on the information of Diokleides those who were not accused by Andokides were discharged with the informer: the rest were put upon their trial, and the language of Thucydides implies that they were convicted on evidence as slender or absurd as that which sent Lord Strafford and his fellow-sufferers to the scaffold. But although the punishment of these victims had, as it was supposed, appeased the wrath of Hermes, nothing had been brought out to connect Alkibiades with the plot. Still his enemies were resolved that if he could not be convicted of mutilating statues he should be found guilty of profaning the mysteries. In the accusation laid against him by Thessalos, the son of Kimon, he was charged not with any share in the matter of the Hermai or even in political plots of any kind, but simply with mimicking the Eleusinian ceremonies in his own house. Unfortunately the march of a small Spartan force to the isthmus for the purpose of concerting some measures with the Boiotians caused in the public mind a fresh paroxysm of suspicion and terror. In this movement they saw plain evidence of a deep-laid plot on the part of Alkibiades for the subversion of the democracy; and in their agony the whole force of the city slept with their arms in the Temenos of Theseus near the gates which opened on the roads to Eleusis and Corinth. The feeling against Alkibiades had now been raised to a height which satisfied his enemies that they might safely insist on his recall; but although the commander of the Salaminian trireme received for Alkibiades only an order that he should return home in his own ship, there can be no doubt that the trireme which carried this summons brought him also information of the efforts which his enemies had made to poison the mind of the people against him. His resolution was at once taken, and with it the doom of the Athenian demos was sealed. He accompanied the Salaminian trireme as far as Thourioi; but when the ships were to sail onwards from that place, he was nowhere to be seen. All attempts to search for him were fruitless. The ships returned to Athens without him; and with the rest who had shared his flight he was sentenced to death. the Athe shores of the Great The departure of Alkibiades left to Nikias and Lamachos the joint command of the whole expedition. Instead of sailing southVictory of wards, the whole fleet steered through the Messenian nians on the strait, and then along the northern shores of the island. The generals wished to visit both Egesta and Selinous,1 for the purpose of obtaining money from the former, and bringing about a peace between the two cities. They had hoped to be received at Himera, the only Hellenic town 1 We have no reason for supposing that they went on to this latter city. Harbour at on this coast; but their exclusion here was in some degree compensated by the capture of the Sikanian fortress of Hykkara, which they gave over to the Egestaians, while the captives taken in the place brought to them the sum of 120 talents, in addition to the thirty obtained from Egesta. So ended the summer, the bright hopes with which they left Peiraieus still remaining dreams for the future which were rapidly vanishing away. To the Syracusans on the other hand the indecision of the Athenians and their illsuccess in gaining allies in Sicily changed the first feeling of awe into one of positive contempt, and Syracusan horsemen riding up to the Athenian lines asked them if they were come as colonists to Sicily or for the purpose of restoring the city of Leontinoi. This insult suggested to Nikias a plan for effecting a landing near Syracuse without the danger of a battle. The Athenians had no cavalry, and an attempt to force their way on to the shore in the face of the horsemen of Syracuse might end in a failure as signal as that of Brasidas at Pylos. A Katanaian on whom Nikias could thoroughly depend was therefore sent to Syracuse. Availing himself of his own previous reputation and that of the Syracusan partisans in Katanê whose names he mentioned, this man told them how easily the Athenian army might be destroyed. If a day were definitely fixed for the attempt, the Katanaians would shut up in their town those Athenians who were in the habit of sleeping within the walls, and would also set fire to the Athenian fleet, while the Syracusans, attacking the Athenian lines, would carry everything before them. The Syracusans caught eagerly at the bait, and their whole force of cavalry and infantry was dispatched at the time agreed upon to Katanê, only to find a deserted camp and to suspect that their presence was needed most of all at home. Meanwhile the Athenian fleet had sailed round the island of Ortygia into the great harbour, and had landed the troops at leisure on its western shore near the inlet known as the bay of Daskon. The bridge across the Anapos near the temple of the Olympian Zeus was immediately broken; the trees felled in the neighbourhood supplied a strong palisade for the ships, while a fort of wood and stone was hastily run up on the shore of Daskon. To all these operations no opposition was offered by the Syracusans within the city: but the army on its return from Katanê showed its unabated confidence by at once offering the Athenians battle. For that day it was declined; but on the following morning Nikias placed the Argives and Mantineians on the right wing, and the other allies on the left, while the Athenians occupied the ground in the midst. The short address which Nikias made to his men before the engagement contains, if it be accepted as historical, a humiliating confession of the evil effects produced by his own hesitating strategy; and the Syracusans are now represented as men needing a severe lesson from enemies whom they despise, while the Athenians are spurred on by the sense not of their own intrinsic superiority but of the difficulties of their position which courage alone would enable them to surmount. The previous indecision of Nikias had led the Syracusans to think that they might choose their own time for the attack. In this they were mistaken. Nikias had no sooner ended his speech than he ordered a sudden and rapid charge, and the Athenian hoplites were on the enemy almost before the latter could seize their arms. But in spite of this surprise the struggle was obstinate, and the result might have been indecisive but for a heavy storm of rain and thunder which discouraged the Syracusans, while the Athenians, not having as yet anything to dismay them, ascribed the incident to the season of the year. Thus dismayed, their infantry fled; but the Syracusan horse so effectually protected their retreat that the Athenians were soon compelled to give up the task of pursuing them. Two hundred and fifty had been slain on the side of the Syracusans: the Athenians and their allies had lost fifty. The results of the battle were confined, it would seem, to the erection of a trophy. A large treasure lay in the Olympieion; but the Athenians made no attempt to take it, and the Syracusans threw a strong garrison into the Temenos. A decisive defeat might have led Nikias at once to give up the enterprise, to the unspeakable benefit of Athens; his insignificant success furnished him with an excuse for spending the winter in comparative idleness and for sending to Athens for troops and munitions of war. Even now, although some three months had passed since their arrival in Sicily, the general prospect was almost as favourable as it had been at the first. Between the great harbour and the bay of Thapsos lay the inner city on Ortygia joined by a bridge to the mainland, and the outer city on Achradina to the north, each with its own encircling walls. Between the two the little harbour afforded an unwalled landing-place: and there was no reason why the Athenians should not at once have drawn their besieging lines far within the circuit of the wall which, during the winter now beginning, the Syracusans threw up from the shore of the Great Port, taking in the precincts of Apollon Temenites, to the eastern extremity of the ground afterwards occupied by the suburb of Tyche. But now, as before, the golden hours were wasted. The 1 Thục. vi. 68. 2 This suburb was so known from the temple of Tychê, or Fortune, which it contained; but there is little doubt or none that the name Sykê, mentioned by Thucydides, vi. 98, as that of a position seized by the Athenians after occupying Labdalon, is not another form of Tyche. There is no reason for supposing that the Syracusans said Sycha for Tycha; and, had they done so, the fact must fleet sailed away to Katanê, and thence to Messênê in the hope that that town would be betrayed to them. Here they had the first practical experience of the hatred of Alkibiades. His countrymen had sentenced him to death: he had sworn that they should feel that he was alive. His first act was to warn the Syracusan party in Messênê of the intended betrayal of the town; and the partisans of the Athenians were put to death. For thirteen days the fleet lingered in vain hope before the place, and then withdrew to winter quarters at Naxos.1 Taking the the Syracu- The conduct of Hermokrates in Syracuse was as prompt and statesmanlike as that of Nikias was feeble and silly. true measure of the situation, that sagacious leader told his countrymen that the result was fully as encouraging as he had dared to hope that it might be. Even in battle they had undergone nothing more than an insignificant reverse at the hands of the most experienced troops in Hellas; and better discipline for the future would soon make up for past want of skill. But he told them candidly that they were suffering from the evil of having too many masters. The large number of fifteen Strategoi would do more harm than good: three would amply suffice, if they were invested with adequate powers. His advice was taken, and he himself was appointed to be one of the three with Herakleides and Sikanos as his colleagues. Envoys were sent to Corinth and Sparta to urge the adoption of vigorous measures against Athens. The wall which might have formed the line of Athenian circumvallation was advanced rapidly to the needful height, and if the slopes of Epipolai to the northwest had been garrisoned as well as the deserted town of Megara and the Olympicion, the great catastrophe of the Athenian army might have been prevented by the impossibility of attempting the siege. Further, all places on which a hostile force might find it easy to land were strongly palisaded by stakes thrust into the sea bottom; and lastly the empty camp of the Athenians at Katanê was burnt and the neighbouring country ravaged. Debate at Still more to counteract the feeble efforts of Nikias, the Syracusans sent envoys to Kamarina the alliance of which place with Laches,2 ten years before, had induced the Athenians to make fresh overtures. The envoys of both parties have been noticed by historians. Syche is said by Stephanos Byzantinos to have been a place near Syracuse, so called from the fig-trees which grew there. Mr. Grote, Hist. Gr. vii. 559, agrees with Dr. Arnold, Thucydides, vi. 98, in placing Sykê on the middle of the southern slope of Epipolai, exactly to the southward of Targetta, a name which along with the neighbouring Targia seems to exhibit traces of the ancient name Trogilos. 1 Thục, vi. 74. were introduced together before the assembled citizens. On the part of the Syracusans Hermokrates sought to draw them into a closer friendship or a more hearty co-operation by dwelling on the restless and aggressive temper and habits of the Athenians, and warned them that, if the Syracusans should gain the day, they would know how to recompense the inaction of those who left them to their own resources in the hour of supreme danger. The reply of the Athenian ambassador Euphemos is noteworthy chiefly as inviting the alliance of the Kamarinaians on the very grounds which Nikias in the first debates at Athens had urged as reasons for abandoning the enterprise altogether, and as ascribing the expedition to motives which must have wholly failed to awaken the enthusiasm of the Athenian people. They were not come to effect any permanent settlement in Sicily, or to make the island a part of their empire. They indulged in no such wild dreams. The distance was far too great, the impossibility of maintaining such distant conquests far too obvious,1 to justify any fears on this score, on the part whether of the Syracusans or of their allies.. Their objects were twofold. The one they would be glad to attain; the other must at all hazards be achieved. They earnestly hoped to win the friendship of Kamarina and other Sicilian cities; but they could not afford to leave the Dorians of Sicily in a position which would enable them to interfere actively on behalf of the Dorians of Peloponnesos. Neutrality of the Kamarinaians. As we read the speech of Euphemos, we can scarcely help feeling how easily that portion of it which relates to the growth of the Athenian empire might be translated into language thoroughly harmonising with our own notions of national unity and freedom. The Athenian empire was a standing protest against the suicidal policy of isolation on which Sparta for her own selfish purposes found it convenient to act; and the Athenians, whether consciously or unconsciously, felt that the Hellenic theory of autonomy tended first to keep up a dead level of insignificance and then to leave the feeble units thus produced at the mercy of one great military state. Euphemos would have been speaking the truth, had he said that Athens had been striving to weld the Ionic tribes into a nation; but the Greek language had no word to express the idea, nor could he have dared so far to wound the strongest instincts of the Hellenic, and more especially of the Dorian, mind. But the very truthfulness of this assertion would have laid him open to the retort that on his own showing he was advocating a policy of isolation for the Sicilian cities which he deprecated as mischievous or fatal nearer home. Euphemos could not confess that the expedition was from first to 1 Thục. vi. 86, 3. |