A Summary of the Sicilian Expedition

Leave a Comment Posted by William Tew on January 20, 2012
This is a paper I wrote in Fall 2011 for a class called “Art and Power in Ancient Athens.” It’s mostly a summary of Donald Kagan’s volume on the peace of Nicias and the Sicilian expedition. I didn’t port the footnotes over.
The Sicilian Expedition has come down to us as one of the greatest blunders of Athens’ democracy. Almost every mistake possible seems to have been made. However, we have the benefit of hindsight, and the problem of obtaining most of our information from a few sources which all saw some fated-ness or moral in the disaster. But the disaster was not fated, and certainly the Athenians did not imagine they were headed for utter disaster.
It all started in 416 BC when two Sicilian cities, Segesta and Leontini, appealed to Athens for aid against the powerful city of Syracuse and its protectorate, Selinus. Within two years an Athenian army would be encamped on the heights above Syracuse, and within three years Athens would lose tens of thousands of men, hundreds of ship, some of its best generals, and its reputation for supremacy at sea and on the battlefield.
It is impossible to evaluate the Sicilian Expedition without first examining the general political feeling of the time and a few of the most important events which primed Athens for its disastrous expedition. When the Athenians debated the decision to invade Sicily, they were in the sixth year of the Peace of Nicias, yet still engaged in a political struggle with Sparta that was constantly on the edge of collapsing into a military conflict. The Peace of Nicias itself was a structure built on a foundation of sand. Neither side would or could fulfill its terms: the Spartans would not return Amphipolis to the Athenians, and the Athenians were loath to relinquish their fort at Pylos, from which they threatened Sparta and fomented unrest in its subservient Helot populace. Just two years before the Sicilian emissaries arrived in Athens, in 418, the Athenians’ Argive allies (and a relative handful of Athenians) had fought the Spartans and their allies at Mantinea. The Spartans had won that battle, giving them momentum and prestige in the “cold war” with Athens.
When the embassy first arrived and made their proposal, the Segestan element had brought with it 60 talents of uncoined silver as a display of their city’s wealth. The Segestans promised to pay the costs of the Athenian army for the duration of the entire campaign. Obviously, this captured the interest of the Athenian Assembly. What state would not be enticed by an offer of great rewards with few risks? The Athenians, in what may have been the wisest decision of those made concerning the expedition, dispatched emissaries of their own to Sicily to examine the actual wealth of the Segestans, and suspended the debate until their return. However, the emissaries were duped by the Segestans, who in actuality possessed far too little to support an Athenian force in Sicily. The Segestans dressed up their temples and public places, gilding much and heaping treasure in the temples to deceive the Athenian inspectors. Even more cleverly, they collected the finest items of the wealthiest private citizens and passed them from house to house to make it seem as if each home was extremely wealthy. They return in January of 415 and the Assembly, after hearing confirmation of the Segestans great wealth, begins to debate the merits of an expedition to Sicily.
The faction for the expedition was led by the famous Alcibiades, an ambitious young Athenian, and the man who had been convinced the Athenians to tie themselves with Argo. There were some potential benefits to an expedition to Sicily; it could limit the growing power of Syracuse, a Dorian state which the Athenians worried might help Sparta in the war; it would be a display of Athenian might and reaffirm to the rest of the Greeks Athens’ military ability; it could also increase the tribute Athens received from allies and subjugated cities and give Athens an access point to the rich grain fields of Sicily, which would reduce their dependence on grain from the Black Sea. Thucydides suggests that the Athenians, and especially Alcibiades, were primarily concerned with the expansion of the empire. He sees the lust for power and wealth as blinding the Athenians to the realities and potentialities of an expedition. On the opposing side, Nicias was the primary speaker. He had been the leader of a loose group of moderates for some time and had of course negotiated the Peace of Nicias. He focuses on the cost of the expedition and the strength of the Sicilian cities they might fight. Being both wealthy and numerous, Nicias feared that the Athenians would have a very difficult time invading Sicily or even Syracuse. Nicias was so convinced that the expedition was a bad idea that he asked not to be appointed to command the force.
Unfortunately for Nicias, the Assembly did authorize a force, and at its head would be three commanders: Nicias, Alcibiades, and the seasoned campaigner Lamachus. The force would consist of 60 triremes but no army, so the expedition was limited in scope. A defeat would be painful but not devastating. There certainly seemed to be little chance of the utter disaster that would unfold over the next two years. This limited force was not sent to Sicily, however. Four days after the first Assembly, Nicias, in one of history’s greatest blunders, expanded the size and scope of the expedition hugely with a political miscalculation. Still opposing the war, he thought that if he exaggerated the strength of Syracuse and her Sicilian allies, and suggested that only a much larger force would have at chance at success, the Athenians would reconsider the entire mission and abandon their plans. His ploy backfired when the demagogue Demostratus asked him to name the men and ships necessary. Nicias was put on the spot and after hemming and hawing suggests 100 ships and 5,000 hoplites with an adequate number of supporting troops. Interestingly, and unfortunately for the Athenians, he does not request a large cavalry force to be sent along. The Assembly quickly granted Nicias the troops he had listed. Despite the time that elapsed between this debate and the actual start of the expedition, Nicias did not request cavalry, an oversight that would be punished soon by the Syracusan horsemen. In total, 134 ships, 5,100 hoplites, 480 archers, 700 slingers, 120 light infantrymen, and 30 cavalrymen were sent to Sicily.
Nicias had miscalculated and was now in command of a very large army. Hindsight asks how he could have been so blind? Perhaps his error lay in under-weighing the religiosity (or superstition, as the case may be) of the Athenians and their support for him. Nicias was the most ostentatiously pious leader in Athens. As a general he had chosen his battles carefully and been able to maintain a record of many wins and few losses. The Athenians saw his military successes as blessings from the gods in reward for his piety. His name was even connected to the word victory, and it seems that the Athenians hoped he would bring his luck to the expedition.
The expedition would set out after an ill-boding sin. Just a few days before the expedition was to leave, in late May or early June, the Athenians awoke to find the many statues of the god Hermes (the Herms) desecrated. All throughout the city the statues had been defaced and their characteristic phalloi had been hacked off. The sacrilege was taken as both a bad omen for the expedition to Sicily and as evidence of an oligarchic plot to destroy the democracy. Rewards were offered for information on who had committed the sin, and in this atmosphere of fear, people began informing on each other. Initially Alcibiades and his hetariai were accused of being the perpetrators. The charges against Alcibiades were allegedly orchestrated by a rival of his, Androcles, who employed false witnesses against him. Androcles and his companions then convinced the Assembly to dispatch the expedition anyways, so that both Alcibiades and his main base of support, the military, would be away from Athens and unable to defend him.
While Alcibiades and the Athenian forces sailed to Sicily, the trials continued. A series of informants reversed and then re-reversed who seemed to be guilty. Eventually, a certain Andocides testified, corroborating the testimony of an earlier and unrelated witness. He listed 22 conspirators, few of whom were noteworthy citizens, and most of whom were already in custody, dead, or had fled from the city. Interestingly, the list contained the names of a few men connected to Nicias. Were the conspirators intentionally trying to halt the expedition and preserve the peace? Maybe, but there are problems with that hypothesis. There was only a small chance that such a trick would work. Nicias would be unable to suggest scrapping the expedition for fear of being accused of the mutilations himself. Also problematic is the fact that the expedition did not break the terms of the peace. Only invasions of Athenian or Spartan territory were in violation of the peace—satellite wars were and had been tolerated by both sides. Ultimately, the testimony of Androcles reduced fears of an oligarchic plot and cleared Alcibiades’ name of the charges. Alcibiades, however, did not escape unscathed from the fear bred in the city. While people were informing on each other, a relative had accused him in absentia of profaning the Eleusinian mysteries with his drinking companions at a symposium. This was a serious offense, but perhaps not shocking in the context of the symposium. In any case, Alcibiades was found guilty and the state trireme Salaminia was dispatched to return him to Athens. The ship caught up with the expedition in late July. Alcibiades, crafty as ever, managed to slip away in his own ship at Thurii and fled to the Spartan court, where he betrayed Athenian plans to the Spartans. The Athenian force was not deprived of greatest proponent and most active general, and of information advantage they had over the Spartans.
When the Athenian force had first come to Sicily, the generals had been split as to what strategy to pursue, especially after uncovering that the Segestans could not pay for the expedition. Lamachus wanted a swift attack on Syracuse while the city was still unprepared, Alcibiades wanted to collect support from allies in Sicily, and Nicias favored a show of force and a quick return home. Thucydides, other ancient writers, and modern historians agree that the best strategy was Lamachus’. It was decisive and provided an opportunity for a swift victory. With Alcibiades gone, Alcibiades contributions to the campaign had, up to his recall, yielded few fruits. The Athenians were not greeted as liberators by the people of southern Italy and Sicily, as Alcibiades had claimed they would be. Instead, many neutral cities had shut their gates to the Athenian force—some had even refused them trade. The size of the expedition disturbed the Greeks in Magna Graecia. It seemed as if the Athenians were coming to conquer them, not just supporting a minor ally. Even some of Athens’ allies were suspicious of her intentions. The city of Rhegium, perhaps Athens’ most powerful ally in southern Italy, refused the Athenians entrance to the city. Athenian attempts to bolster their forces with local allies were thus frustrated, and after the recall of Alcibiades, Nicias and Lamachus decided to attack Syracuse.
Nicias, despite all the blunders he had made, did prove himself a capable tactician in the first battle against Syracuse. He lured part of their force by encamping his army to the north of Syracuse in the city of Catana. When the Syracusans began to march on the city, he moved his forces by sea to the harbor of Syracuse, where he landed his troops near the Anapus River. The Syracusans, upon learning that Athenian ships were in their harbor, marched back to Syracuse to fight the Athenians. In the battle, the discipline and experience of the Athenian troops was able to push back the left wing of the Syracusan army, leading to a general rout of the Syracusan forces. The Athenians were prevented from pursuit and total victory by the Syracusan cavalry, which greatly outnumbered that of the Athenians. If the Athenians had been able to completely destroy the Syracusan army, it is probable that the city would have surrendered before they could get reinforcements or rebuild their morale. The Athenians would have been saved from a long and futile war had they arrived with adequate cavalry support.
Following the Athenian victory at the Battle of the Anapus, Nicias withdrew his troops to Catana for the winter, and left the harbors of Syracuse unguarded. Over the winter, the Athenians awaited more money and troops (thankfully Athens was sending more cavalry), and gathered men from Sicily, particularly the native Sicels, who were hostile to Syracuse. While his decision may have been justified, it did allow the Syracusans to send envoys to Sparta and Corinth requesting aid. The Syracusans were also able to build a wall around an outlying suburb of the city called Temenides.
The coming of spring led to a new season of campaigning but one which was ill-starred for Athens. Nicias began by moving his army to the heights of Epipolae, which were located next to the city itself and provided a defensible base to continue operations. The Athenians began building a wall around Syracuse. They hoped to blockade the city by sea and circumvallate it by land so that no help could reach the city. Seeing this, the Syracusans began building their own counter walls to maintain their access to the outside world.
Meanwhile, in Athens, the Argives have convinced the Athenians to support them in a raid on Spartan territory. This is a flagrant break of the Peace of Nicias and gives the Spartans the excuse they wanted, though perhaps did not need, to send relief force under the mothax general Gylippus to Syracuse. The Spartan force numbered about 3,000, and was composed of relatively unimportant elements. Most of the soldiers were helots or non-Spartan Laconians. The Corinthians also sent a small force to support their Dorian brothers. While the forces of the Peloponnesians were en route, Nicias began suffering from some kind of kidney ailment. Even worse, Lamachus was killed in battle. When the Spartans arrived the Athenians lacked a bold and vigorous leader. Gylippus breaks onto Epipolae and reinforces the Syracusans. He then forces two battles, the second of which prevents the Athenians from completing their wall. With the wall broken, a number of defeats and tactical errors behind him, and his kidneys failing, Nicias sends to Athens, asking for reinforcements and to be removed from his command. He may have hoped that the Athenians would resist sending reinforcements and instead order the retreat, but just as before, he misjudged the Athenians’ taste for warfare. They refused to remove him from command, and sent they reinforced him with, in all, 73 ships, another 5,000 hoplites, and many supplies and support troops under the command of the generals Demosthenes and Eurymedon. Demosthenes arrived with his reinforcements near the summer of 413. His appraisal of the situation was the same as Lamachus’ initial plan—a quick assault would be best. He devised a plan to attack and take Epiploae by night and from there force a surrender of the city. The night of the battle began well. The Spartans had failed to guard the passes as they should have, and the Athenians were able to make their way onto the high plain. Once there, however, things began to sour. Part of the battle line was broken by a Boeotian phalanx, and confusion and panic spread in the dark. What started as a successful assault quickly became a rout. The Athenians and their allies confused themselves with the enemy and vice versa, unable to see well by the moonlight and unable to hear order over the Dorian paeans. Those that were not cut down by the Spartans, or by their own panicked comrades, were left to make their way back to the Athenian camps. The troops that been originally sent were able to find their way back, but those newly arrived with Demosthenes easily lost their way in the dark and unfamiliar territory. They fell off the cliffs or were hunted down by Syracusan cavalry the next morning. The defeat left over 2,000 Athenian soldiers dead and killed any hope of a swift victory.
Demosthenes then pushed for a quick withdrawal to salvage what they could of the Athenian army. Despite initial resistance, Nicias agreed after a few days. But before their plan could be put into action, on August 27, 413 BC, between 9:41 pm and 10:30 pm, the assembled Greeks witnessed a complete lunar eclipse. Obviously, such a striking omen could not be ignored, and the superstition was only increased by Nicias, who had brought his personal seer, Stilbides, everywhere with him for years. The omen was interpreted, and the army was advised to wait “thrice-nine” days before retreating. A delay of 27 days would be (and certainly was) foolish in the fast-moving arena of was, but Nicias and the rest of the army were unwilling to disregard the seers’ interpretation. During the wait, the Athenian plan found its way to the ears of Gylippus and the Syracusans. They were unwilling to allow the escape of the Athenians, fearing that they would maraud about Sicily only to return later. The Spartans had a perfect opportunity to smash their enemy, and were also eager to seize it. They soon forced a naval battle with the Athenians, in which the Athenians lost 18 ships and their crews, as well as the commander Eurymedon. The Syracusans then began building a palisade across the water to prevent a naval retreat. The Athenians realized that they cannot delay any longer, but must risk a battle to escape by sea. Ten days after the eclipse, they set their plan in motion. The restricted battle-space of the harbor lends the Syracusans an advantage, and the Athenian attempt is repulsed. The sailors abandon their ships on the shore, not even stopping to burn them. Although, the Athenians still possess a numerical advantage, the men refuse to go to sea again. Now Nicias and Demosthenes must attempt a land retreat.
Again, however, the Athenians lose what little advantage they have by dawdling. They wait two days in the camp to prepare for the retreat, allowing Gylippus and the Syracusans time to maneuver troops to strategic points along possible escape routes. The Syracusans intend to hold the passes the Athenians will have to pass through. On the morning of the retreat, the remnants of the full Athenian force, some 40,000 men (of which about half were soldiers), left their sick, wounded, and unburied dead in the camp. All along their retreat they were harried by Syracusan horsemen. The Athenians make it to a well defended pass, and barely escape annihilation at the hands of the Spartans holding it. Demosthenes and Nicias decide to go avoid the passes by heading south and crossing several rivers before heading inland to meet up with their Sicel allies. They then split the army in two, half lead by Nicias, and the rear half commanded by Demosthenes. The rear column is overtaken by a force of Spartans and Syracusans which surrounds the Athenians and slaughters them. Only 6,000 prisoners are taken, the rest of Demosthenes’ force is dead. He himself is prevented from committing suicide and taken by the Syracusans. Nicias’ troops are cut down in the river Assinarus, where the enemy lines the high banks of the river and his men fall over each other in the scramble to escape and slake their maddening thirst. His force is reduced to about a thousand men, which Nicias surrenders with himself to Gylippus. The Syracusans, despite the protestations of Gylippus, execute Nicias and Demosthenes, sell the non-Greeks into slavery, and imprison the remainder of the Athenian force in a quarry outside Syracuse, where the prisoners slowly die over eight months in the blazing Sicilian sun.
News of the disaster is slow in filtering back to Athens. When it does, the Athenians are rightly shocked, as is the rest of the Greek world. The Sicilian Expedition marks one of the great, if not the greatest, turning points of the Peloponnesian War. As a consequence of the defeat, the Athenians lost several top leaders, tens of thousands of trained troops with their equipment, scores of ships and their highly trained crews, and a huge sum of money. Worse than this though were the political effects of the disaster. Athens’ enemies rallied at the news of her defeat. Those cities that were vacillating between Athens and Sparta sided with the Spartans, and the Persians were inspired to aid the Spartans. The rest of the war was just one, prolonged losing battle for Athens. While she would maintain her intellectual prestige for many years, the glory days of Athens’ military power were ended.