the rest of their ships as fast as each could make it; and Gongylus, one of the Corinthian commanders, who had set out last, with a single ship, arrived first at Syracuse, a little ahead of Gylippus. He found the Syracusans about to hold an assembly on ending the war. He stopped them and put heart into them, telling them that more ships were still on the way, and Gylippus son of Cleandridas, whom the Lacedaemonians had sent as commander. The Syracusans took courage and went out at once in full force to meet Gylippus, for they had learned that he was already close. He, having taken Ietae, a Sicel fort, on his way, and having drawn up his men ready for battle, reached Epipolae; he went up by Euryelus, the way the Athenians themselves had first gone, and advanced with the Syracusans against the Athenian fortification. He happened to arrive at the very moment when the Athenians had finished a double wall seven or eight stades long down to the Great Harbor, except for a short stretch at the sea, which they were still building; along the rest of the circle, toward Trogilus on the other sea, stones had already been laid down for most of the distance, and some parts had been left half built and others finished. That was how close Syracuse came to danger.

3 The Athenians were thrown into confusion at first by the sudden advance of Gylippus and the Syracusans, but they formed up for battle. Gylippus grounded arms close by and sent a herald to tell them that if they were willing to leave Sicily within five days, taking their belongings with them, he was ready to make a truce. They treated this with contempt and sent the herald away without an answer. After this the two sides made ready against each other for battle. Gylippus, seeing that the Syracusans were in disorder and not easily getting into line, drew his army back into more open ground. Nicias did not lead the Athenians forward but kept quiet by his own wall. When Gylippus saw that they were not coming on, he led his army off to the height called Temenites, and they camped there for the night. The next day he led out the greater part of his army and drew it up facing the Athenian walls, so that they could not send help elsewhere; and he sent a detachment against the fort of Labdalum and took it, and killed everyone he captured in it. The place was out of sight of the Athenians. On the same day an Athenian trireme keeping watch off the harbor was captured by the Syracusans.

4 After this the Syracusans and their allies began to build a single wall across Epipolae, starting from the city and running up toward the cross wall, so that the Athenians, unless they could prevent it, would no longer be able to wall them off. The Athenians had by now gone up to the heights, having finished the wall by the sea; and Gylippus, since part of the Athenian wall was weak, took his army by night and moved against it. But the Athenians, who happened to be camped outside the wall, saw this and advanced to meet him, and when he saw it he quickly led his men back again. The Athenians raised that section higher and guarded it themselves, and they now posted the allies along the rest of the fortification, each at the place it was to garrison. Nicias decided to fortify the place called Plemmyrium. This is a headland opposite the city that juts out and makes the mouth of the Great Harbor narrow; if it were fortified, he thought, bringing in supplies would be easier, because they would be keeping watch on the Syracusan harbor from closer at hand and would not, as now, have to put out from the far end of the Great Harbor whenever the enemy made any move with their navy. He was by now paying more attention to the war at sea, since he saw that their prospects on land had become less hopeful since Gylippus came. So he took a force and the ships across and built three forts; most of the equipment was stored in them, and the large boats and the warships now lay at anchor there. As a result, it was now above all that the crews first began to deteriorate. They had to use water that was scarce and not close at hand, and whenever the sailors went out to gather firewood they were cut down by the Syracusan horsemen, who were masters of the countryside; for on account of the men at Plemmyrium a third of the Syracusan cavalry had been posted at the little town at the Olympieum, to keep them from coming out to do damage. Nicias also learned that the rest of the Corinthian ships were on their way, and he sent twenty ships to watch for them, with orders to lie in wait for them around Locri and Rhegium and the approach to Sicily.

5 Gylippus went on building the wall across Epipolae, using the stones the Athenians had laid down for their own wall, and at the same time kept leading the Syracusans and their allies out and drawing them up in front of the fortification; and the Athenians drew up against them. When Gylippus judged that the moment had come, he began the attack; they came to close quarters and fought between the two walls, where the Syracusan cavalry could be of no use at all. The Syracusans and their allies were beaten, they took up their dead under truce, and the Athenians set up a trophy. Gylippus then called the army together and said that the mistake had been not theirs but his own: by drawing up their line too far inside the walls he had robbed them of the help of their cavalry and javelin men. Now he would lead them on again. He told them to keep this in mind: in equipment they would be no worse off than the enemy, and as for spirit, it would be intolerable if they, Peloponnesians and Dorians, could not bring themselves to beat Ionians and islanders and a mixed rabble and drive them out of the country.

6 After this, when the moment came, he led them on again. Nicias and the Athenians believed that even if the enemy were unwilling to begin a battle, they themselves could not stand by and let the wall be built past their own (for the Syracusan wall had already all but passed the end of the Athenian wall, and if it went farther, it would come to the same thing for them whether they won every battle they fought or did not fight at all); so they advanced against the Syracusans. Gylippus led his hoplites farther out from the walls than before and engaged there, and posted his cavalry and javelin men on the Athenians’ flank, in the open ground where the works of both walls ended. In the battle the cavalry charged the Athenian left wing, which was opposite them, and routed it; and because of this the rest of the army too was beaten by the Syracusans and driven headlong into its fortifications. The next night the Syracusans managed to carry their wall past the Athenian works in time, so that they could no longer be stopped by them, and the Athenians were wholly deprived of any chance, even if they won, of walling them off.

7 After this the remaining twelve ships of the Corinthians, Ambraciots, and Leucadians sailed in, having slipped past the Athenian guard (Erasinides, a Corinthian, commanded them), and helped the Syracusans build the rest of the wall up to the cross wall. Gylippus went off into the rest of Sicily to raise an army, both naval and land forces, and at the same time to win over any of the cities that were either lukewarm or had kept wholly out of the war so far. Other envoys of the Syracusans and Corinthians were sent to Lacedaemon and Corinth to get another army brought across in whatever way it could, in merchant ships or boats or any other way that worked, since the Athenians too were sending for reinforcements. The Syracusans manned a fleet and began to train it, meaning to try their hand at this too, and in everything else they had taken great heart.

8 Nicias saw this and saw that the enemy’s strength and his own helplessness grew day by day, and he too sent to Athens. He had often done so before, reporting each thing as it happened, but now more than ever, since he believed they were in danger and that unless the Athenians either recalled them as quickly as possible or sent out others, and not a few, there was no hope of safety. He was afraid that the men he sent, whether through lack of skill in speaking, or failures of memory, or by saying something to please the crowd, might not report the facts, and so he wrote a letter, thinking that in this way the Athenians would best learn his own judgment, with nothing of it lost in the messenger, and could deliberate on the truth. The men he sent left, carrying the letter and whatever they had to say themselves; and he attended to the camp, now managing it more by keeping on guard than by running risks of his own choosing.

9 At the end of the same summer Euetion, an Athenian general, marched with Perdiccas against Amphipolis with many Thracians. He did not take the city, but he brought triremes round into the Strymon and besieged it from the river, using Himeraeum as his base. And the summer ended.

10 The following winter the men from Nicias arrived at Athens. They said what they had been told to say by word of mouth, answered any questions put to them, and delivered the letter. The clerk of the city came forward and read it to the Athenians. It ran as follows.

11 “Athenians, you know what was done earlier from many other letters; but now it is time for you, no less than before, to learn our situation and to deliberate. We had beaten the Syracusans, against whom we were sent, in most of the battles, and had built the walls we now occupy, when Gylippus, a Lacedaemonian, came with an army from the Peloponnese and from some of the cities in Sicily. In the first battle he was beaten by us; the next day we were overpowered by numerous horsemen and javelin men and withdrew into our walls. So now, because of the numbers against us, we have stopped walling them in and are keeping quiet (we could not use our whole army in any case, since guarding the walls has taken up part of our hoplite force); and they have built a single wall past ours, so that it is no longer possible to wall them in, unless someone attacks this counter-wall with a large army and takes it. And it has turned out that we, who are supposed to be besieging others, are ourselves the ones who suffer it, at least on land; for we cannot even go far into the countryside because of the cavalry.

12 “They have also sent envoys to the Peloponnese for another army, and Gylippus has gone to the cities in Sicily, to persuade those that are now neutral to join the war, and from others to bring, if he can, more infantry and materials for a navy. For they intend, as I learn, to try our walls with their infantry and at the same time with their ships by sea. And let none of you think it a strange thing that I say by sea as well. Our navy, as the enemy also know, was at first in its prime, both in the dryness of the ships and the soundness of the crews; but now the ships are waterlogged from being at sea so long, and the crews have been ruined. We cannot haul the ships ashore and dry them out, because the enemy’s ships, equal to ours in number and more, keep us always expecting an attack. They are plainly seen training; the initiative lies with them; and they have more freedom to dry out their own ships, since they are not blockading anyone else.

13 “We, on the other hand, could hardly do this even if we had a great surplus of ships and were not forced, as we are now, to keep all of them on guard; for if we relax our watch even a little, we shall have no supplies, since even now we bring them in with difficulty past their city. Our crews have been ruined, and are still being ruined, for these reasons. Of the sailors, some are lost to the cavalry while they go far afield for firewood, for plunder, and for water; the servants have been deserting since we came to be evenly matched; and of the foreigners, those who were pressed into service go off at once to their cities, while those who were first tempted by high pay, thinking they would make money rather than fight, now that they see, against their expectation, a navy and everything else standing against them on the enemy’s side, leave either on the pretext of deserting to the enemy or in any way each of them can (and Sicily is large). There are even some who trade on their own account, persuade the trierarchs to take slaves bought at Hyccara aboard in their place, and so have destroyed the precision of our navy.

14 “I write to people who know that a crew is at its peak only for a short time, and that only a few of the sailors can get a ship under way and keep the rowing together. Of all these things the most hopeless is, first, that I as general cannot prevent them (for your natures are hard to command), and second, that we have no source from which to fill up our crews, as the enemy can from many places; both what we have now and what we lose must come out of what we brought with us. For the cities that are now our allies, Naxos and Catana, are powerless. And if one more thing is added to the enemy’s side, so that the districts of Italy that feed us, seeing the state we are in and that you are not sending help, go over to them, the war will have been fought to the end for them without a battle, and we shall have been starved out by siege. I could have sent you other news more pleasant than this, but certainly not more useful, if you are to deliberate with clear knowledge of affairs here. And knowing your natures as I do, that you wish to hear what is most pleasant, but blame people afterward if anything turns out differently for you as a result, I thought it safer to show you the truth.

15 “And now, understand that as far as the purpose for which we first came is concerned, neither your soldiers nor your commanders have given you cause for blame. But since all Sicily is uniting, and another army is expected by them from the Peloponnese, you must now deliberate on the basis that the forces here are not equal even to the enemy now present. You must either recall these men or send out another army no smaller, both land and naval forces, and money, and not a little; and a successor for me, since I cannot stay on because of a disease of the kidneys. I think I have a claim on your indulgence; for when I was in good health I did you much good service in my commands. But whatever you mean to do, do it at the very start of spring and without delay, since the enemy will procure what they need from Sicily in a short time, and what comes from the Peloponnese more slowly; but even so, unless you pay attention, some things will escape your notice, as before, and in others they will be ahead of you.”

16 That was what Nicias’ letter disclosed. When the Athenians heard it, they did not relieve Nicias of his command; but until the colleagues they chose should arrive, they appointed two men already there, Menander and Euthydemus, to serve with him, so that he would not bear the strain alone in his sickness; and they voted to send another army, both naval and land forces, of Athenians from the muster roll and of the allies. As his colleagues they chose Demosthenes son of Alcisthenes and Eurymedon son of Thucles. Eurymedon they sent off to Sicily at once, around the winter solstice, with ten ships, carrying 120 talents of silver,² and to tell the men there that help would come and that they would be looked after.

17 Demosthenes stayed behind and prepared for the expedition, meaning to sail at the start of spring; he sent word to the allies for troops and got ready money, ships, and hoplites at home. The Athenians also sent twenty ships around the Peloponnese to see that no one crossed from Corinth or the Peloponnese to Sicily. For the Corinthians, when their envoys came back with better news from Sicily, thought their earlier dispatch of ships had not been ill-timed and took much greater heart; they made ready to send hoplites to Sicily in merchant ships themselves, and the Lacedaemonians were to send them in the same way from the rest of the Peloponnese. The Corinthians also manned twenty-five ships, to try a sea battle with the squadron at Naupactus, and so that the Athenians at Naupactus would be less able to stop their merchant ships from putting out, being occupied with keeping watch on the Corinthian triremes drawn up against them.

18 The Lacedaemonians were also preparing for their invasion of Attica, as they had decided before, and because the Syracusans and Corinthians were urging them on, now that they learned of the reinforcements from Athens to Sicily, so that an invasion might stop them. And Alcibiades kept pressing them, urging them to fortify Decelea and not to let the war slacken. But above all the Lacedaemonians had gained a certain confidence because they thought that the Athenians, with two wars on their hands, against themselves and against the Sicilian Greeks, would be easier to destroy, and because they believed the Athenians had been the first to break the treaty. In the earlier war, they thought, the offense had been more theirs, because the Thebans had entered Plataea in time of truce, and because, although the earlier agreement had said that arms should not be brought against those who were willing to submit to arbitration, they themselves had refused when the Athenians invited them to arbitration. For this reason they thought their misfortunes deserved, and they took to heart the disaster at Pylos and any other that had befallen them. But when the Athenians, using Argos as a base, had ravaged part of the territory of Epidaurus and Prasiae and other places with their thirty ships, and at the same time were plundering from Pylos, and whenever disputes arose over any of the points in question under the treaty, refused to submit to arbitration when the Lacedaemonians invited them, then indeed the Lacedaemonians, believing that the offense they themselves had committed before had now come round in the same form to the Athenians, were eager for the war. During this winter they sent round to their allies for iron and got ready the other tools for building the fort; and at the same time, to send help to the men in Sicily in the merchant ships, they raised troops themselves and compelled the other Peloponnesians to do the same. So the winter ended, and with it the eighteenth year of this war, which Thucydides recorded.

19 At the very start of the following spring, earlier than ever before, the Lacedaemonians and their allies invaded Attica. Agis son of Archidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians, was in command. First they ravaged the country around the plain; then they began to fortify Decelea, dividing the work among the cities. Decelea is about 120 stades from the city of Athens, and about the same distance, not much more, from Boeotia. The fort was being built to do damage to the plain and the richest parts of the country, and it could be seen from the city of Athens itself. So the Peloponnesians and their allies in Attica built their fort, while those in the Peloponnese, at about the same time, were sending the hoplites to Sicily in the merchant ships. The Lacedaemonians picked the best of the Helots and of the Neodamodes,³ some six hundred hoplites of both together, with Eccritus, a Spartiate, in command; the Boeotians sent three hundred hoplites, commanded by Xenon and Nicon, Thebans, and Hegesander, a Thespian. These were the first to set out, from Taenarum in Laconia, and put out to the open sea. Not long after them the Corinthians sent off five hundred hoplites, some from Corinth itself and some Arcadians they had hired, with Alexarchus, a Corinthian, placed in command. The Sicyonians too sent two hundred hoplites along with the Corinthians, commanded by Sargeus, a Sicyonian. Meanwhile the twenty-five Corinthian ships that had been manned in the winter lay at anchor facing the twenty Attic ships at Naupactus, until these hoplites had set sail from the Peloponnese in the merchant ships. That was why they had been manned in the first place: so that the Athenians would pay attention to the triremes rather than to the merchant ships.

20 Meanwhile the Athenians too, at the same time as the fortification of Decelea and at the very start of spring, sent thirty ships around the Peloponnese under Charicles son of Apollodorus, who had orders to go to Argos as well and to call on the Argives, under the terms of the alliance, for hoplites to serve on the ships. And they sent off Demosthenes to Sicily, as they had intended, with sixty Athenian ships and five Chian, twelve hundred Athenian hoplites from the muster roll, as many islanders as they could possibly get from each place, and whatever they could gather from the other subject allies that was of use for the war. He had orders first to sail around with Charicles and take part in his operations around Laconia. Demosthenes sailed to Aegina and waited there for any part of his force that had been left behind, and for Charicles to pick up the Argives.

21 In Sicily, at about the same time this spring, Gylippus too came back to Syracuse, bringing from the cities he had won over as large a force as he could get from each. He called the Syracusans together and told them they must man as many ships as they could and make trial of a sea battle; for he hoped from this to accomplish something for the war worthy of the risk. Hermocrates joined in persuading them, and not least, that they should not lose heart at attacking the Athenians with their ships. He said that the Athenians too did not have their experience of the sea from their fathers, or from all time; they had been landsmen even more than the Syracusans and had been forced to become seamen by the Medes. Against daring men such as the Athenians, he said, those who dared in return would seem the most formidable; for the same means by which the Athenians terrified their neighbors, sometimes not by superior power but by attacking with boldness, the Syracusans too could use on their enemies in the same way. And he said he knew well that if the Syracusans dared, against expectation, to stand up to the Athenian navy, they would gain more from the enemy’s being taken aback by such a thing than the Athenians would harm the Syracusans’ inexperience with their skill. So he told them to go and make trial of their navy and not to shrink from it. The Syracusans, persuaded by Gylippus and Hermocrates and whoever else, were eager for the sea battle and began to man their ships.

22 When the fleet was ready, Gylippus led out the whole land army under cover of night, intending to attack the forts at Plemmyrium himself by land; at the same time and at a signal the Syracusan triremes moved out, thirty-five sailing against the enemy from the Great Harbor, and forty-five sailing around from the smaller harbor, where their dockyard was, wishing to join the ships inside and at the same time to sail against Plemmyrium, so that the Athenians would be thrown into confusion on both sides. The Athenians quickly manned sixty ships against them, and with twenty-five of these they fought the thirty-five Syracusan ships in the Great Harbor, and with the rest they went to meet the ships sailing around from the dockyard. They fought at once in front of the mouth of the Great Harbor, and for a long time held each other off, the one side wishing to force the entrance, the other to prevent it.

23 Meanwhile, while the Athenians at Plemmyrium had gone down to the shore and were intent on the sea battle, Gylippus struck first: at dawn he fell suddenly on the forts and took the largest first, and then the two smaller ones too, since their garrisons did not stand when they saw the largest so easily taken. From the first one taken, the men who fled to the boats and to a merchant ship had a hard time getting away to the camp, for the Syracusans were winning the sea battle with their ships in the Great Harbor, and they were chased by one fast trireme. But by the time the two forts were being taken, the Syracusans happened to be already losing, and the men fleeing from these forts sailed past more easily. For the Syracusan ships fighting in front of the mouth forced their way past the Athenian ships but sailed in with no order, fell into confusion among themselves, and handed the victory to the Athenians; for the Athenians routed these and also those by which they had at first been beaten in the harbor. They sank eleven Syracusan ships and killed most of the men aboard, except those from three ships, whom they took alive; and of their own ships three were destroyed. They hauled in the wrecks of the Syracusan ships, set up a trophy on the islet off Plemmyrium, and went back to their own camp.

24 That was how the Syracusans had fared in the sea battle; but they held the forts at Plemmyrium, and they set up three trophies for them. One of the two forts taken last they pulled down; the other two they repaired and garrisoned. Many men were killed or taken alive in the capture of the forts, and a great deal of property was taken in all; for the Athenians had been using the forts as a storehouse, and there was much property of merchants in them, and grain, and much of the trierarchs’ property too, since the sails of forty triremes and the rest of their gear were captured there, and three triremes that had been hauled ashore. The capture of Plemmyrium was the greatest and the first of the blows that ruined the Athenian army. Even the entrance for bringing in supplies was no longer safe (for the Syracusans lay in wait there with ships and stopped them, and from now on supplies could be brought in only by fighting), and in other respects too it struck the army with dismay and despondency.

25 After this the Syracusans sent out twelve ships with Agatharchus, a Syracusan, in command. One of them went to the Peloponnese, carrying envoys who were to report that the Syracusan cause was hopeful and to urge that the war there be pressed still harder. The other eleven sailed to Italy, on news that boats laden with goods were on their way to the Athenians. They fell in with the boats and destroyed most of them, and they burned timber for shipbuilding in the territory of Caulonia, which was lying ready for the Athenians. After this they went to Locri, and while they were at anchor there one of the merchant ships from the Peloponnese put in, bringing Thespian hoplites; the Syracusans took them on board their ships and sailed along the coast for home. The Athenians watched for them with twenty ships off Megara and took one ship, men and all, but could not take the others, which escaped to Syracuse. There was also skirmishing in the harbor over the stakes that the Syracusans had driven into the sea in front of the old ship sheds, so that their ships could lie at anchor inside them and the Athenians could not sail in and damage them by ramming. The Athenians brought up a ship of ten thousand talents’ burden, fitted with wooden towers and screens, and from boats they tied ropes around the stakes and hauled them up and broke them off, or dived down and sawed them through. The Syracusans shot at them from the ship sheds, and the men on the merchant ship shot back; in the end the Athenians removed most of the stakes. The hardest part of the palisade was the hidden part; for there were some stakes they had driven in that did not rise above the surface, so that it was dangerous to sail in, for fear that a man might not see them in time and run his ship onto them as onto a reef. But divers went down and sawed off these too, for pay. Still, the Syracusans drove in stakes again. They devised many other things against each other, as was natural with the two armies close together and drawn up face to face, and made use of skirmishes and attempts of every kind. The Syracusans also sent envoys, Corinthians, Ambraciots, and Lacedaemonians, to the cities to report the capture of Plemmyrium, and to say of the sea battle that they had been beaten not by the enemy’s strength so much as by their own confusion; and to make it known that in all else they were hopeful, and to ask them to come to their aid with ships and infantry, since the Athenians too were expected with another army, and if they could destroy the army already there before it came, the war would be finished. That was what the men in Sicily were doing.

26 When Demosthenes had gathered the force he was to take to the aid of Sicily, he set out from Aegina, sailed to the Peloponnese, and joined Charicles and the thirty Athenian ships; and taking on board the Argive hoplites, they sailed to Laconia. First they ravaged part of Epidaurus Limera; then they put in on the coast of Laconia opposite Cythera, where the temple of Apollo is, ravaged some of the land, and fortified a sort of isthmus there, so that the Helots of the Lacedaemonians could desert to it, and so that raiders could use it, as they used Pylos, as a base for plunder. Demosthenes, as soon as he had helped to occupy the place, sailed on along the coast for Corcyra, to pick up allies there too and make the voyage to Sicily as quickly as possible; Charicles waited until he had finished fortifying the place, left a garrison in it, and then went home himself with the thirty ships, and the Argives with him.

27 In this same summer there also arrived at Athens thirteen hundred peltasts, sword-bearing Thracians of the Dii tribe, who were to have sailed with Demosthenes to Sicily. Since they had come too late, the Athenians meant to send them back to Thrace, where they had come from. To keep them for the war from Decelea seemed too costly, for each man received a drachma a day. For Decelea, first fortified by the whole army in this summer and afterward occupied, to the harm of the country, by garrisons from the cities relieving one another at intervals, did the Athenians great damage; and with its destruction of property and loss of men it was among the first things that ruined their affairs. Before, the invasions had been short and did not prevent them from enjoying their land for the rest of the time; but now the enemy sat on them continuously, and sometimes larger forces came, and sometimes the regular garrison, out of necessity, overran the country and plundered; and with the king of the Lacedaemonians, Agis, present, who did not treat the war as a side matter, the Athenians were greatly harmed. They had lost the whole of their country; more than twenty thousand slaves had deserted, and most of them were craftsmen; all their sheep and draft animals had been lost; and of the horses, since the horsemen rode out every day, making raids toward Decelea and guarding the country, some were lamed on the hard ground and by continuous hardship, and others were wounded.

28 The bringing of supplies from Euboea, which had formerly been quicker overland from Oropus through Decelea, now went around Sunium by sea at great cost. The city needed everything alike from abroad, and instead of a city it became a fort. The Athenians stood guard on the battlements, by day in turns and by night all together except the horsemen, some at the arms posts and others on the wall,⁴ and they wore themselves out summer and winter. What pressed them most was that they had two wars at once; and they had reached a pitch of contentiousness that no one would have believed if he had heard of it before it happened. No one would have believed that they, though themselves besieged by the fort the Peloponnesians had built, would not even so withdraw from Sicily, but would in turn besiege Syracuse there in the same way, a city in itself no smaller than Athens; or that they would so confound the Hellenes’ estimate of their power and daring (for at the start of the war some thought they would hold out for a year, some for two, but no one for more than three, if the Peloponnesians invaded their country), that in the seventeenth year after the first invasion they went to Sicily, already worn down by the war in every way, and took on a war no smaller than the one they already had from the Peloponnese. For these reasons, and because Decelea was doing them great harm and other heavy expenses were falling on them, they had now become short of money. At about this time they imposed on their subjects, in place of the tribute, a duty of one twentieth on all goods carried by sea, thinking that in this way more money would come in to them. For their expenses were not as before but had become much greater, as the war had become greater, while their revenues were perishing.

29 So, because of their present shortage of money, and not wishing to spend it, they sent the Thracians who had come too late for Demosthenes straight back, appointing Diitrephes to take them home, and telling him at the same time to do the enemy what damage he could with them on the voyage along the coast (for they were going by way of the Euripus). He landed them at Tanagra and carried off some plunder quickly; then he crossed the Euripus from Chalcis in Euboea in the evening, landed them in Boeotia, and led them against Mycalessus. He spent the night unnoticed at the Hermaeum (it is about sixteen stades from Mycalessus), and at daybreak he assaulted the town, which is not a large one. He took it, falling on people who were off their guard and who never expected that anyone would come so far up from the sea to attack them; the wall was weak, and in some places had even fallen, and in others had been built low, and the gates too were open because they felt safe. The Thracians burst into Mycalessus and sacked the houses and the temples, and they slaughtered the people, sparing neither the old nor the young, but killing everyone they met, one after another, children and women, and even the draft animals and every other living thing they saw; for the Thracian race, like the most bloodthirsty of the barbarians, is most murderous whenever it feels secure. And then there was confusion of every kind, and every form of destruction; and they fell on a boys’ school, the largest in the place, which the children had just entered, and cut them all down. This disaster fell on the whole city, a disaster second to none, and more unexpected and more terrible than any.

30 The Thebans learned of it and came to the rescue. They caught up with the Thracians when they had not gone far, took the plunder from them, and drove them in panic down to the Euripus and the sea, where the boats that had brought them lay at anchor. They killed most of them as they were getting aboard, since they did not know how to swim, and the men in the boats, when they saw what was happening on land, had anchored the boats out of bowshot. In the rest of the retreat, however, the Thracians defended themselves not unskillfully against the Theban cavalry, which attacked first, dashing out and closing up again in the manner of their country, and few of them were killed in this part. Some of them were caught in the town itself while plundering and were killed. Of the thirteen hundred Thracians, two hundred and fifty were killed in all. They killed about twenty of the Thebans and the others who came to help, horsemen and hoplites together, and Scirphondas, one of the Boeotarchs of Thebes; and of the Mycalessians a part was wiped out. Such were the things that happened at Mycalessus, which suffered a calamity that, for its size, was as pitiable as any in the war.

31 Demosthenes, meanwhile, sailing for Corcyra after the fortification in Laconia, found a merchant ship lying at Pheia in Elis, in which the Corinthian hoplites were to cross to Sicily. He destroyed the ship; the men escaped, and later got another ship and sailed. After this Demosthenes went to Zacynthus and Cephallenia, took on hoplites there, sent for some of the Messenians from Naupactus, and crossed over to the mainland opposite, to Acarnania, to Alyzia and to Anactorium, which the Athenians held. While he was there Eurymedon met him, sailing back from Sicily, where he had been sent in the winter with the money for the army; and he reported, among other things, that he had learned while already on his voyage that Plemmyrium had been taken by the Syracusans. Conon, who commanded at Naupactus, also came to them, reporting that the twenty-five Corinthian ships lying opposite them were not breaking off the war and were about to fight; he asked them to send ships, since his own eighteen were not enough to fight their twenty-five. So Demosthenes and Eurymedon sent ten ships with Conon, the best sailers they had, to join those at Naupactus, and themselves went on with the gathering of the army. Eurymedon sailed to Corcyra, told the Corcyraeans to man fifteen ships, and enlisted hoplites (for he had turned back and was now sharing the command with Demosthenes, as he had been elected to do); Demosthenes collected slingers and javelin men from the districts around Acarnania.

32 The envoys who had gone from Syracuse to the cities after the capture of Plemmyrium had persuaded them and gathered an army, and were about to bring it. Nicias learned of it in advance and sent to those of the Sicels who held the route and were his allies, the Centoripans, the Halicyaeans, and others, asking them not to let the enemy through but to unite and stop them from passing; for they would not even try another route, since the Agrigentines would not give them passage through their territory. When the Sicilian Greeks were already on the march, the Sicels, as the Athenians had asked, set an ambush in three places, fell on them suddenly while they were off their guard, and killed about eight hundred of them, and all the envoys except one, the Corinthian. He brought those who escaped, about fifteen hundred, to Syracuse.

33 About the same days the Camarinaeans also arrived to help the Syracusans, with five hundred hoplites, three hundred javelin men, and three hundred archers. The Geloans too sent a naval force of five ships, four hundred javelin men, and two hundred horsemen. For by now almost the whole of Sicily, except the Agrigentines (who were with neither side), all the rest, who had before been watching events, joined together with the Syracusans and came to help against the Athenians. The Syracusans, after the disaster they had suffered among the Sicels, held off from attacking the Athenians at once. Demosthenes and Eurymedon, their forces from Corcyra and from the mainland now being ready, crossed the Ionian Gulf with their whole army to the Iapygian headland. Setting out from there, they put in at the Choerades islands off Iapygia and took on board their ships a hundred and fifty Iapygian javelin men of the Messapian tribe; and after renewing an old friendship with Artas, who as ruler there had supplied them with the javelin men, they came to Metapontum in Italy. They persuaded the Metapontines, under their alliance, to send with them three hundred javelin men and two triremes, and taking these they sailed along the coast to Thurii. There they found that the party opposed to the Athenians had recently been driven out in a civil conflict. They wished to gather their whole army there and review it, to see if anyone had been left behind, and to persuade the Thurians to join the campaign with them as eagerly as possible and, since they were in this position, to count the same men enemies and friends as the Athenians did; so they waited in Thurian territory and worked at this.

34 At about this same time the Peloponnesians in the twenty-five ships, who had been lying opposite the ships at Naupactus to cover the passage of the merchant ships to Sicily, made ready for a sea battle, manned still more ships, so that they were only a little fewer than the Attic ships, and anchored off Erineus in Achaea, in the territory of Rhypes. The place where they lay was crescent-shaped; the infantry of the Corinthians and of the local allies, who had come to help, was drawn up on the headlands projecting on either side, and the ships held the space between, blocking it. The fleet was commanded by Polyanthes, a Corinthian. The Athenians sailed out against them from Naupactus with thirty-three ships, commanded by Diphilus. At first the Corinthians kept still; then, when the signal was raised for them and the moment seemed right, they charged the Athenians and fought. They held each other off for a long time. Three Corinthian ships were destroyed; of the Athenian ships none was sunk outright, but some seven were disabled, struck head-on and with their outriggers stove in by the Corinthian ships, which had catheads made thicker for this very purpose. They fought an even battle, such that each side could claim the victory; but the Athenians took possession of the wrecks, because the wind drove them out to sea and the Corinthians did not put out again, and the two sides parted. There was no pursuit, and no prisoners were taken on either side; for the Corinthians and Peloponnesians, fighting close to land, got away easily, and on the Athenian side no ship was sunk. When the Athenians had sailed back to Naupactus, the Corinthians at once set up a trophy as victors, because they had disabled more of the enemy’s ships, and because they considered themselves not beaten for the very reason that the others did not consider themselves victorious. For the Corinthians thought they had won if they were not badly beaten, and the Athenians thought they had lost because they had not won by much. When the Peloponnesians had sailed away and the infantry had dispersed, the Athenians too set up a trophy as victors in Achaea, about twenty stades from Erineus, where the Corinthians had lain. So the sea battle ended.

35 When the Thurians had been made ready to join the campaign with seven hundred hoplites and three hundred javelin men, Demosthenes and Eurymedon ordered the ships to sail along the coast toward the territory of Croton, and they themselves, after reviewing all their infantry first at the river Sybaris, led them through the territory of Thurii. When they reached the river Hylias, the Crotoniates sent to tell them that they did not wish the army to go through their land; so they went down to the sea and camped near the mouth of the Hylias, and their ships met them at the same place. The next day they went aboard and sailed along the coast, putting in at the cities except Locri, until they reached Petra in the territory of Rhegium.

36 Meanwhile the Syracusans, learning that they were on their way, wished to make another attempt with their ships and with the rest of their infantry force, which they had been gathering for this very purpose, wishing to strike before the newcomers arrived. They fitted out the rest of their fleet in the way they had seen, from the earlier sea battle, would give them some advantage; and they cut the bows of their ships shorter and made them more solid, set heavy catheads on the bows, and ran stays from these to the ships’ sides, about six cubits long, inside and out. This was the way the Corinthians too had refitted their ships at the bows to fight the squadron at Naupactus. The Syracusans thought that against the Athenian ships, which were not built in the same way to meet them but were light at the bows, because the Athenians did not ram head-on so much as by sailing around, they would have the advantage; and that the battle in the Great Harbor, where there would be many ships in a small space, would be in their favor. Ramming bow to bow, they would stave in the Athenians’ bows, striking with solid, heavy beaks against hollow, weak ones. And the Athenians, in a confined space, would have neither the sailing around nor the breaking through, the maneuvers in which they most trusted their skill; for they themselves would do all they could to keep them from breaking through, and the narrowness of the space would keep them from sailing around. And the head-on collision, which had before been thought a lack of skill in the helmsmen, they themselves would use most of all, for in it they would have the greatest advantage. The Athenians, if they were pushed back, would have no room to back water except toward the land, and that only a short way and into a small space, right by their own camp; the rest of the harbor the Syracusans would control. And the Athenians, if they were pressed anywhere, would be crowded together into a small space, all into the same place, and would run into each other and fall into confusion (and this was in fact what hurt the Athenians most in all the sea battles, since they could not back water over the whole harbor, as the Syracusans could). As for sailing around into the open water, they would not be able to, since the Syracusans controlled the way in from the open sea and the way back, especially as Plemmyrium would be hostile to them and the mouth of the harbor was not wide.

37 Having worked out such plans to suit their own skill and strength, and at the same time more confident now after the earlier sea battle, the Syracusans attacked with their infantry and their ships at once. Gylippus led out the infantry from the city a little before and brought it up against the part of the Athenian wall that faced the city; and the men from the Olympieum, the hoplites who were there and the horsemen and the light troops of the Syracusans, advanced against the wall from the other side. Immediately afterward the ships of the Syracusans and their allies sailed out. The Athenians, who at first thought they would try them with their infantry alone, were thrown into confusion when they saw the ships too suddenly bearing down on them. Some formed up on the walls and in front of the walls against the attackers; others went out to meet the horsemen and javelin men, many of them, who were coming quickly from the Olympieum and from outside; others manned the ships and at the same time ran down to the beach to help; and when the ships were manned, they put out seventy-five ships against them. The Syracusan ships numbered about eighty.

38 For much of the day they advanced and backed water and tried each other out, and neither side could gain any advantage worth mentioning, except that the Syracusans sank one or two Athenian ships; then they parted, and at the same time the infantry withdrew from the walls. The next day the Syracusans kept quiet and gave no sign of what they would do next. Nicias, seeing that the sea battle had been evenly fought and expecting them to attack again, made the trierarchs repair their ships wherever any had been damaged, and moored merchant ships in front of the palisade they had driven into the sea before their ships, in place of an enclosed harbor. He set the merchant ships at intervals of about two plethra from one another,⁵ so that if any ship were hard pressed it would have a safe refuge and a way out again at leisure. The Athenians spent the whole day until nightfall making these preparations.

39 The next day the Syracusans engaged the Athenians earlier in the day, but with the same kind of attack, by infantry and fleet together. They took up position facing them with their ships in the same way and again spent much of the day trying each other out, until Ariston son of Pyrrhichus, a Corinthian, the best helmsman on the Syracusan side, persuaded their naval commanders to send to the officials in the city and tell them to move the market of things for sale down to the sea as quickly as possible and to compel everyone who had food to bring it there and sell it, so that they could land the sailors and have them take their meal at once beside the ships, and after a short time attack the Athenians again on the same day, when they did not expect it.

40 They were persuaded and sent a messenger, and the market was got ready. The Syracusans suddenly backed water and sailed back toward the city, landed at once, and took their meal there. The Athenians, thinking they had withdrawn toward the city because they were beaten, landed at leisure and went about their other business and about getting their meal, believing that on this day at least there would be no more fighting at sea. But suddenly the Syracusans manned their ships and sailed against them again. The Athenians, in great confusion and most of them unfed, went aboard in no order and with difficulty finally put out against them. For some time the two sides held off from each other, on their guard. Then the Athenians decided not to wait any longer and be worn down by their own exhaustion, but to attack as quickly as possible; and they charged with a cheer and engaged. The Syracusans received them, and, ramming bow to bow as they had planned, with the beaks they had prepared, stove in the Athenian ships along a great part of their outriggers. The men on their decks, throwing javelins, did the Athenians great harm, and still greater harm was done by the Syracusans who rowed around in light boats, slipped in under the oars of the enemy ships, came alongside their flanks, and threw javelins from the boats at the sailors.

41 In the end, fighting hard in this way, the Syracusans won, and the Athenians turned and fled between the merchant ships into their own anchorage. The Syracusan ships pursued them as far as the merchant ships; then the yards with the dolphins, hoisted from the merchant ships above the entrances, stopped them. Two Syracusan ships, carried away by their victory, closed in near them and were destroyed, and one of them was taken, men and all. The Syracusans sank seven Athenian ships and disabled many, took most of the men alive and killed the others, and withdrew; and they set up trophies for both sea battles, and now held a firm hope that they were far superior with their ships, and they thought they would master the infantry too.

42 They were preparing to attack again on both elements, when at this point Demosthenes and Eurymedon arrived with the reinforcements from Athens: about seventy-three ships, including the foreign ones; about five thousand hoplites, their own and the allies’; javelin men, barbarian and Hellenic, not a few; and slingers and archers and the rest of the equipment in good measure. The Syracusans and their allies were at once struck with no little dismay, wondering whether there would ever be any end for them, any release from danger, when they saw that in spite of the fortification of Decelea an army had come no smaller than the first and like it, and that the power of the Athenians appeared great on every side; while the first Athenian army, after its misfortunes, regained some strength. Demosthenes saw how matters stood and thought it impossible to waste time and suffer what Nicias had suffered. (For Nicias, who was formidable when he first arrived, came to be despised when he did not at once attack Syracuse but spent the winter at Catana; and Gylippus forestalled him by arriving with an army from the Peloponnese, which the Syracusans would not even have sent for if Nicias had attacked at once; for thinking themselves strong enough, they would have learned that they were weaker at the same moment as they were walled off, so that even if they had sent for it, it would no longer have helped them in the same way.) Considering this, then, and knowing that he himself too was at this moment, on the first day, most formidable to the enemy, Demosthenes wished to make use as quickly as possible of the dismay the army was causing at present. He saw that the Syracusan counter-wall, by which they had prevented the Athenians from walling them in, was a single wall, and that if one could master the ascent to Epipolae and then the camp on it, the wall would easily be taken (for no one would even stand against them); so he hurried to make the attempt, and thought it the shortest way of ending the war. Either he would succeed and take Syracuse, or he would lead the army away and not waste the Athenians serving with him and the whole city to no purpose. First, then, the Athenians went out and ravaged the land of the Syracusans around the Anapus, and they were superior with their forces as at first, both on land and at sea (for the Syracusans did not come out against them on either element, except with the horsemen and javelin men from the Olympieum).

43 Then Demosthenes decided first to try the counter-wall with siege engines. But when he brought them up, the engines were burned by the enemy defending from the wall, and the rest of the army was beaten back as it attacked at many points; so he decided to waste no more time, and having persuaded Nicias and his other colleagues, he made the attempt on Epipolae as he had planned. By day it seemed impossible to approach and climb up without being seen; so he ordered five days’ provisions, took all the masons and carpenters and other equipment, arrows and whatever else they would need for building if they won, and himself, with Eurymedon and Menander, took the whole army after the first sleep and marched for Epipolae; Nicias was left behind in the walls. When they came up to it at Euryelus, where the first army too had first gone up, they got past the Syracusan guards unseen, went up to the fort the Syracusans had there, took it, and killed some of the guards. But most of them escaped at once to the camps, of which there were three on Epipolae, in outworks, one of the Syracusans, one of the other Sicilian Greeks, and one of the allies, and reported the attack; and they told the six hundred Syracusans, who were the first guards on this part of Epipolae. These came to the rescue at once, and Demosthenes and the Athenians met them and, though they fought hard, routed them. The Athenians themselves pressed straight on, so as not to lose speed, while their present momentum lasted, in accomplishing what they had come for; others, from the first, took the Syracusan counter-wall, whose guards did not stand, and began tearing down the battlements. The Syracusans and their allies, and Gylippus and his men, came to help from the outworks; and since the daring stroke had been made at night and was unexpected, they were dismayed as they attacked the Athenians, and at first they were forced back by them. But as the Athenians advanced, now more in disorder, as if they had won, and wishing to get through all the enemy who had not yet fought as quickly as possible, so that they should not rally again if the Athenians slackened their attack, the Boeotians were the first to stand against them; they charged them, routed them, and put them to flight.

44 And now the Athenians fell into great confusion and helplessness, and it was not easy to learn, even from the men of either side, how each thing happened. In daylight things are clearer, but even so those who are present scarcely know everything, except what happened near each man himself; but in a night battle, the only one between large armies in this war at least, how could anyone know anything clearly? There was a bright moon, and they saw each other as one naturally sees by moonlight, making out the shape of a body before them but unable to trust their recognition of their own side. Hoplites on both sides, not a few, were moving about in a narrow space. Of the Athenians, some were already beaten, while others, still unbeaten from their first attack, were going forward. Much of the rest of their army had either just come up or was still climbing, so that they did not know which way to move. For now that the front had been routed, everything was in confusion, and it was hard to make anything out because of the shouting. The Syracusans and their allies, as victors, were cheering each other on with loud cries, since it was impossible at night to signal in any other way, and at the same time they were receiving those who charged them. The Athenians were looking for one another and took everything coming toward them for enemy, even if it was friendly and part of those already fleeing back; and since they could tell each other apart in no other way, by constantly asking for the watchword they made great confusion for themselves, all asking at once, and they made it known to the enemy. But they did not learn the enemy’s watchword in the same way, because the enemy, being victorious and not scattered, were less unknown to each other. So if they met a party of the enemy that they outnumbered, the enemy escaped them, since they knew the Athenian watchword; but if they themselves did not answer, they were killed. What did the greatest harm, and not least of all, was the singing of the paean; for it was much the same on both sides and caused bewilderment. Whenever the Argives and the Corcyraeans and all the Dorians who were with the Athenians sang the paean, it frightened the Athenians, and the enemy’s did the same. So that in the end, once they had been thrown into confusion, they fell on one another in many parts of the army, friends on friends and citizens on citizens, and not only were they terrified, but they came to blows with one another and could hardly be parted. As they were pursued, many threw themselves down the cliffs and were killed, since the way down again from Epipolae was narrow; and when those who got safely down from above reached the level ground, most of them, and especially those of the earlier army, from their better knowledge of the country, escaped to the camp, but of those who had come later some missed the roads and wandered about the countryside; and when day came, the Syracusan horsemen rode around them and killed them.

45 The next day the Syracusans set up two trophies, one on Epipolae at the point of the ascent, and one at the place where the Boeotians had first stood against the enemy; and the Athenians took up their dead under truce. Not a few of them and of their allies had been killed, but even more arms were taken than there were dead; for of the men who had been forced to leap down the cliffs without their shields, some were killed and some survived.

46 After this the Syracusans, restored once more by their unexpected success, as they had been before, sent Sicanus with fifteen ships to Agrigentum, which was torn by civil strife, to bring the city over if he could; and Gylippus went off again by land into the rest of Sicily to bring still more troops, since he now hoped to take even the Athenian walls by storm, after the way things had gone on Epipolae.

47 Meanwhile the Athenian generals met to deliberate on the disaster that had occurred and on the general weakness that now prevailed in the camp. They saw that their attempts were failing and that the soldiers were weary of staying. They were afflicted with sickness on two counts: this was the season of the year in which men are most often ill, and at the same time the place where they were camped was marshy and unhealthy; and everything else seemed hopeless to them. Demosthenes therefore thought they should stay no longer. In accordance with the plan on which he had risked the attack on Epipolae, now that it had failed, he voted to leave and to waste no time, while it was still possible to cross the sea and while, with the ships that had come at least, they still had the upper hand in their forces. He said it was more useful to the city to make war on those who were building forts in their own country than on the Syracusans, who could no longer easily be subdued; nor was it reasonable to sit on there spending a great deal of money to no purpose.

48 That was Demosthenes’ opinion. Nicias himself also thought their affairs were in a bad way, but he did not wish to reveal their weakness in words, or to have the enemy informed of it by their openly voting for withdrawal with many present; for they would be far less able to do it unnoticed when they wished. To some extent, too, the enemy’s affairs, of which he had a better view than the others, still gave him some hope that they would become worse than their own, if they persisted in the siege; for they would wear the enemy out through lack of money, especially now that, with the ships they already had, they controlled the sea more widely. There was also a party in Syracuse that wished to hand the city over to the Athenians, and it kept sending messages to him and would not let him raise the siege. Knowing this, he was in fact still holding off, keeping both courses open and watching; but in the open statement he made at that time he said he would not lead the army away. He knew well, he said, that the Athenians would not accept this from them, if they left without a vote of the Athenians themselves. For those who would vote on them would not be men who, like themselves, saw the facts and did not have to learn them from the criticism of others, but men who would be persuaded by whatever any clever speaker might say in slander. And many of the soldiers present, indeed most, who were now crying out that they were in danger, would, once they got home, cry out the opposite, that the generals had been bribed to betray them and leave. For his own part, then, knowing the Athenian character, he did not wish to be put to death by the Athenians on a shameful charge and unjustly, rather than, if he must, suffer this at the hands of the enemy, taking the risk on his own account. And the Syracusans’ position, he said, was even so still worse than theirs. They were paying for mercenaries, spending money on garrison posts at the same time, and had now been maintaining a large navy for a year; they were already short in some respects, and in others would soon be at a loss. They had already spent two thousand talents and owed much besides; and if they let go any part whatever of their present force by failing to give it pay, their cause would be ruined, since it rested on auxiliaries rather than, like their own, on men compelled to serve. So they must wear them down by continuing the siege, he said, and not go away beaten by money, in which they were far stronger.

49 Nicias said this and held to it, because he knew the situation in Syracuse precisely, and their lack of money, and that there was a large party there who wished affairs to go the Athenians’ way and who kept sending messages to him not to raise the siege; and at the same time he was more confident than before that with their ships at least they would prevail. Demosthenes would not hear of continuing the siege in any way at all. But if they must not lead the army away without a decree of the Athenians, and had to wear the enemy down where they were, he said they should move to Thapsus or to Catana and do it from there. From there, with their infantry, they could overrun much of the country and live by ravaging the enemy’s land, and do them harm; and with their ships they would fight their battles in the open sea and not in a confined space, which favored the enemy rather, but in wide waters, where their experience would be of use and they could make their retreats and their attacks without setting out from and putting in to a small, closed-in space. In a word, he said, he was in no way content to stay in the same place any longer; they should move out now as quickly as possible and without delay. Eurymedon spoke in support of him. But since Nicias opposed it, a certain hesitation and delay set in, and with it a suspicion that Nicias might know something more and was insisting for that reason. So in this way the Athenians delayed and stayed where they were.

50 Meanwhile Gylippus and Sicanus arrived at Syracuse. Sicanus had failed to win Agrigentum (for while he was still at Gela, the party friendly to the Syracusans had been driven out); but Gylippus came with a large additional army from Sicily, and with the hoplites who had been sent from the Peloponnese in the merchant ships in the spring and had come from Libya to Selinus. They had been carried off course to Libya; the Cyrenaeans gave them two triremes and pilots for the voyage, and on their way along the coast they fought on the side of the Euesperitae, who were being besieged by the Libyans, and defeated the Libyans; from there they sailed along the coast to Neapolis, a Carthaginian trading post, from which Sicily is a voyage of two days and a night at the shortest; and crossing from there, they came to Selinus. As soon as they had arrived, the Syracusans prepared to attack the Athenians again on both elements, with ships and with infantry. The Athenian generals, seeing that another army had joined the enemy, and that their own affairs, far from improving, were growing worse day by day in every respect, and above all were being crushed by the sickness of the men, regretted that they had not moved out before; and since Nicias no longer opposed it as strongly, but only asked that they should not vote on it openly, they gave notice to everyone, as secretly as they could, to be ready to sail out of the camp when the signal was given. And when everything was ready and they were about to sail away, the moon was eclipsed; for it happened to be full moon.⁶ Most of the Athenians took it to heart and urged the generals to wait; and Nicias (who was somewhat too much given to divination and such things) said that he would not even discuss the question further until they had waited thrice nine days, as the soothsayers prescribed, before making any move. So the Athenians, who had delayed, stayed on for this reason.

51 The Syracusans also learned of this, and they were much more eager not to let up on the Athenians, since the Athenians themselves had now admitted that they were no longer superior to them either with their ships or with their infantry (otherwise they would not have planned to sail away); and at the same time they did not want them to settle somewhere else in Sicily and be harder to fight, but wished to force them to fight at sea there, as quickly as possible and in conditions that suited themselves. So they manned their ships and trained for as many days as seemed enough. When the moment came, on the first day they attacked the Athenian walls; and when a small part of the hoplites and horsemen came out against them by some gates, they cut off some of the hoplites, routed them, and pursued them; and since the entrance was narrow, the Athenians lost seventy horses and a few of the hoplites.

52 On this day the Syracusan army withdrew. The next day they sailed out with their ships, seventy-six of them, and at the same time advanced with their infantry against the walls. The Athenians put out against them with eighty-six ships, closed, and fought. Eurymedon held the Athenian right wing and, wishing to surround the enemy’s ships, was extending his line too far toward the land; and the Syracusans and their allies, having first defeated the Athenian center, cut him off too in the hollow and inmost part of the harbor, and killed him, and destroyed the ships that had followed him. Then they pursued all the Athenian ships and drove them ashore.

53 Gylippus, seeing the enemy’s ships beaten and driven ashore outside their palisades and their own camp, and wishing to kill the men as they landed and to make it easier for the Syracusans to tow the ships away from a shore held by their friends, came down to help at the breakwater with part of the army. The Tyrrhenians (for they were on guard for the Athenians at this point), seeing them coming on in disorder, ran out to meet them, fell on the foremost, routed them, and drove them into the marsh called Lysimeleia. Later, when a larger part of the army of the Syracusans and their allies had come up, the Athenians too came to help, fearing for their ships, and engaged them in battle, defeated them, and pursued them; they killed a few hoplites and saved most of the ships and brought them together at the camp; but the Syracusans and their allies took eighteen of them and killed all the men. Wishing to burn the rest, they filled an old merchant ship with brushwood and pine torches (for the wind was blowing fair toward the Athenians), set fire to it, and let it go. The Athenians, fearing for their ships, devised means in turn to put out the fire and stop it; they quenched the flames and kept the merchant ship from coming close, and so escaped the danger.

54 After this the Syracusans set up a trophy for the sea battle and for the cutting off of the hoplites up by the wall, where they had also taken the horses; and the Athenians set up one for the rout of the infantry that the Tyrrhenians had driven into the marsh, and one for the rout they themselves had made with the rest of the army.

55 Now that the Syracusans had won a brilliant victory with their navy too (before, they had feared the ships that had come with Demosthenes), the Athenians were in utter despondency. Their disappointment was great, and their regret for the expedition far greater still. These were the only cities they had come against that were like their own in character: democracies, as they themselves were, and possessing ships and horses and size. They could not bring on them any division through a change of government, by which they might have won them over, nor through a much superior force; they had failed in most things, and they were at a loss even before, and now that they had been beaten even with their ships, which they would never have thought possible, they were much more so still.

56 The Syracusans at once began to sail freely along the harbor, and they planned to close its mouth, so that the Athenians could no longer, even if they wished, sail out unnoticed. For they were no longer concerned only with saving themselves, but also with how to stop the enemy. They believed, rightly, that their position was now far superior, and that if they could defeat the Athenians and their allies by land and by sea, the contest would appear a glorious one for them in the eyes of the Hellenes. The other Hellenes would at once be freed, some of them, and others released from fear (for the remaining power of the Athenians would no longer be able to bear the war that would afterward be brought against it); and they themselves, being thought the authors of this, would be greatly admired by all other men and by those who came after. And the contest was indeed worthy of this, both for these reasons and because they were prevailing not over the Athenians only but over their many allies as well, and not by themselves alone, but together with those who had come to help them, having taken the lead with the Corinthians and Lacedaemonians, and having offered their own city to bear the brunt of the danger, and having made great progress with their navy. For more peoples came together against this one city than ever, apart, that is, from the whole muster in this war against the city of Athens and that of the Lacedaemonians.

57 For these were the peoples on each side who fought at Syracuse, coming against Sicily or for Sicily, some to help win the country, others to help save it. They took their stand together not according to justice, or according to kinship, but as each found themselves placed by circumstance, either by advantage or by necessity. The Athenians themselves, Ionians, came of their own will against Dorians, the Syracusans; and with them, still using the same language and customs, came the Lemnians and Imbrians and the Aeginetans, those who then held Aegina, and also the Hestiaeans who live at Hestiaea in Euboea, who were colonists. Of the others, some served as subjects, some as independent allies, and some as mercenaries. Of the subjects paying tribute, there were the Eretrians, Chalcidians, Styrians, and Carystians from Euboea; from the islands, the Ceans, Andrians, and Tenians; and from Ionia, the Milesians, Samians, and Chians. Of these the Chians did not pay tribute but provided ships and came along as independent. Nearly all of these were Ionians and of Athenian descent, except the Carystians (these are Dryopes), and though they were subjects and came under compulsion, still they were Ionians following against Dorians. Besides these there were Aeolians: the Methymnaeans, subjects with ships, not tribute, and the Tenedians and Aenians, tributaries. These Aeolians were forced to fight against Aeolians, their founders, the Boeotians, who were with the Syracusans; but the Plataeans, Boeotians directly opposed to Boeotians, alone fought them, naturally enough, out of hatred. Of the Rhodians and Cytherians, both Dorians, the Cytherians, colonists of the Lacedaemonians, bore arms with the Athenians against the Lacedaemonians who were with Gylippus; and the Rhodians, Argives by descent, were forced to make war on the Syracusans, who were Dorians, and on the Geloans, who were even their own colonists and were serving with the Syracusans. Of the islanders around the Peloponnese, the Cephallenians and Zacynthians were independent, but because of their island position they were rather constrained, since the Athenians controlled the sea, and so came along. The Corcyraeans, not only Dorians but plainly Corinthians, came against Corinthians and Syracusans, though they were colonists of the one and kinsmen of the other: with compulsion as the respectable reason, but no less by choice, out of hatred of the Corinthians. The people now called Messenians, from Naupactus and from Pylos, which the Athenians then held, were taken along to the war. And a few Megarian exiles, by misfortune, fought against the Selinuntines, who were Megarians. With the rest the service was by now more voluntary. The Argives, not for the sake of the alliance so much as out of hatred for the Lacedaemonians and each man’s own immediate advantage, followed the Athenians, Ionians, as Dorians against Dorians. The Mantineans and other Arcadians, mercenaries accustomed to go against whatever enemy was pointed out to them at the time, now for gain thought the Arcadians who had come with the Corinthians no less their enemies. The Cretans and Aetolians had also been persuaded by pay; and it so happened that the Cretans, who had helped the Rhodians found Gela, came of their own will for pay not with their colonists but against them. Some of the Acarnanians came to help partly for gain, but more because they were allies out of friendship for Demosthenes and goodwill toward the Athenians. These were the peoples bounded by the Ionian Gulf. Of the Italian Greeks, the Thurians and Metapontines, caught then in such necessities by times of faction, joined the campaign; of the Sicilian Greeks, the Naxians and Catanaeans; of the barbarians, the Egestaeans, who had called the Athenians in, and most of the Sicels; and of those outside Sicily, some Tyrrhenians, because of their quarrel with the Syracusans, and Iapygian mercenaries. These were the peoples who served with the Athenians.

58 On the side of the Syracusans, there came to help the Camarinaeans, their neighbors, and the Geloans, who live beyond them; then, with the Agrigentines neutral, the Selinuntines, who are settled beyond them. These inhabit the part of Sicily that faces Libya. The Himeraeans came from the part that faces the Tyrrhenian Sea, where they are the only Hellenes living; they were also the only ones from there who came to help. These were the Hellenic peoples in Sicily who fought on their side, Dorians and all independent; and of the barbarians only the Sicels, those who had not gone over to the Athenians. Of the Hellenes outside Sicily, the Lacedaemonians provided a Spartiate as commander, and the rest Neodamodes and Helots (Neodamode means a man who is now free); the Corinthians alone came with both ships and infantry, and the Leucadians and Ambraciots because of kinship; from Arcadia, mercenaries sent by the Corinthians, and Sicyonians serving under compulsion; and from outside the Peloponnese, the Boeotians. Against these incomers the Sicilian Greeks themselves furnished greater numbers in every arm, since they lived in great cities; for many hoplites and ships and horses, and an abundant crowd of other troops, were gathered. And against all the others, so to speak, the Syracusans themselves furnished more again, because of the size of their city and because they were in the greatest danger.

59 Such were the auxiliaries gathered on each side, and by now they were all present on both sides, and nothing more came to either. The Syracusans and their allies naturally thought it would be a glorious contest for them, after the sea victory they had won, to take the whole Athenian camp, great as it was, and not let them escape either way, by sea or by land. So they at once began to close the Great Harbor, whose mouth is about eight stades wide, with triremes set broadside, and boats and small craft moored at anchor; and they made their other preparations in case the Athenians should still dare to fight at sea; and nothing they planned was small.

60 The Athenians, seeing the harbor being closed and perceiving the rest of the enemy’s intentions, thought they must deliberate. The generals and the taxiarchs met to consider their present difficulties of every kind, and above all that they no longer had provisions for the moment (for in expectation of sailing away they had sent ahead to Catana telling them not to bring any), nor would they have any in future unless they won control of the sea. They decided to abandon the upper walls, and at the ships themselves to cut off, by a cross wall, as small a space as possible that would be enough for the baggage and the sick, and to garrison this; and with the rest of the infantry to man all the ships, every one that was serviceable and even those less seaworthy, putting every man aboard; and to fight it out at sea, and if they won, to go to Catana, but if not, to burn the ships, form up, and retreat by land by whatever route would most quickly bring them to some friendly place, barbarian or Hellenic. And as they decided, so they did. They came down from the upper walls and manned all the ships, compelling everyone to go aboard who seemed to be of serviceable age in any way. In all about a hundred and ten ships were manned. They put aboard many archers and javelin men, Acarnanians and other foreigners, and provided everything else as far as possible under necessity and with such a plan. When most things were ready, Nicias, seeing that the soldiers were despondent at having been badly beaten at sea, contrary to their habit, and that because of the shortage of provisions they wished to risk a decision as quickly as possible, called them all together and first encouraged them, and spoke as follows.

61 “Soldiers of the Athenians and of our other allies, the coming contest will be common to all alike, a contest for the safety and the country of each of us, no less than it is for the enemy; for if we now win with our ships, each of us can see his own city again, wherever it is. You must not lose heart, nor feel what the most inexperienced of men feel, who, having failed in their first contests, ever afterward have hopes as fearful as their misfortunes. All of you Athenians here, who already have experience of many wars, and all of you allies, who always serve with us, remember the surprises that come in war; and hoping that fortune too may stand on our side, prepare to fight again in a manner worthy of this multitude of yourselves that you see before you.

62 “Whatever help we have seen against the crowding of ships that there will be in the narrow harbor, and against the troops on their decks, by which we were harmed before, all of this we too have now prepared, after considering it with the helmsmen, as far as present means allow. Many archers and javelin men will go aboard, and a crowd of men, whom we would not use if we were fighting in the open sea, because they would hamper our skill by the weight of the ships; but in the land battle that we are forced to fight here from the ships, they will be useful. We have found out how we must refit our ships in turn, and against the thickness of their catheads, which did us the most harm, we have grappling irons, which will stop the ship that has struck from backing off again, if the marines do their part after this. For we have been forced to this: to fight a land battle from the ships, and it seems to our advantage neither to back water ourselves nor to let them do so, especially since the land, except as much as our infantry holds, is hostile.

63 “Remember this, and fight it out as hard as you can, and do not let yourselves be driven onto the shore; when ship meets ship, do not think of breaking loose until you have swept the hoplites off the enemy’s deck. I urge this on the hoplites no less than on the sailors, since this work belongs more to the men on deck; and we still have the advantage, even now, in most respects with our infantry. To the sailors I give this advice, and I beg them as well, not to be too much dismayed by our misfortunes, since we now have better equipment on our decks and more ships; and to consider that this pleasure deserves to be preserved: you who until now, though not Athenians, have been taken for Athenians, and for your knowledge of our language and your imitation of our ways have been admired throughout Hellas, and who have had no less share than we in the benefits of our empire, and a far greater share in being feared by the subjects and in being safe from wrong. So, as the only free partners in our empire, it would be just for you not to betray it now. Despise the Corinthians, whom you have often beaten, and the Sicilian Greeks, not one of whom even thought of standing against us while our navy was in its prime; fight them off, and show that even with weakness and misfortunes your skill is stronger than another’s strength that has luck on its side.

64 “And to you who are Athenians I say this too, to remind you again: you have left behind no other ships in the sheds like these, and no hoplites of fighting age; and if anything happens other than your victory, the enemy here will at once sail against Athens, and those of us left there will be unable to hold off both the enemy at home and those who come against them. Those of you here would at once be under the Syracusans, and you know yourselves with what intent you came against them; and those at home would be under the Lacedaemonians. So, since you stand in this one contest for both, hold firm now if ever, and keep in mind, each of you and all together, that those of you who will now be on the ships are, for the Athenians, their infantry and their ships and what remains of their city and the great name of Athens. For their sake, if any man excels another in skill or in courage, he could find no better moment to show it, to his own benefit and for the safety of all.”

65 Nicias, having given this encouragement, at once ordered the ships to be manned. Gylippus and the Syracusans could tell that the Athenians were going to fight at sea, since they could see the preparations themselves; and they had been told in advance of the grappling irons too. So they equipped themselves against everything else, each thing as it came, and against this too: they covered the bows and much of the upper part of each ship with hides, so that the iron hand when thrown would slip off and find no hold. When everything was ready, the generals and Gylippus encouraged their men and spoke as follows.

66 “Syracusans and allies, that what has already been done is glorious and that the coming contest will be for glorious things, most of you seem to us to know (otherwise you would not have taken them up so eagerly); and if anyone has not grasped it as fully as he should, we will show him. The Athenians came to this country first to enslave Sicily, and then, if they succeeded, the Peloponnese too and the rest of Hellas. They possessed the greatest empire of any Hellenes past or present; and you, the first of men to stand up to their navy, by which they had mastered everything, have already beaten them in the sea battles, and in all likelihood will beat them in this one now. For when men are cut short in the thing in which they claim to excel, what remains of their self-regard is weaker than it would have been if they had never thought so well of themselves to begin with; and being tripped up, against their expectation, in what they boasted of, they give way more than their real strength warrants. That is likely what has now happened to the Athenians.

67 “With us, the strength we had before, with which we dared even while still unskilled, is now surer; and since the belief has been added to it that we are the strongest, if we have beaten the strongest, each man’s hope is doubled. And in most undertakings the greatest hope gives the greatest eagerness too. As for their imitation of our equipment, it is familiar to our way of fighting, and we will not be unprepared for any of it. But when they have many hoplites on their decks, contrary to their custom, and many javelin men too, landsmen, so to speak, Acarnanians and others, put aboard ships, who will not even find out how to throw a missile sitting down, how can they help unsettling their ships and all falling into confusion among themselves, moving in a way not their own? Nor will the number of their ships help them, if any of you fear this too, that he will not be fighting on equal terms; for many ships in a small space will be slower to do what they wish and the easiest to damage with the means we have prepared. And know the plain truth from what we believe we have learned for certain: overwhelmed by their misfortunes and forced by their present helplessness, they have been driven to desperation, trusting not in their preparation so much as in fortune, to risk everything in whatever way they can, so that they may either force their way out by sea or afterward make their retreat by land, since they could fare no worse than they are faring now.

68 “Against such disorder, then, and against the fortune of our bitterest enemies, which has given itself up to us, let us close with anger. Let us consider that it is most lawful against enemies to claim, as just requital for the aggressor, to sate the fury of the heart; and at the same time that vengeance on enemies, which we shall have, is, as the saying goes, the sweetest thing. That they are enemies, and the worst of enemies, you all know, since they came against our country to enslave it; and if they had succeeded, they would have inflicted the most grievous sufferings on our men, the most shameful on our children and women, and on the whole city the most disgraceful name. In return for this, no one should go soft or think it a gain if they merely go away without danger. They will do that just the same even if they win. But if we accomplish what we wish, as is likely, and these men are punished, and we hand on to the whole of Sicily the freedom it enjoyed before, but made more secure, it is a glorious contest. And of risks, the rarest are those in which failure does the least harm and success brings the most good.”

69 The generals of the Syracusans and Gylippus, having given their own soldiers such encouragement, at once began to man their ships in turn when they saw the Athenians doing so. Nicias, overwhelmed by the situation, and seeing what the danger was and how near it was now, since they were all but on the point of putting out, and thinking, as men do in great contests, that in deed everything still fell short and in words not enough had yet been said to them, called upon each of the trierarchs again, one by one, naming each by his father’s name and his own and his tribe. He asked each man who had any distinction of his own not to betray it, and those whose ancestors were illustrious not to obscure the virtues of their fathers; he reminded them of their country, the freest of all, and of the freedom in it, without orders from anyone, for every man to live as he pleased; and he said all the other things that men will say when they have come to such a moment, without guarding against seeming to anyone to talk in stale commonplaces: the appeals, much alike on every occasion, to wives and children and the gods of their fathers, which men cry out because in the dismay of the moment they think them useful. When he thought he had given exhortation, not enough, but as much as necessity allowed, he withdrew and led the infantry down to the sea, and drew it up along as long a line as he could, so that it would be of the greatest help to the men on the ships in keeping up their courage. Demosthenes, Menander, and Euthydemus (for these had gone aboard the Athenian ships as generals) put out from their own camp and sailed straight for the barrier across the harbor and the passage that had been left open, wishing to force their way out.

70 The Syracusans and their allies had put out before them with about the same number of ships as before, and they guarded the way out with part of them and the rest of the harbor all around, so as to fall on the Athenians from all sides at once; and at the same time their infantry came to help wherever the ships put in to shore. The Syracusan fleet was commanded by Sicanus and Agatharchus, each holding a wing of the whole, and by Pythen and the Corinthians in the center. When the rest of the Athenians came up to the barrier, in their first rush they overpowered the ships stationed at it and tried to break the fastenings; but after this, when the Syracusans and their allies bore down on them from all sides, the sea battle was no longer at the barrier only but all over the harbor, and it was hard fought, as none of the earlier ones had been. On both sides the sailors showed great eagerness to charge whenever the order was given, and there was great counter-maneuvering by the helmsmen and rivalry against one another; the marines took care, whenever ship struck ship, that the work on deck should not fall short of the skill of the rest; and every man, at whatever post he had been assigned, strove to be seen first. With many ships colliding in a small space (for these were the most ships that ever fought in the smallest space; together they came little short of two hundred), the rammings were few, because there was no room for backing water or breaking through; but the collisions, as ship happened to fall on ship, either in fleeing or in attacking another, were more frequent. As long as a ship was bearing down, the men on the decks used javelins and arrows and stones against it unsparingly; and once they had closed, the marines came to grips and tried to board each other’s ships. In many places it happened, because of the narrow space, that some had rammed others and were themselves rammed, and that two ships or sometimes more were locked by necessity around one; and the helmsmen had to guard against some and plan against others, not one at a time but many from every side; and the great din from many ships colliding both struck terror and made it impossible to hear what the boatswains called. For there was much exhortation and shouting on each side from the boatswains, both as their craft required and from the eagerness of the moment: to the Athenians they cried out to force the passage, and now, if ever again, to fight hard for their safe return to their country; to the Syracusans and their allies, that it was a glorious thing to stop the enemy escaping and, by winning, to increase the glory of each one’s own country. The generals on each side, besides, if they saw any ship anywhere backing water without being forced to, called out the trierarch by name and asked him: the Athenians, whether they were retreating because they now thought the most hostile land more their own than the sea, which they had won with no small toil; the Syracusans, whether they were fleeing from fleeing men, men they knew well were eager to escape in any way they could.

71 The infantry of both sides on the land, while the sea battle hung in the balance, went through a great agony and conflict of mind: the men of the place striving now for still greater glory, the invaders afraid that they would fare even worse than they were faring. For since everything the Athenians had was staked on their ships, their fear for what was to come was like no other; and because the battle was uneven, they were forced to see it unevenly from the land too. The spectacle was close at hand, and they were not all looking at the same point at once. If some saw their own men winning somewhere, they took heart and turned to calling on the gods not to rob them of their safety; others, who looked toward a part that was losing, broke into lamentation and cries, and from the sight of what was being done were more enslaved in their minds than the men in the action; still others, looking at some part of the battle that was evenly fought, because of the unbroken, undecided struggle, swayed their very bodies in fear along with their opinion, and passed the most painful time of all; for they were always within a little of escaping or of being destroyed. And in the same Athenian army, as long as they fought at sea on even terms, you could hear everything at once: lamentation, shouting, “We are winning,” “We are beaten,” and all the other cries that a great army in great danger would be forced to utter. The men on the ships went through much the same, until at last the Syracusans and their allies, after the battle had held for a long time, routed the Athenians, and pressing on them brilliantly, with great shouting and cheering each other on, pursued them to the land. Then the naval force, scattered here and there, those who had not been captured afloat, ran ashore and rushed out into the camp. The infantry, no longer divided in feeling but with one impulse, all groaning and wailing, unable to bear what was happening, some ran down to help at the ships, others to guard what remained of the wall, and others, the majority, were now thinking of themselves and of how they would be saved. At that moment the dismay was greater than at any time before. What they suffered was much like what they had done to others at Pylos; for when the Lacedaemonians’ ships were destroyed, they lost besides the men who had crossed to the island, and so now for the Athenians there was no hope of being saved by land, unless something happened beyond all reckoning.

72 The sea battle had been hard fought, and many ships and men had been lost on both sides. The Syracusans and their allies, having won, took up the wrecks and their dead, sailed back to the city, and set up a trophy. The Athenians, because of the magnitude of their present misfortunes, did not even think of asking for the recovery of their dead or the wrecks, but planned to retreat at once that night. Demosthenes went to Nicias and proposed that they man the remaining ships once more and try to force the passage at dawn, if they could, saying that they still had more ships fit for service than the enemy: the Athenians had about sixty left, and the enemy fewer than fifty. Nicias agreed with this proposal, and they wished to man the ships; but the sailors refused to go aboard, because they were stunned by their defeat and no longer believed they could win.

73 So now they were all of one mind to retreat by land. But Hermocrates the Syracusan suspected their intention. He thought it would be dangerous if so large an army withdrew by land and settled somewhere in Sicily and chose to make war on them again; so he went to the authorities and put it to them that they ought not to let the Athenians get away by night, saying what he himself thought, but that all the Syracusans and their allies should go out at once, block the roads with walls, and occupy and guard the narrow passes in advance. They too agreed with this no less than he did, and thought it ought to be done; but they thought the men, who had just gladly taken their rest after a great sea battle, and on a festival day as well (for it happened that they had a sacrifice to Heracles on this day), would not readily be willing to obey. In their delight at the victory most of them had turned to drinking at the festival, and the authorities thought they could expect them to obey in anything rather than in taking up arms and going out at that moment. When the magistrates, reckoning this, found it impracticable, and Hermocrates could no longer persuade them, he himself contrived the following, fearing that the Athenians might quietly get ahead of them by passing the most difficult places during the night. He sent some of his own companions with horsemen to the Athenian camp when it was growing dark. They rode up close enough to be heard and called out to some of the men as though they were friends of the Athenians (for there were some who brought news to Nicias from inside the city), and told them to tell Nicias not to lead the army away by night, since the Syracusans were guarding the roads, but to make his preparations at leisure and withdraw by day. Having said this, they went away, and those who heard it reported it to the Athenian generals.

74 On this message they held back for the night, believing it was not a trick. And since even so they had not set out at once, they decided to wait the following day as well, so that the soldiers could pack up the most useful things they could, and then to leave everything else behind and start out taking only what was needed for bodily subsistence. The Syracusans and Gylippus went out ahead with their infantry, blocked the roads through the country by which the Athenians were likely to go, guarded the crossings of the streams and rivers, and posted themselves to receive the army and stop it wherever they thought best. With their ships they sailed up and towed the Athenian ships away from the beach (the Athenians themselves had burned a few of them, as they had intended); the rest they took in tow at their leisure, with no one to stop them, wherever each had run ashore, and brought them to the city.

75 After this, when Nicias and Demosthenes thought the preparations sufficient, the army at last moved out, on the third day after the sea battle. It was a terrible thing, and not in one respect only: that they were leaving after losing all their ships, and that instead of their great hope they and their city were in danger; but also, in abandoning the camp, it fell to every man to see things painful to the eye and to the mind. The dead lay unburied, and whenever a man saw one of his friends lying there, he was filled with grief and fear; and the living who were being left behind, the wounded and the sick, were far more painful to the living than the dead, and more wretched than those who had perished. For they turned to entreaty and lamentation and drove the others to distraction, begging to be taken along and calling on each one by name, if they saw any of their comrades or kinsmen anywhere, hanging on to their tentmates as they were already leaving and following as far as they could, and, when strength and body failed, being left behind with not a few appeals to the gods and with wailing. So the whole army was filled with tears and with such distress that it was not easy for them to set out, even from a hostile land, and though they had already suffered things too great for tears and feared for what they might yet suffer in the unknown. There was also a deep dejection among them and much self-reproach. They were like nothing so much as a city starved out by siege and making its escape, and no small city; for the whole multitude on the march was not less than forty thousand. All the others carried whatever each could that was useful, and the hoplites and horsemen, contrary to custom, carried their own provisions under their arms, some for lack of attendants, others because they did not trust them; for the attendants had been deserting for a long time, and most of them did so at once. Even so they did not carry enough; for there was no longer any grain in the camp. And the rest of their misery, and the equal share of misfortunes, though there is a certain relief in suffering with many, did not even so seem easy to bear at that moment, especially when they thought from what splendor and boasting at first they had come to what an end and what humiliation. This was indeed the greatest reversal that ever befell a Hellenic army. They had come to enslave others, and they were leaving in fear of suffering this themselves; instead of the prayers and paeans with which they had sailed out, they were setting out again with the opposite omens; they were going by land instead of by sea, and relying on hoplites rather than on a navy. And yet, because of the greatness of the danger still hanging over them, all this seemed bearable to them.

76 Nicias, seeing the army despondent and greatly changed, went along the ranks and encouraged and comforted them as far as he could in the circumstances, raising his voice still more as he came to each group in turn, out of eagerness, and wishing to do some good by being heard by as many as possible.

77 “Even in our present situation, Athenians and allies, we must have hope (men have been saved before from worse straits than these), and you must not blame yourselves too much, either for your misfortunes or for your present sufferings, which you do not deserve. I myself am no stronger than any of you (you see the state my sickness has brought me to), and I think I was once second to no one in good fortune, in my private life and otherwise; yet now I am hanging in the same danger as the meanest. And yet I have spent my life performing many duties toward the gods as custom requires, and many just and blameless acts toward men. For this reason my hope for the future is still bold, though our misfortunes frighten me, being undeserved. But perhaps they may abate; for the enemy have had good fortune enough, and if we made this expedition offensive to any of the gods, we have by now been punished sufficiently. Others before now have gone against their neighbors, and after doing what men do, have suffered what men can bear. And we too may now reasonably hope to find the gods kinder (for we are by now more deserving of their pity than of their resentment); and seeing yourselves, what fine hoplites you are and how many of you are marching in your ranks, do not be too dismayed, but reckon that you are yourselves a city, wherever you settle, and that there is no other city in Sicily that could easily withstand your attack, or drive you out once you were settled anywhere. See to it yourselves that the march is safe and orderly, each man thinking only this: that whatever place he is forced to fight in, if he wins it, he will have it as his country and his fortress. We shall press on with the march night and day alike; for our provisions are short, and if we reach some friendly place of the Sicels (these are still loyal to us because of their fear of the Syracusans), consider yourselves already secure. Word has been sent ahead to them, and they have been told to meet us and to bring more food. In a word, soldiers, know that you must be brave men, since there is no place near where you could find safety if you played the coward; and that if you escape the enemy now, the rest of you will see again what you long for, and the Athenians will raise up again the great power of their city, fallen though it is. For men are the city, and not walls or ships empty of men.”

78 Nicias, as he gave this encouragement, at the same time went along the army, and wherever he saw it straggling and not marching in order, he brought it together and set it in place; and Demosthenes did no less with the men under him, saying such things and the like. The army marched in a hollow square, Nicias’ division leading and Demosthenes’ following; the hoplites had the baggage carriers and most of the crowd inside. When they reached the crossing of the river Anapus, they found a force of the Syracusans and their allies drawn up at it; they routed them, took the ford, and went on. But the Syracusans pressed them, their horsemen riding alongside and their light-armed troops throwing javelins into them. On this day the Athenians advanced about forty stades and camped for the night at a hill. The next day they set out early and advanced about twenty stades, and went down into a level place and camped there, wishing to get some food from the houses (for the place was inhabited) and to carry water with them from there; for in front of them, for many stades along the way they were to go, there was little of it. Meanwhile the Syracusans went ahead and walled off the pass in front of them. This was a strong hill with a steep ravine on either side, and it was called the Acraean Cliff. The next day the Athenians advanced, and the horsemen and javelin men of the Syracusans and their allies, many of them, hindered them on both sides, throwing javelins and riding alongside. The Athenians fought for a long time, and then withdrew again to the same camp. And they no longer had provisions as before; for it was no longer possible to leave the camp because of the horsemen.

79 Early in the morning they started out and marched again, and forced their way to the hill that had been walled off; and they found in front of them, above the wall, the enemy infantry drawn up in depth, many shields deep, for the place was narrow. The Athenians charged and attacked the wall, but they were shot at by many men from the hill, which was steep (for the men above reached them more easily), and, unable to force their way, they withdrew again and rested. At the same time there happened to be some thunder and rain, such as is usual when the year is turning toward autumn; and at this the Athenians lost heart still more and thought that all this too was happening for their destruction. While they were resting, Gylippus and the Syracusans sent part of their army to wall them off again in the rear, on the way they had come; but the Athenians sent some of their own men against them and prevented it. After this the Athenians withdrew with the whole army more toward the plain and camped there for the night. The next day they advanced, and the Syracusans attacked them on all sides around them and wounded many; if the Athenians charged, they gave way, and if they retreated, they pressed on them, falling especially on the rearmost, in case they could rout them little by little and throw the whole army into panic. For a long time the Athenians held out in this way; then, after advancing five or six stades, they rested in the plain. And the Syracusans withdrew from them to their own camp.

80 During the night Nicias and Demosthenes decided, since the army was in a bad state, from want of all provisions by now, and many had been wounded in the many attacks the enemy had made, to light as many fires as possible and lead the army away, no longer by the route they had intended, but in the opposite direction from the one the Syracusans were watching, toward the sea. This route as a whole led the army not toward Catana but toward the other part of Sicily, toward Camarina and Gela and the cities, Hellenic and barbarian, in that region. So they lit many fires and set out in the night. And, as fears and terrors tend to arise in all armies, and most of all in the largest, especially when they are marching by night, through hostile country, and with the enemy not far off, confusion fell on them. Nicias’ division, which was leading, kept together and got far ahead; but Demosthenes’ division, about half the army or more, became separated and marched in greater disorder. Nevertheless at dawn they reached the sea, and taking the road called the Helorine Road, they marched on, intending, when they reached the river Cacyparis, to go up along the river into the interior; for they hoped that the Sicels they had sent for would meet them along this way. When they reached the river, they found there too a Syracusan guard walling off and fencing off the ford with stakes. They forced their way through it, crossed the river, and went on again toward another river, the Erineus; for this was the way their guides told them to go.

81 Meanwhile, when day came and the Syracusans and their allies learned that the Athenians had gone, most of them blamed Gylippus for having let the Athenians get away on purpose. They pursued quickly along the route, which they had no difficulty in discovering the Athenians had taken, and caught up with them about the time of the midday meal. When they came up with Demosthenes’ men, who were behind and marching more slowly and in more disorder, since they had been thrown into confusion that night, they fell on them at once and fought; and the Syracusan horsemen surrounded them the more easily because they were separated from the others, and drove them together into one place. Nicias’ division was as much as fifty stades ahead; for Nicias was leading faster, thinking that in such a situation safety lay not in staying and fighting by choice, but in retreating as quickly as possible and fighting only as much as they were forced to. Demosthenes, for his part, had been for most of the time in more continuous hardship, because, as he was retreating in the rear, the enemy attacked him first; and now, when he learned that the Syracusans were pursuing, instead of pushing on he formed his men for battle, until, lingering there, he was surrounded by them, and he and the Athenians with him were in great confusion. For they were crowded into a place that had a wall around it, with a road on either side and not a few olive trees, and they were shot at from every side. The Syracusans naturally used such attacks rather than fighting at close quarters; for to risk everything against men in despair was no longer to their advantage rather than the Athenians’; and at the same time, with success now certain, they were sparing of themselves, so that no one should be used up before the end; and they thought that even so, by this method, they would subdue them and take them.

82 So when they had been shooting at the Athenians and their allies from all sides all day, and saw that they were now worn out by their wounds and their other sufferings, Gylippus and the Syracusans and their allies made a proclamation, first, that any of the islanders who wished could come over to them and be free; and some cities, not many, went over. Then later an agreement was made with all the rest of Demosthenes’ men, that they should hand over their arms and that no one should be put to death, either by violence or by imprisonment or by want of the barest necessities of life. Six thousand in all surrendered, and they laid down all the money they had, throwing it into upturned shields, and they filled four shields. These men were at once taken off to the city. Nicias and his men reached the river Erineus on this day; he crossed it and posted his army on some high ground.

83 The next day the Syracusans overtook him and told him that Demosthenes’ men had surrendered, and called on him to do the same. He did not believe it, and made a truce to send a horseman to see. When the horseman had gone and brought back word that they had surrendered, Nicias sent a herald to Gylippus and the Syracusans to say that he was ready to make an agreement on behalf of the Athenians to repay whatever money the Syracusans had spent on the war, on condition that they let his army go; and until the money was paid he would give Athenians as hostages, one man for each talent. The Syracusans and Gylippus did not accept these proposals, but attacked, surrounded them, and shot at these men too from every side until late in the day. These men too were in a wretched state for want of food and provisions. Nevertheless they waited for the quiet of the night and meant to march on. They were taking up their arms when the Syracusans noticed it and raised the paean. When the Athenians saw that they had not escaped notice, they laid them down again, except for about three hundred men; these forced their way through the guards and went on through the night wherever they could.

84 When day came Nicias led the army on; and the Syracusans and their allies pressed them in the same way, shooting at them from every side and striking them down with javelins. The Athenians hurried on toward the river Assinarus,⁷ partly because they were hard pressed by the attack from every side of the many horsemen and the rest of the crowd, and thought things would be somewhat easier for them if they crossed the river, and partly because of their exhaustion and their craving to drink. When they reached it, they rushed in, no longer in any order; every man wanted to be the first across himself, and the enemy pressing on them made the crossing difficult by now. For being forced to move in a mass, they fell on one another and trampled each other down, and some were killed at once on the spears and the baggage, while others got entangled and were carried away by the stream. The Syracusans, standing along the other bank of the river (it was steep), shot down from above at the Athenians, most of whom were drinking greedily and were tangled together in confusion in the hollow riverbed. The Peloponnesians came down and slaughtered them, especially those in the river. And the water was at once fouled, but it was drunk all the same, muddy and bloody as it was, and most of them fought to have it.

85 At last, when the dead were already lying in heaps on one another in the river, and the army had been destroyed, part of it at the river, and part, if any got away, by the horsemen, Nicias surrendered himself to Gylippus, trusting him more than the Syracusans; and he told him and the Lacedaemonians to do with himself whatever they wished, but to stop killing the rest of the soldiers. After this Gylippus gave orders to take prisoners. They brought in alive all the rest whom the soldiers had not hidden away (and these were many), and they sent men in pursuit of the three hundred who had broken through the guard in the night and captured them. The part of the army that was collected as public property was not large, but the part stolen away was large, and the whole of Sicily was filled with them, since they had not been taken by agreement, as had Demosthenes’ men. Not a small part was also killed; for this was the greatest slaughter, and second to none, in this war. And in the other attacks that had been frequent during the march not a few had died. Many nevertheless escaped, some at the time, and others after being enslaved and running away later; for these, Catana was the place of refuge.

86 The Syracusans and their allies gathered together, took up as many of the prisoners as they could and the spoils, and went back to the city. All the other Athenians and allies they had taken they put down into the stone quarries, thinking this the safest way to keep them;⁸ but Nicias and Demosthenes they put to death, against the will of Gylippus. For Gylippus thought it would be a glorious achievement for him, on top of everything else, to bring the enemy generals as well to the Lacedaemonians. It happened that one of them, Demosthenes, was their bitterest enemy, because of what had happened on the island and at Pylos, and the other, for the same reasons, their best friend; for Nicias had worked hard to get the Lacedaemonians from the island released, by persuading the Athenians to make the treaty.⁹ For this reason the Lacedaemonians were well disposed toward him, and it was not least because of this that he trusted Gylippus and surrendered himself to him. But some of the Syracusans, it was said, afraid because they had been in communication with him, that under torture he might cause them trouble in the midst of their success; and others, especially the Corinthians, afraid that since he was rich he might bribe someone, escape, and cause them new trouble again, persuaded the allies and killed him. For this reason, or for something very close to it, he was put to death, the man who of all the Hellenes in my time least deserved to come to such misfortune, because of his whole way of life, devoted to virtue as custom understands it.

87 Those in the quarries the Syracusans treated harshly in the first period. There were many of them in a hollow and narrow place, and at first the sun, and the stifling heat besides, tormented them, since there was no roof; and then the nights that followed, autumnal and cold, by the change brought on sickness. Because of the lack of space they did everything in the same place; and besides, the dead were heaped together on one another, men who had died of their wounds and of the change and of such things, and the stench was unbearable; and they were tormented at the same time by hunger and thirst (for to each of them, for eight months, they gave a cotyle of water a day and two cotyles of grain);¹⁰ and of all the other sufferings that men thrown into such a place were likely to endure, there was none that did not befall them. For about seventy days they lived like this, all together. Then, except for the Athenians and any Sicilian or Italian Greeks who had served with them, they sold the rest. How many were taken in all, it is hard to say exactly, but they were not fewer than seven thousand. This was the greatest action of this war, and, it seems to me, of all Hellenic actions that we know of from report; it was the most glorious for the victors and the most disastrous for the vanquished. For they were beaten at every point and altogether; they suffered no small misery in anything; they were destroyed, as the saying goes, with total destruction, army and ships and everything, and nothing was not lost; and few out of many returned home. These were the events in Sicily.

Notes

1. 1. Locri on the toe of Italy, called Epizephyrian (“under the west wind”) to distinguish it from the Locrians of mainland Greece.

2. 2. The number “a hundred” is supplied by editors; the manuscripts give twenty talents.

3. 3. Neodamodes: Helots freed by the Spartans, usually for military service.

4. 4. The Greek of “at the arms posts” is corrupt in the manuscripts; the sense is uncertain.

5. 5. A plethron is a hundred Greek feet, about thirty meters.

6. 6. The lunar eclipse of 27 August 413 BC.

7. 7. A river south of Syracuse, near Helorus; its modern identification is uncertain.

8. 8. The latomiae, stone quarries cut into the rock at Syracuse.

9. 9. The Spartiates captured on Sphacteria in 425 BC (Book 4) were returned under the Peace of Nicias, 421 BC (Book 5).

10. 10. A cotyle was about a quarter of a liter, roughly half a pint.