The Sicilian Expedition

Transcript:

 We are back in Greece for this episode and we have a returning guest who you all know and love.  Would you like to re-introduce yourself, please?  

Hello, everyone. My name is Roel Konijnendijk. I am an Ancient Historian,  Derby Fellow in Ancient History at Lincoln College, Oxford. I specialize in classical  Greek warfare, Sparta, Athenian democracy, all that fun stuff.  

We have got the Sicilian Expedition today, which is a roller coaster. I am so glad that  we have got Roel to explain it all because it is not the easiest expedition in the world  to explain. Can you just set the scene for us? What is Athens doing at around the time of  415? 

The Sicilian Expedition sits in kind of a weird space. It is in the middle of  what we call the Peloponnesian War, but which is broken up actually into two distinct  periods of conflicts. There is a first period of conflict called the Archidamian War or the  Ten Year War, which runs from 431 down to 421. That concluded with this so-called  Peace of Nicias. This is a peace treaty between Athens and Sparta.  At the end of the conclusion of those hostilities, essentially there was a tenuous  peace for a little while. Technically, Athens and Sparta were even allies for a little bit,  but it seemed fairly clear from the outcome of the war that tensions were not resolved.  There is an ongoing sense that there might be a recommencement of hostilities. Both of these  states are kind of eye-sizing each other out. They are trying to see where they might seize  the advantage. It so happens in this period that Sparta is facing a very serious crisis.  

Sparta has lost a huge amount of its reputation as the great hegemon of the Greeks  and protector of its allies because it could not beat Athens. It was not outright able  to defeat the Athenians in their ten-year period of war. In fact, they suffered a  really humiliating defeat on the island of Sphacteria, which is very small in terms of  the numbers involved, in terms of the effect on Sparta. It was this huge blow to the Spartan  reputation because not only were they beaten by Athenian lightheart troops, the great, vaunted Spartan hoplite, but they surrendered. The Spartans actually of their own volition  laid down their arms and were taken prisoner. At that point, for everybody in the Peloponnese  this myth of Spartan superiority and an indomitable fighting prowess was shattered.  

As a result of that, a lot of Sparta's allies, both as a result of their failure in the war and  their lack of living up to their own military reputation, a lot of Sparta's allies began to  think that maybe things could be arranged differently in the Peloponnese, that this  idea of Spartan hegemony could be broken. For a while after the peace, Sparta is  really having to worry about its former allies ganging up on it essentially. This  comes to a head at the Battle of Mantinea in 418. This is the preoccupying Sparta. They're  completely preoccupied with maintaining their power within the Peloponnese, within their own  backyard, which kind of leaves Athens free to do whatever it wants. You're in this situation  where the Spartans, even after they win the Battle of Mantinea, which is another episode,  maybe we'll talk about it at some point. 

They win the Battle of Mantinea, they put a lot  of people back in their place, but even then, the conflict isn't instantly resolved. They  have a campaign against Argos, which is still trying to assert its independence and trying to  assert its own power within the Peloponnese. They still really have to worry about different  allies within the Peloponnese essentially just trying to shake off the domination of Sparta.  Sparta is really busy, essentially, and is really not safe and secure in its strategic  interests. They're off to the side, essentially being kept busy by others, which gives the  Athenians the opportunity to start thinking about how they might exploit that advantage,  exploit that window. 

There's a couple of moments when the Athenians are really trying  already to contribute to this instability in the Peloponnese. They're sending troops out.  They're at the Battle of Mantinea. Even though they're technically at peace,  they're fighting the Spartans actively on the battlefield. A little bit weird,  hard to explain, but they're not at war. They're fine. They're just stabbing each other,  but there's quite a bit of that going on because the Athenians obviously are interested  in making sure that Sparta is preoccupied, has its hands tied.  While that's going on, the Athenians are trying to essentially push other boundaries.  As the years progress, their treasury starts to fill up again. They start to recover from the  financial devastation of the first stage of the Peloponnesian War.

 A generation, we are told,  is growing up in Athens to replenish the losses from the plague that absolutely decimated  population. They are starting to feel that they can take on bigger challenges again.  The first thing that they do that they really undertake in this period, in 416 they sail against  the island of Milos in the Aegean, which is one of the only islands they don't already  control. It's technically neutral during the war, although it's quite Sparta leaning and  may even have supported Sparta during the war. The Athenians have invaded it before,  but they didn't actually establish their power over it. This time, they basically just go in  and say, okay, we're taking over whether you like it or not. The Melians say we don't like it,  and so the Melians are destroyed. That is essentially what they do in 416. They annihilate  the population. They do the usual thing of killing the male citizens, selling women and  children into slavery, and then occupying the land themselves. Milos is destroyed,  is wiped off the map, and the Athenians are starting to cast about for other ways to  expand their power. They are starting to look at different options for places where they have  interests already, but where they can be pushed, where they might commit their resources that are  starting to accumulate again, where they can once again start to expand the power that they  established and defend it so successfully against the Spartans. 

So we're nearly at the end of  Series 1 of Ancient History 101. The first episode of Series 2 is with someone that you  and I both know and love. Christy Constantikopoulou is going to be talking to Ancient History 101  about the Athenian Empire, but that's a couple of episodes away. So for now,  can you just briefly summarize what Athens is doing in regards to other cities in the Aegean  at this point, and what kind of relationship they have with their 'allies'? 

The Athenians are  in charge of an alliance system which was initially founded as an anti-Persian alliance.  So it was a voluntary alliance of defense against the threat of potential  Persian resurgence attempts to push back into the Aegean. But over time, this really quite  rapidly devolves into an alliance of unequal partners to Athens. The Athenians really  take the leading role. They demand contributions to their defensive efforts. Initially, this is  fairly established, or at least that's what we're told. It's fairly measured monetary  contributions. And if you want, you can actually contribute ships and retain the initiative in  campaign. But increasingly, the Athenians essentially are pushing states to give them money  to do the fighting for them, which leaves them essentially militarily dependent on Athens.  And it forces them into this relationship where they have to give money to the Athenians every  year in order to secure their own position as an independent state. Well, that is increasingly  seen as a form of political enslavement. 

I mean, enslavement is the word the Greeks use.  This is essentially being stripped of your autonomy. Because these states are not free  to do what they want, they have to obey the Athenians. And they're in a lot of ways  militarily neutered by the fact that the Athenians are the ones who are doing all the  campaigning and they are just the ones who are paying for it. So they no longer have  any ships of their own. They no longer have any military experience of their own.  They just rely on the Athenians to take the money and use that money to  campaign on their behalf, or at least that is what they say. But actually,  on the Athenian behalf, of course. So that's been encroaching upon many other states over the  course of the decades between the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War. The Peloponnesian War  eventually erupts because too many allies are complaining to the Spartans that this must be  stopped since the Athenians are expanding further and further, something else to be done.  

The Spartans are initially not super interested in doing this, but they are eventually  pushed by their allies, lobbying them continuously to declare that they will  destroy the Athenian Empire and that they must leave the Greeks independent.  Ten years of war follow and this absolutely does not change the situation. So the Spartans  completely fail to achieve their propagandistic aim, essentially, the idea that they wanted to  abolish the Athenian Empire. And the result of that is that after the end of the war,  after the peace of Nicias, the Athenian Empire is still going strong. I mean,  it's asking for much more tribute now than before because the war costs have forced them to  massively increase their demands on their allies. They're getting about three times  as much as they used to and they're sucking it all up and they are very happy about that  situation. And the allies, of course, increasingly are not happy, but there's nothing  they can do because the only one who would be able to help them is Sparta. And Sparta,  as we've said, has both failed to offer meaningful assistance and is now so wrapped  up in its own crisis that it cannot possibly do anything to help. And so the Athenian  Empire now is riding high. It's in a lot of ways doing better than ever.  

So they're feeling quite cocky. They've got dozens and dozens of allied cities,  but they're all east of Athens and south and north. They haven't really gone west yet,  have they? 

So they have connections in the west. So this is the kind of thing that is  easily overlooked because they're not imperial expansion. Like you said, they have a lot of  imperial holdings. They're all around the Aegean, the Thracian coast, Asia Minor,  the islands. Those are all tribute paying allies or subject allies. But they also have  network of actual allies, like equal allies, essentially people with whom they have an  arrangement and understanding of friendship and mutual support. And that network actually  already expanded further to the west. There are treaties that go back into the 430s with  Greek states in Italy. They have connections with Greek communities in Sicily already.  They've been trying to expand that network before the Peloponnesian War broke out.  And one of the reasons why the Peloponnesian War happened is that they were making a new alliance  like that with the island of Corcyra. This is modern Corfu. So this is a sort of stepping stone  between Greece and Italy. So they are establishing good friendly relations with  a very strategically located place. If you're trying to sail to the west, you've got to  control Corfu as your last stopping point. And secondly, a state that has a major fleet  of its own. So this is something that the Athenians obviously would really like to have  on their side and not adding to the naval resources of their potential enemies.  So they are interested in expanding further west, which goes directly at the expense of  the Corinthians who have their own sort of mini informal empire in the west. 

And they  hate this. But the Athenians are increasingly going to or looking to the west and thinking  of new ways to establish friendly relations there. In the course of the Archidamian War,  those first 10 years, they've significantly extended their alliance network in western  Greece. So this is still the mainland areas like Acarnania and Aetolia, but they have  subjected much of that region to their alliance network. Some of them are our  tribute paying members. Others are actual allies. But huge regions of western Greece  facing towards the Ionian Sea, facing towards Italy, are now essentially friendly to Athens.  And they're clearly interested in expanding that network constantly further out west.  They're clearly looking for a foothold throughout the Peloponnesian War, or rather  the Archidamian War, that first stage of the Peloponnesian War. There have been multiple  Sicilian expeditions, as in there have been ships sent out by the Athenians to go to  Sicily with this very open-ended mission of essentially seeing what could be done to further  the interests of the Athenians. 

Now, there's at least three of those. I mean, two of them  are military. The last one is more diplomatic. But fundamentally, there are three of these  expeditions that get sent out that achieve basically nothing, but that show a sort of  consistent intention by the Athenians to expand their interests in the west, and  specifically in Sicily. They really are trying to find ways to justify their own involvement  there as much as possible. They're making lots of friends. They're getting their fingers  in those pies. They're trying to make sure that someone's going to pull that string  and bring them in. 

So let's talk about Sicily in the 5th century, specifically at this point.  Is it one big homogenous kingdom, or is it split up into small, very different groups?  

Yeah, Sicily is complex. Sicily is a patchwork because Sicily, it has been settled by Greeks  for a very long time. We know that the... Sicily gives a rough date that we can count  back to the 730s BC when some of the earliest Greek cities on the east coast of Sicily were  founded. And archaeology seems to confirm that date. So these are really, really early  Greek, what used to be called colonies, but they're basically overseas settlements.  They're autonomous states that get settled from Greek cities that are sort of collective  ventures. So they will have one community taking the lead, but anyone can join. And  then they sort of go over there. They carve out some land, usually by driving out or  they carve out some land and they settle in new Greek states that is autonomous, that operates  on its own, that has its own laws, that has its own cults and customs. 

So the first of those  are very old, 730 BC, but from there on, they spread out. So they're more and more being  settled from Greece and also they have sub-colonization. So the actual states  that are already there in Sicily are also producing their own offshoots, their own further  settlement along the coast. So along the coast, by the time that we had, that we're  talking about now, by the time the Peloponnesian War, you have Greek cities along the East Coast  of Sicily, also halfway along the North Coast and along much of the Southern Coast.  So the coastlines are along sort of three sides of the islands, very heavily Greek.  The last remaining side, essentially the western tip and the western part of the  northern coast, sorry this is complex, it really just is like easier to have a map  in front of you, but like that part is settled by the Carthaginians, which makes  sense as well because when you look at a map, you realize that Tunis, you know,  Carthage is not very far. 

So they have been settling that place as their own form  of sub-colonization. So they have been settled from Phoenicia and now they're  settling their own cities. So that's also very old. Those are also settlements that  go back to maybe the 8th century, maybe even older. And then the inland has not been  settled by Greeks. That is largely dominated by indigenous peoples. So there's the  Elymeans in the west, there's the Sicanians in the center and the Sicels in the west,  more or less. And this is like a rough approximation, but there are these three  main groups of indigenous peoples who are Italic peoples. They speak their own  language, they have their own culture. They're under influence of peoples from  the coast, of course. They're under Greek and Carthaginian influence, but they are  in many ways sort of a wild card in the geopolitical picture of this island.  So it's complex. It's been changing a lot in the centuries of the historical period in  And it is a patchwork of small states and not just states, but also peoples and  cultures. 

So we have inscriptions from some of these Sicilian towns that talk  about friendship and treaties, even with Athens, I'm thinking Leontinoi, Segesta. What do those kind of friendships involve? 

So those are very  basic sort of alliance treaties that we have. So these are the ones that I  mentioned earlier, where we see the Athenians just were getting involved  with these cities. They seem to be very basic sort of agreements to support each  other if there is a crisis. That's fundamentally what it is. Now,  obviously, you have to wonder about like if you're talking about Leontinoi  or something, this is a small sort of, even recently inland for Greek  standards, community in the east of the east coast of Sicily. If  something's going wrong in Athens, are the people of Leontinoi ever  actually going to help? Of course not. 

What happens when a treaty like this  made is the Athenians are basically asking them get us involved, like ask  for us. We will come because we want to put boots on the ground here. We  want to expand our interests here. So they're building this friendship and  they're saying, well, definitely, you know, we'll be your friend. You  just have to be equal allies here. You can promise to help us,  which will never happen. But if you ask us to help you, things  will happen that you don't want. Because we will show up and then  things will be worse for you. But that is fundamentally what they're  trying to say is we're just friends. We're just allies. We're  going to help you, you know? And the claim that they make is that  they have this ancient kinship, right? They have this affinity with  certain peoples because they were settled by Greek communities from the  same dialect group, from the same sort of distinct ethnicity. And  there are different communities that have settled in Sicily. There are  cities that are primarily Dorian. There are cities that are primarily  Ionian. There are cities that are primarily Ionian. And the Ionians  are the ones that which the Athenians claim to be sort of the ultimate  settler mother city essentially. And so some of these communities like  the Leontinoi, these are Ionians. And so the Athenians basically just  walk up and say, hey, you're our cousins. Would you like our  protection? And as always, when the Athenians promise their  protection, you know, there is something behind something coming  behind that foot in the door. 

So for a town, for instance, like  Leontinoi or Segesta, when they're asking Athens for help with  the boots on the ground, why do they need that help? Who is their  big enemy? 

So Segesta is asking for Athenian help because they  have a border dispute with Selinus, which is a Greek city on the  coast. And that city, I mean, the Ionians themselves, the  people of Agesta are not Greek, technically. They're  nostalgic to adopt Greek ways, but they also have certain things  that we're not really sure if they adopt those things because they  genuinely want to live like Greeks or if they're doing that  in order to essentially butter up potential Greek allies, right?  So they have this magnificent unfinished temple on the site of  Se=esta, which is one of the only truly unfinished temples that  is preserved from antiquity. It's really gorgeous because all the  columns are unfluted and some of the blocks still have the  nubs on them by which you sort of raise them up with ropes and  pulleys. So it's a temple that was fully put together according  to the normal Greek order, but once they no longer had a use for  it, they just kind of left it and they never finished it. So  you have this kind of gesture at Greek culture that was then  sort of abandoned potentially after they had achieved this  alliance with Athens because they no longer needed to  impress anyone. They no longer needed to convince anyone  that they were going to be good friends, so they just  abandoned the whole project. It's this kind of thing that  makes it interesting how these local populations are reacting to  the Greeks trying to get involved in the area. So they're  not originally Greeks, but they are trying to present  themselves as being a reliable, very Greek, very  cosmopolitan, obviously very derogatory with all the things  that need to happen in a Greek city. And they are just  asking for help because these pesky neighbors in  Selinus are being annoying.

 And so you need someone to  come and stand up for you because you're just a small  inland community living in the hills, minding your own  business. And as I said, the Athenians, I mean, kind of  shouldn't expect anything from the people of Segesta  because this is a community that is by all accounts not  going to be that large or that wealthy, isn't going to  be able to do anything to support the Athenians,  really. Even when they promise to pay for the military  expedition to support them against Selinus, there's  already suspicions in Athens whether they'll be able to  afford that in any meaningful way. Like, do they have  any money really, essentially? Are they able to  support us if we come to their aid? But as I mentioned, the  Athenians aren't necessarily interested in honestly  helping out friends and allies and finding more people  to come and support. What they're interested in is  getting people to ask them to come to Sicily so that  they don't just look like an outright invader, right?  That is what they ultimately want. They want to provoke  a just cause for war. And that is what they get from  the Augustans when they create an alliance of  which is this really patchy inscription. 

So yes, this is an  inscription that records the creation of this alliance  between the Segesta and the Athenians, which  Sicily says that they had long been friends, that they  had been friends since time immemorial. And this has  often been considered, oh maybe it belongs to one of  those other, you know, to the time when they were  building these other alliances that you mentioned  with Leontinoi with Rhegium. So this belongs to the 430s,  maybe even earlier, right? This is understanding that  if Sicily says it happened a long time ago, that must  be it, right? The problem is the inscription itself is  not easy to date, but there is a name of an  Athenian archon, right? The eponymous archon. That's  how the Athenians count years, is by naming them  after one of their magistrates who's called the  eponymous archon, as in the name-giving archon. He  gives his name to the year. So if we know the  name, we have lists of which year they go with.  Okay, that means we know when it was done.  Unfortunately, the name is almost completely gone  from the stone. We just have a few letters.  And so the question has always been, which name  is it, right? Which name fits the letters we have?  Because if we have the name, we have the date,  right? And for a long time, I don't remember  the exact name of the archons, but it doesn't  really matter. For a long time, it was thought  that it was one of the archons from the 430s  or even around 440, if I have it right. 

But  increasingly over time, more and more people  have looked at the stone and have identified an  additional letter or two and have said it can  only be this one guy who was archon in 418.  That's obviously very significant.  Segesta is pretending as if they'd  been friends forever. Actually, by the time  of the Sicilian expedition, when this  crisis happens, Segesta is calling for  Athenian aid against Selinus and they've  been allies for three years. It's a very  recent development and it fits the exact  picture of what I was just saying, that  the Athenians are reviving their interests  or continuously pursuing really their  interests in having more things in Sicily  that could potentially suck them in and  could potentially be a benefit for them  to exploit.  

So Athens is a radical democracy. 

Haha! What does that mean?  

Haha. If Segesta is asking for aid, how does  a democracy answer the call?  

To its credit, the Athenian democracy  isn't completely moving by  moods and moments. They actually do ask  the Segestans to prove that if they  want an Athenian expedition, that they  can pay for it.  So they send out a bunch of envoys to  go and check the place out,  have a little bit of a scope  around, see how much wealth  is there and what these people might  be able to contribute if the  Athenians decide to commit.  We're told that they are  magnificently fooled by the  Segestans, that they have this  whole elaborate feel where they invite  them over to a house and show them  all the nice beautiful cutlery and  cups and all the silverware.  Then the Athenians look very  impressed and say, yeah, it looks very  nice. They go to the next person's  house and in the meantime,  surreptitiously, the Segestans are  taking all those nice silver cups and  silverware, whatever, running to the  next house and putting the table in a  different order and saying, look,  this house is also full of nice  gold and cups and plates.  Supposedly, this is the trick that  fooled the Athenian envoys. We  don't know if that's true, but it's  a beautiful story. Fundamentally, the  idea is the Segestans are making it  seem as if they are absolutely  swimming in wealth to fool the  Athenians. The Athenians then  actually do ask for the Segestans to  come to Athens and deliver some of  that money, which they do.  That's presumably all the money they  have, but they're basically sort of  paying up front and saying, look,  here's the money. We don't care.  Have it. Then you'll find the  rest when you come to us, when  you actually bring the troops.  This is what the democracy does is  they're not really that interested in  just plunging in the deep end. They  do want to figure out whether this  is the right decision, but on the  other hand, I get the impression. I  think this fits the picture that  I've been sketching of an Athenian  empire that's keen to start  expanding again. 

They are happy to be  fooled, essentially. They're happy to  be drawn into affairs in Sicily,  which is exactly what they've been  trying to do for decades. They want  to get involved because if they get  asked to intervene, they can then  go and do whatever they want because  they will always be able to say,  look, we're here to help our  friends. We're not here to just  stomp on the weak and force them into  our empire. We are here because people  want us to be here. That is  obviously the great move of every  imperialist power is to argue that  it's for your own benefit. You  asked us to do this, actually.  

Thucydides in Book 6 has certain  historical figures give arguments  for and against the Sicilian  expedition. What does he have them  say? 

This is one of these great  set pieces. He has a debate in the  assembly, which he simplifies. I mean,  he says there are many people  speaking, but I'm only going to  represent these two. It's Nicias,  well known from the piece of Nicias  that I mentioned earlier. This very  experienced general, who was also the  diplomat who essentially secured the  end of the first stage of the  Peloponnesian War. He's in a  very good standing. He achieved a lot  for Athens. His rival is   Alcibiades, a different kind of  person!!  Alcibiades is very  young still. He's only been  politically active for a few years, so  he's only in his early 30s at this  stage. He's very ambitious. He's very  wealthy. He's really trying to make a  name for himself. He's so  extravagant and so rich and so  smooth-talking and forceful and  manipulative that a lot of people  find him a bit sus. I mean, he's not  really somebody that you can trust,  but they also really like the way  that he's very bold, he's very  ambitious. He doesn't get  daunted. He doesn't feel  shame for the kind of things that he  might suggest or that he might desire.  He's just very open and upfront that  he wants the world. People are taken in  by that, essentially. They find him  sort of young and energetic and he's  apparently very attractive and then  everybody thinks he's amazing.  Some of the things that  he's done so far with  manipulating the situation to the  detriment of the Spartans have been  very successful. In a lot of ways, I  think the Athenians are quite happy  to listen to him. This is quite an  interesting sort of confrontation.  

On the one hand, you have Nicias who  represents this kind of view that  Athens shouldn't take risks. He was  not for nothing. He was the one who  created the peace. He says,  we've got enough going on at home. We  have this situation with  Sparta that is coming to a boil.  They are constantly having to fight  and we are getting involved and they  know it, so  conflict is likely to erupt again.  We should focus on that. We  shouldn't squander our slowly  recovering resources, our population.  We should just stay quiet. In any  case,  Sicily is really strong, you guys.  It's full of big, strong, powerful,  rich Greek cities and getting  involved there is only going to  cause grief. We don't have the  means to fight them  on our own terms. We will be  launching a huge expedition into their  territory  and then they get to decide how  that situation unfolds.  He's saying this is too much  risk. It's not worth it and we  shouldn't do it. We have other things to do.  And Alcibiades is like, let's just do  it and be legends.  I mean, that is fundamentally the argument  in a nutshell is, you know, let's go.  Let's be worthy of resources. Let's be  worthy of our ancestors, which is  obviously all this thing for the  Athenians as well. Like, our ancestors  improved so much.  They built the empire. They defeated  the Persians. Why aren't we doing  something like that? And he's basically  giving it to them. He says,  Sicily and then Carthage and then who  knows, right? The world.  Because he's Alcibiades. Let's go.  

I'm so desperately waiting for the Roel Konijnendijk  Thucydides translation. Let's be legends! 

And there's,  rightly, parallels have been written  between the speech that Alcibiades  gives  and the speech and the one that  Nicias does to oppose him  and the speeches that you get in  Herodotus, where he's talking about  whether Xerxes should invade  and you have Mardonius, who is very much  the young, ambitious aristocrat who wants  to go, wants to fight, wants to become  satyr of Greece  and the old and wise Artabanus, who  says that maybe we shouldn't do that.  And it's very similar. The arguments  they use are very, very similar.  Both in terms like, you know,  caution is best. You shouldn't squander  resource, shouldn't take risks, etc.  Versus the ambitious side of like,  no, let's just do it. Let's be worthy.  You know, let's do something  cool. But also the argument that  they use to support that, which is  always, you know, the ambitious one  always saying like, oh, but they're  weak anyway. We can easily just  stomp on them. Like, it's not going to be  difficult at all. They will just,  they won't even resist. You know,  it's going to be easy. Whereas the  the wise advisor, who proves to be  right, of course, in both cases  is saying like, maybe we're not so  sure of victory. You know, maybe we  shouldn't underestimate this then.  And that's exactly the same in both  of those cases. That's how this  speech unfolds. 

And we, as the  audience, of course,  when these people are writing it, they  already knew what what would happen  and we, as the audience, also know  what will happen. So we're very much  meant to feel that this is a great  tragedy where reason and the  correct assessment of things loses  out against, you know, the sheer  appeal of ambitious, courageous,  daring kind of moves.  

So for those of us who don't  quite know where Thucydides is in  the timeline, would he have been  one of those 6,000 people in  the assembly possibly listening to  these speeches and that's why he's  written them down?  

Nope, they kicked him out.  No, so Thucydides was alive at this  time. He says he started writing  his history around the time that  the war started, like he started  gathering his evidence at the very  least. He's been writing this  whole time. But he was a general  briefly in 424. So during the  first stage of the Peloponnese War,  he failed to arrive in time to  prevent the fall of the city of  Amphipolis. And as a result of  that, he was exiled by the people.  So in this time that he's writing  about now, in 415, when the  Sicilian expedition is being  organized, he's not in Athens.  He's hiding in his estate,  essentially, in Thrace. I mean,  he's got estates there. He's  fine. You don't have to worry  about the city. But he is  basically away from Athens and  he's receiving news of this kind of thing. And we're always  wondering, like, who did you  talk to? Where are you getting  the information for this? But he  did seem to have really quite  reliable sources. And it's quite  possible even that he spoke to  Alcibiades later on in his life,  as well as some of the figures  on the Sicilian side, which is  really interesting.  

So for any students listening,  whenever we see a speech  in Thucydides, what are the  main things that we need to  keep in mind?  

The main thing is that it's  made up. No, this is an  endless debate amongst scholars,  really. It's this endless  question, like, how much  could he have known? How much  does this reflect what was  actually said? He himself  already comments on this  because he's aware, of  course, that no one can  remember a speech verbatim.  It's not possible. And there  are no voice recorders in  the ancient world. So you  have to make some kind of  approximation of what was  said. And he admits that what  he actually did in most cases  was write what, in his own  phrase, what should have been  said, which is not the same  as what was said, right?  Like he is using these  speeches as a writing  exercise. He's setting  himself the mission of  writing the speech that  should persuade people of a  certain course of action in  the circumstances that are  given. So he's giving  himself the exercise of, like,  write both sides of the  Sicilian expedition. Should  we go? Should we not go?  And that is how it plays out  for him. He's trying to choose  the best arguments that he  can think of that either side  might have used. And then  some of them may have been  informed by reports of how  the speeches went and what  persuaded people and what they  remember. 

But that is no  more than, I guess, you  know, an outline or a sketch  or maybe a highlight of  certain specific points that  were made. And the rest of  it is him, you know,  Thucydides showing off his  own skills as an orator  and saying, look, I'm  interested in figuring out  how this would have been  done. And the exercise  extends to style. I mean,  Nicias, being this sort of  rich stuffy old man,  experienced general and sort  of boring and cautious, he  speaks in this really  convoluted sentence and says  very difficult Greek, very  stodgy, you know, this  enormous number of sub  clauses, very Ciceronian.  And then Alcibiades comes  in and just says, let's  just do it and be legends.  And, you know, speaks in a  way that people can relate  to and that they feel this  is activating and encouraging.  

So the reasons that  Thucydides gives in these  speeches for invading  Sicily, are they, do we think,  accurate to what the  arguments were at the time?  Or is Thucydides maybe  missing out a few motives?  

Yeah. So, I mean, I think  it's important to know that  Thucydides, you know, he  has his own idea of why  this all happened and he's  very interested in  impressing upon you that,  you know, mistakes were  made. I mean, this is  his great tragedy, right?  The Sicilian expedition for  him stands aside in these  two books, book six and  seven of his histories,  has this expedition that  begins in the highest hopes  and ends in the greatest  disaster, right?  This is just this great  reversal of fortunes, this  enormous tragedy, the loss  of tremendous amounts of  lives and material money  for no good reason.  Everybody knew they could  have gone wrong, but they  also sort of kept  following sort of running  headlong over the cliff,  et cetera. And so a lot  of that informs the way  he presents it and we  can't trust necessarily  that what he says was  said is in any sense a  real reflection of those  speeches. I don't think  it's a very interesting  question because that  isn't really why, it's  a great text, you know,  why it's interesting  for us. I mean, it  reflects ideas that no  doubt would have been  around at the time.  We can't say if that  was, if that was  actually what was said.  

He also says in  the beginning of book six  that when the Athenians  were talking about this  expedition, that they  were largely ignorant  of Sicily, its size,  the cities, its inhabitants.  Is that true?  

I mean, no, obvious,  for obvious reasons. I  mean, that's a very  weird thing for him to say.  I'm always highlighting  this because it's such a,  it's defied by his own  text, right? We know  that, as I said, there  have been multiple  expeditions to Sicily in  recent years, right?  Like a decade ago,  less than a decade ago,  Phiax was the last  to go to Sicily and  try to plead with the  cities to choose the  Athenian side, make  alliances, make friends.  People there rebuffed him,  they didn't want to hear  him, but fundamentally  Athenians have been  going to Sicily for  a very long time, even  if they hadn't already  had, you know, established  trade relations,  exchanges of ideas,  you know, people who go,  the playwright Aeschylus  was patronized by  Syracusan tyrants,  and so he ended his life  there, you know, he was,  he's buried in  Sicily somewhere.  Like these kinds of  Athenian figures who  were patronized by  others because the  Sicilian Greek world  is just part of the  Greek world, right?  It's integrated.  

They meet each other at  the Panhellenic Games,  they see each other,  they hear each other's  stories, they see each  other's performances,  etc. They know about each other.  And in fact, there's a very  interesting alternative  tradition, which is not  in Thucydides, but it is  in Plutarch, who's written  a biography, both of  Nicias and Alcibiades,  so you can see kind of  both sides of the issue.  And he actually has  the people, when they  start discussing this  possibility of going on  this expedition, he says  that everywhere around  Athens, you could see  people, like, chatting  about the possibilities of  what would, what awaited  them in Sicily and  drawing little maps  down in the sand.  And this is such a  cute little idea that  everyone around the Agora  is drawing maps of  Sicily in the sand, but  it implies, of course,  that there is quite a  widespread awareness of  what Sicily was like  and what was there  and what it looked like  and what they might  expect when they got there,  because, you know, both  in living memory,  people had been there,  you know, thousands of  Athenians had been there,  but also because of  these expeditions,  I mean, if you send  42 ships, that's  thousands of Athenians  plus others who were  serving in these fleets.  And then there's also  just a general sense  of, like, knowledge  of the world.  I mean, these Greeks  don't live in ignorance,  they're educated,  and some of them will get  a good sense of  what's going on elsewhere.  And they try to visualize that,  they try to talk about it.  So, no, the story  that the Athenians  had absolutely no idea  what they were getting into  is clearly meant to  invoke this narrative  contrast that the  cities had, right?  It's meant to increase  this sense that the  Athenians were being fools,  that they were engaging  in something they absolutely  should never have contemplated  when, in fact, I mean,  they probably knew pretty well  what was going to happen.  They just thought that  they could pull it off, you know,  and they had the confidence  and they believed in the resource  and they believed in  their prior success  and they thought they could do it.  

So we've got Nicias saying,  let's not go,  I don't want to go,  this is a stupid idea.  But the title of the episode  is the Sicilian Expedition,  so spoiler alert,  they didn't go with his idea, right?  

We're 40 minutes in,  we can get to actually sailing away.  

Sorry, it's the ADHD.  

I should add as well, though,  because we were talking about,  like, what's in the speeches,  but one of the things  that Thucydides adds  as a sort of aside  that a lot of people  were interested in going,  partly because, I mean, the young,  because they just wanted to get paid.  And this is a really important point, right?  Like, for decades now,  the poor in Athens,  their main source of income  is these naval expeditions.  And now it's been,  they've been at peace  for about six, seven years.  There's a bit of a lack of opportunity  for them to make it back.  So there's a desire  by a lot of the people  who are voting in the assembly  to get an expedition going.  Doesn't matter where,  doesn't matter if it's Sicily  or anywhere else,  as long as there's rowers needed  so that they can get paid.  And that is obviously  a huge voting block  that pushes this forward  regardless of whether  there's a lot of sense  in the expedition.  So you really have to think  about that as well.  And then also very interesting,  Thucydides frames the idea  partly as a matter of  so gender ideology,  which is really interesting  because it comes up  so rarely in Thucydides.  He says that people were afraid  that if they opposed the expedition,  that they would be called soft,  you know, they would be called feminine  because it's a masculine thing  to go out and do things  and dare things  and undertake things.  And so if you oppose an expedition,  that's fair enough to suppose,  to suggest, you know,  you can just say that  point at a place and say,  let's go there and conquer it.  If you're a naysayer,  then you're, you know, a wimp.  It's not a good look.  And so for a lot of these  Athenian citizens,  according to Thucydides,  you know, there's a real sort of  their ego gets in the way  of their own better judgment, right?  They actually genuinely will say  masculinity is at stake.  We've got to undertake things.  We've got to achieve something  that is worthy of our name.  

We've mentioned pay,  which brings me on to my next thought.  Segesta possibly isn't the richest  because they're faking  how many silver cups they have.  But is Sicily poor  or is there a chance of loot  for the Athenians going over as well?  

Oh, lots of it, yeah.  No, Sicily is very wealthy.  That's one of the reasons why,  you know, why Nicias  is quite concerned about all this  is that these cities  are wealthy and powerful.  And you can still see that, right?  If you go to Sicily,  I mean, Syracuse has a lot of  later construction,  but there's a couple of cities  that were sadly destroyed  by the Carthaginians  shortly after this story  of the expeditions  of the late 5th century.  And the sheer scale of the ruins  will show you  just how much wealth  was concentrated there.  So you have Akragas,  which is now Agrigento,  and you have Selinus itself,  which is Selinunte.  These are magnificent ruins.  I mean, some of the most beautiful,  best-preserved big temples are there.  And loads of other cities as well,  just really wealthy,  really well-developed, urbanized centers,  loads of wealth in Sicily.  Not least because they produced  two of the most desired exports  in the ancient world,  grain and timber.  And those are just two things  that Athens in particular  desperately needs.  So these are things that  are obviously drawing them  to this island.  

So we can definitely see  there are motives  for begging friends,  please ask us for military help.  

Not an accident, yeah.  

Military help is granted.  Is Nicias allowed to stay home  because he thinks it's a rubbish idea? 

 And his kidneys hurt, yeah.  Unfortunately, not for Nicias.  No, this is one of those moments  where, you know,  Thucydides waxes sort of  cynical about this and says,  this is just what the democracy does.  Like, if you protest,  then they will make you do it.  It definitely comes up at times  that if you propose something  that's very bold,  then you are told to put your money  where your mouth is.  So Alcibiades gets voted  one of the generals  because he says it's going to be all,  a cakewalk is going to be great.  So yeah, he's got to show them, right?  This happens on a few occasions  that the people who are boasting  that it will be easy,  they will get to be made to prove it, right?  So that's fair.  But Nicias also gets made  to join as one of the generals  because they think it will balance him out.  You know, it will balance out Alcibiades  reckless, youthful ambition.  They just want to put someone sensible in there.  And that feels almost ironic  when you realize that he was  the one arguing against the expedition.  But in fact, I mean,  he was a very experienced  and very successful general  up to that point.  So you can imagine that  they just think he's a safe pair of hands.  And so they send him along  because, you know,  who better, essentially?  I mean, they have only a couple of generals  that could boast a similar reputation.  

There's a third one, Lamachus,  who we don't really talk about very much  because he's a very one-dimensional character.  Very interestingly,  he also appears in Aristophanes.  He's in the Acharnians at the end  when Dicaeopolis, the main character of the play  is finally getting to live  the life he wants  and get to party with his nice  Boeotian eels and all his luxuries  and delicious treats.  This general has to go to the border  and fight off Boeotian raiders.  And so the contrast between  like one is packing for a nice dinner  and the other is packing for war  and one is just promising  lovely luxuries and wealth and pleasures  and the other is promising nothing  but pain and hardship.  And that general is Lamachus.  And so you know what kind of guy he is  that he gets picked to be that character.  Like he is the sort of fire-breathing  all-business warrior  who just wants to go somewhere  and punch people in the face real hard.  That is basically Lamachus in a nutshell  both in Thucydides and in Aristophanes  which is basically all there is to him.  But he's the third one  so they form a trio of generals  for this expedition.  

So on the eve of this great  military expedition  that's going to be a cakewalk  no one attached to this expedition  would do something really stupid  like sacrilegious on the eve  of the expedition sailing away would they?  

Oh god, I mean obviously not.  So like you have no evidence  you can't prove it Alexandra  the allegations are completely…hahaha.  No, so in Athens  on the eve of the expedition  there is suddenly  people wake up one morning  and realize that a number of Herms  which are statues  that are scattered around the city  that have sort of the face of Hermes  and usually a phallus attached  that they've been mutilated.  So either their faces  or their phalluses have been knocked off.  There's ambiguity in the phrasing  there's probably the phalluses  because they're the easiest to knock off.  It's just like they've been broken, right?  They've been damaged.  And it's clearly systematic  so there are a bunch of them  and people take this very seriously  because it's seen  it's firstly it's a sacrilege  where these statues were sacred  and secondly it's interpreted very quickly  as a statement against the expedition  and perhaps a statement  against democracy itself.  

Now that leap is very hard to explain.  Many scholars have tried  I've not been convinced  by any of their theories.  I don't really understand how this works  but fundamentally the idea is that  these Herms stand for democracy  in some way and that the expedition  obviously stands for the democracy's  autonomy and sovereignty  and that protests  against these kinds of expeditions  for instance by you know  offending Hermes the god of travel  you know getting in the way  of the safety and sanctity of the city  and its expeditionary forces  and this is considered to be something  that could be taken as a statement, right?  And certainly could be taken  as an attempt to try and set up the gods  set up divine forces  against the expedition  against the success of the expedition.  In the course of the investigation  another scandal emerges.  It turns out that some people  or at least some people  or some some of the wealthy  are accused of profanating  the mysteries of Eleusis  basically performing the mysteries at home  in front of non-initiates  which is again sacrilegious  and also harms the very  sort of religious fabric of the city  you're not supposed to do  this kind of thing.  

This is absolutely a sacred cult of Athens  of Demetrius and Persephone in Athens  and in both cases  Alcibiades is implicated.  Now whether he was guilty or not  is completely unknown, right?  We have no idea  we have no way to prove it.  Several people are pointing fingers at him  but Thucydides is already saying  that the reason why that's happening  is because his opponents are seizing  on this scandal as a pretext.  

He is a likely character to be accused  because he has the right connections.  He's a very wealthy man  who works in those  who lives in those circles  that have indeed profanated the mysteries  if that happened.  You know everybody who's accused  is a friend of Alcibiades  so he might as well be implicated, right?  That's basically fine.  We don't actually know if he did it.  We do know according to Thucydides  he was ready to defend himself  of the charges.  Like he was literally daring them  to take him to court  and make it happen quickly  because he had an expedition to go on  and he knew that he wasn't going  to actually be convicted  because he was innocent.  Now obviously you can say  that that's just a bold stance  or you can say well that  that means he was very confident  of his case.  

You know we don't actually know  one way or the other  but Thucydides certainly gives  the impression that the allegations  were spurious  and they were politically motivated  and Alcibiades was not actually guilty.  We will never be able to  to get to the heart of that  not least because  that's what Thucydides would say.  I mean he's definitely of the same kind  of like social circle  and the same kind of order  of people that might well have been accused  if he hadn't already been sent into exile  and who certainly bore a grudge  against the democracy  for this kind of thing, right?  For its tendency to turn on  the people that he thought  were basically the better people  turn on their betters  because they're his kind of people  and the democracy just comes after them  for no reason, right?  That's very much Thucydides's  vibe in this episode  and so he stands up for his people  essentially and says like  the democracy is off its head  they're not behaving rationally  they're just accusing people  left, right and center  and it's obviously because they want to  seize power for themselves  they want to get rid of powerful individuals  who might cause a problem  for their own rise to  certain democratic leaders  are worried about their own rise to prominence.  

And so Alcibiades in that instance  is just sort of caught up in it.  I can't pronounce on whether he's guilty or not. I mean, he may well have been  but we will never know,  but fundamentally he's accused of it,  the court case is not held immediately  despite his protestations  that it should be  because he's about to sail away.  Instead what happens is  the expedition sails away  the people find additional evidence  get their case together  then accuse him  and so he has to sail back from Sicily  to go and stand trial in Athens  which he doesn't do of course.  

The point he realizes that  oh no this is a kangaroo court  and instead he sneaks away from people  who are meant to escort him to Athens  and he sneaks his boat.  That's another story  I think we might get to that in a minute.  

So he's promised that this whole expedition  is going to be a cakewalk  even though he's arrived  and very quickly gone bad.  So for Nicias who didn't want to go  in the first place,  is it a cakewalk?  

No you'll be surprised to find  and this is always going to be the debate  the point of debate about the Sicilian expedition  is you know could Alcibiades have done it?  There's obviously loads of people  who believe that he might.  If his strategy had been followed  if his leadership had been the most prominent  that his approach to leadership  and generalship might have made the difference.  But it doesn't really matter  because I mean he takes one city  for the Athenians;  he gets them into the walls of Messina  but after that he's basically  or Naxos I think it is,  or one of these cities he infiltrates  and then gets them to turn cloak  but fundamentally he doesn't get to achieve  much before he's called home  and at that point he defects the spire  and basically he's off the table  and is left to Nicias and Lamachus  as we said who isn't necessarily  the sharpest you know knife in the box.  

These are the guys who are meant  to actually clean up the mess  and complete the expedition.  And the problem there is  it becomes very apparent  that Nicias didn't want to be there  doesn't believe in the success of the mission  and advocated a very very cautious  and very sort of hands-off approach  to the whole thing.  He said you know we don't want to  actually get involved  because it will very quickly turn out  that we're not up to defeating  all of the Sicilians together.  So what we should do  is we just make a show of strength  get this giant fleet  that we've got together  sail around the island a little bit  you know intimidate everybody  set the Selinuntians straight  and then just sail home  as quickly as we can.  That is what he wants to do right?  But of course already  he's already gotten involved  they've already followed some  of Alcabite's initial moves  so now he's stuck on the island  you know he's in camp near Catania  and he has to go and do something  to try and figure out how to solve this.  

So let's talk numbers. Is Nicias right to be cautious  or is he just needing  to be a bit more bold? 

 I mean it's always both  because he's overly cautious. This is the big sort of accusation  especially Plutarch  whose biographies always have a point  to them right about like  praiseworthy and blameworthy  elements of character.  Nicias's fault is that he's too cautious  he is given an enormous armada  like he is given 100 Athenian triremes  plus a whole bunch of allied ships.  He's given 5,000 hoplites to go along  he's given cavalry  and light armed troops  and masses of money  he's being equipped on a scale  that hasn't really been seen  in Athens since the first years  of the Peloponnesian war  so when they were at the height  of their power.  So he's been given command  of this enormously equipped  enormously well equipped  and numerous fleet and army  in order to go and confront  the cities of Sicily.  But the problem that he faces is  as we said Sicily is not united right  so there's potentially an opportunity  for some of those states  to choose the Athenian side  and to help them get the numbers  to overcome the rest right?  That's the hope.  

And so Alcibiades' strategy had been  to basically go rock up  to one city after another  with all of their forces  and basically say hey  would you like to surrender to us  and join our expedition please  otherwise consequences will follow  and in that way to try and get  the island to fall one by one  like dominoes until they get  barricades at the end  with the entire island in arms  you know at their back and call  and then Syracuse will fall as well  you know it's not strong enough  to resist all of them to get  that is his idea.  But Nicias finds very rapidly  that a lot of these states  are just not open to being  on the Athenian side  because they know what it means  right if you get Athens involved  Athens will get more  and more involved right  they will strip you from more  and more of your autonomy  until eventually you become subject allies  you know as has happened  to all the Greek states in the Aegean.  

And so they are very hesitant  they are at best  willing to provide some supplies  you're willing to provide a market  but often they don't even  let these troops inside the walls  because that might cause  you know a revolution or a coup d'etat  and a lot of other states  when the Athenians just show up  they just close the gates  and tell them piss off essentially  I mean this absolutely isn't causing  the sort of row of dominoes to fall  a lot of a lot of cases  people just know where this is going to go  and they think it's a bad plan  to join these Athenians  and the other thing is that  Nicias often is just not proactive enough  to try and find other opportunities  to try and find a place to strike  find a weak point or something like that  instead he spends a lot of time  essentially just encamped  outside Catania  waiting for others  to essentially come to him  you know reinforcements  the troops that he needs  the money that he needs  to support his fleet  to see if any envoys are coming  to surrender additional cities  to the Athenian side  or make alliances  and it's just not happening  so a lot of time is being wasted,  and this army is essentially  just costing lots of money  without achieving anything.  

And so that needs to come to a head  something needs to happen  for Nicias to prove that  this fleet and this army  can still achieve something here.  

When we're looking at the expedition  is Alcibiades being too optimistic  and Nicias being too pessimistic,  or is that too simplistic  a statement to make? 

 You could kind of say that  I mean they obviously  also have their own intentions  Nicias just wants to go home  he's not well  he's very old  and he thinks that  the expedition will fail  so the more involved you get  he thinks the more you will lose  right like you're reinforcing defeat  which is sort of military maxim  right you should never  reinforce victory  so the idea is that  he doesn't want to commit  if he can avoid it anyway  which is obviously  it's not going to achieve anything  but it's also not going to cost anything  so in a way he's kind of like  a neutral option  so he's not too cautious  he's just being  he's just trying to get it over with essentially  Alcamiades on the other hand  he thinks he can do whatever he wants  and that's you know  we can't tell from the actual narrative  whether that is realistic or not  but I would say judging  from what actually happens  with the Sicilian expedition in the end  that things would have had  to fall out dramatically in his favor,  for this to have worked  even on his strategy  even on his plan,  and because as I said  a lot of the Sicilians  are just not open to this,  right? A lot of these Greek communities  are just not ready  to submit to the Athenians  or even join the Athenians as allies  because they don't want this  foreign power meddling  in their affairs  even if they declare  that they are there  to protect them  from Syracusan imperialism  (which is definitely a problem  on the island,  the Syracusans  where the biggest city  are definitely expanding  and subjecting others.)  

So the Athenians  try to throw themselves in  as saying like  we will be the alternative  you know we'll protect you  from these people,  but everybody can see  what that means  you know you're just  exchanging one master for another,  and so they're just not into it  right and this is something  that I don't know  if Alcibiades could have changed.

  So Nicias can't be arsed,  but he's got this huge army  and this navy  who clearly want to be paid,  they want some fun,  they want their loot,  so are they engaging  militarily at all  or are they just wandering around  scratching their bums  thinking I want some action?  

Yeah actually they're having  a bit of trouble wandering around  because of the Syracusans  in California  which is a very funny thing  if you have superiority  in cavalry in Greek warfare  then you can coral the enemy  they can't spread out  to ravage the land  because they'll be written down  so if you're watching  over them with cavalry  they can't actually  roam around  loot the countryside  plunder what they want  forage what they want  so they have a real supply problem  actually  because the Syracusans  superiority in cavalry  which Nicias warned them about  when they were having  their debate in the assembly  but of course  did they listen?  

So they have sent him  along with some cavalry  some of them without horses  so there's just guys who say  like I'm definitely cavalry  I can run really fast or something  just give me a horse  and I'll show you  hoping that local Sicilian allies  would provide the horses  so that they could  establish a cavalry force  but it's nowhere near the power  that Syracuse has  in this department,  so they're actually struggling  to support themselves  in that landscape  or to even assert themselves  over the landscape right?  

They can't seize territory  very easily  because the enemy has superior cavalry  so what they choose to do  is to maneuver themselves  into a position  where they can fight a pitch battle  outside the walls of Syracuse  where the Athenians  have the advantage of just having  much more experienced forces  and they're all together there  the Syracuses don't know what to do.  They don't have experience  in these kind of pitch battles  against the mainland Greek force  which has obviously  in the course of the Peloponnesian war  seen battle  and a lot of these people  have been in the wars before  so they're not so skittish,  not so nervous about the prospect.  

So Nicias has managed  to maneuver his army  into a position where  he's protected on both flanks  so the cavalry can't interfere with him right?  So he's safe  and then he just sort of drives his army  at the Syracusans  and they do win that battle.  So there's a big fight outside Syracuse  which does not go well at all  for the Syracusans  but the problem is again  because of the cavalry  it's kind of lurking there.  If you go and chase after guys  who are running away, you're going to be out of formation,  you're going to be unprotected.  The cavalry will ride you down  and there's numerous occasions  when this happens in Greek warfare,  not least during the Persian wars,  when this is the greatest cause  of losses for the Greeks  is that cavalry is watching for you  when you're running after  an enemy that's running away  and so the Athenians  can't actually pursue  the Syracusans effectively,  which means they lose a lot of men  in the initial confrontation.

 But when they start running away,  because they become frightened  by both the Athenian persistence  and bad weather  that suddenly comes on.  When they start running away  the Athenians can't do anything about it,  so they just all get safely back into the city  and they say  well that was not great,  but you know  we have the manpower,  we can just try again later.  You know, it's fine, we learned a lot of lessons here.

 So that's what they do,  you know, they start to prepare seriously for war  they gain a bit of experience,  they gain a better understanding  of how armies should be organized and commanded.  and the Athenians gain basically nothing.  So they do this, they win a battle,  but it doesn't get them anywhere. They need to have a more substantial approach here. They need to grab the bull by the horns. 

Do they end up grabbing any bulls by the horns?  

So it's like half of a horn.  They do end up going against Syracuse in force  the following winter essentially  to try and besiege the city  and this is actually initially in Lamachus's strategy.  So you have the three strategies that are being proposed;  

•  Nicias says  show of force then go home  
• Alcibiades says  one by one,  persuade the cities and  overwhelm Syracuse  
• Lamachus says,  as I said  this is his whole thing,  let's just go up to Syracuse  and punch them real hard.

 That was his strategy,  like he said  let's just go directly  while we have the element of surprise  while they don't know anything about warfare,  while we have them,  just go straight at Syracuse  with everything we've got  and just punch them until they tap out.  They didn't quite do that  but they do decide to focus all their strength on Syracuse  and try to encircle the city  in order to try and starve it out. 

So they start this process of building a wall around it  there's a huge long stretch in Thucydides where they try to do this battle of wits  about who's going to complete the wall first,  who's going to build a counter wall  to prevent it from happening.  You're blocking this kind of attempt to choke the city  essentially from the landward side.  The Syracusans ultimately managed to prevent the closure of this wall -  it's at the last minute essentially , the Athenians are almost there.  

They actually manage  (and under Nicias's leadership  who's very effective at both  making these works progress  and defending the works that are already built)  he's really very effective  at trying to get this encirclement done,  but at the last minute  the Syracusans managed to throw a counter wall out  which blocks the Athenian wall,  makes the fortification and the blockade of the city from the landward side impossible.

And so because the Athenian fleet dominates the sea  they can't get supplied by sea,  so they need that land corridor to survive.  That's how they can survive a siege,  now that they have it, now that that corridor remains open,  there is essentially no way  that the Athenians can ever starve them out.  And that's the problem: if you can't starve them out,  how are you going to get this city to surrender?  

So because at the last second  the Syracusans actually managed to cut off the Athenian works  they are able to survive as a city,  and the Athenians have to reconsider  have to think about how they can approach this problem now.  How they can try to bring the Syracusans to their knees.  

So this has been going on for quite some time then?  How long has this all taken from arriving in Sicily  to try and build this wall  that they don't quite manage to finish?  

Yeah so we're about a year in at this point,  which is the really wild thing we'd realize  but it is a two-year expedition almost  and so that first year has largely been wasted  by Nicias sort of twiddling his thumbs  and not really knowing what to do  along with all the various shenanigans  surrounding Alcibiades,  that first pitched battle that they fight  after which they go to a big conference of Sicilian cities  and say look we won  wouldn't you like to join us now?  Would you like to join us now please?  Can we join?  Can we make three?  All the cities basically still say like  no we're not interested in joining the Athenian empire,  please go away!  And the result of it is that a lot of time has been wasted  without any kind of serious change in the shift in the military balance.  And then they spend this initial period  over the winter and into the next year  trying to wall off Syracuse which doesn't work in the end,  so that is essentially what happens.  We're now in sort of late 414 into 413 already  I'm not exactly sure of the chronology,  it's a bit vague in Thucydides as well actually.  

Fundamentally  we're about a year in.  I don't know.

The major shift that happens at this point  is that for a long time obviously  the Spartans have been waiting for an opportunity  to essentially try and do something to harm Athenian interests  to stop their renewed expansion.  Alcibiades ,who has been defecting to them  and has been spending some time in Sparta,  is now advising them on what to do.  One of those moves is to just renew open warfare with the Athenians  which starts happening from 414.  So the war recommences, the Peloponnesian war is back on,  it's a hot war again.  They're invading Attica again,  building a fortress in the countryside  on Alcibiades' advice (so we're told)  and the other thing is Alcibiades says " if you support Syracuse in Sicily  then you will tie down  and at best if you're very lucky  even destroy a significant part of Athenian forces  while they're away from the city while they're vulnerable,  and you're starting that war at home at the same time  so they will have to choose where they commit their troops  and either way it will be in your interest essentially  because either they will not be able to pursue their imperial project  or they will over commit to that imperial project  and leave themselves weak and exposed."  

And so that is fundamentally the situation there  is that Sparta realizes that yeah  if they can at minimal cost  help the Syracusans win this war against Athens  they will strike a huge blow against the Athenian reputation  as well as a strategic blow against Athenian resources  so they send troops, they send help.  

…because of the biggest cheerleader of the expedition starting in the first place  getting in a bit of a tizz and switching sides halfway through…  

Yeah so we're told.  I mean it's all Alcibiades giving the good advice!  I'm always a little bit suspicious of this  in the sense that he does seem to have all the good ideas,  as if no one else in the Greek world ever has any ideas,  and they're all sort of sitting there  diligently waiting for Alcibiades to tell them what to do.  And I always feel like  somebody in Sparta must have realized  that there was an opportunity here right, it can't all have been Alcibiades saying  look guys look there's something to do!  I mean it must be at the very least  in discussion with the Spartans  who are already thinking about something like this,  but what we're told is that Alcibiades literally just has all the ideas,  so he's the one who rocks up and says  this is here's what you should do:  this and this and this,  and it goes right the way through the  to the end of the Peloponnesian War  where the Alcibiades is always the man  who knows exactly what to do,  which as a reader becomes quite frustrating!  Because you're like,  but I don't like this man  why do you give him so much credit?  And so I'm always a little bit instinctively suspicious,  but it also seems odd to think  that no one else has any agency  except for Alcibiades.  

But yeah, he is  according to the story anyway,  according to the way that it's presented to us  in all of our sources,  Alcibiades has defected to Sparta  and is now,  despite the fact that he was the one  who wanted the expedition to go ahead,  he is now the prime engineer of its collapse.

  So once the Spartans start shoving their noses in, how does this change for the Athenians?

 So the Spartans don't send a lot of troops.  I mean, this is kind of their habit  when it comes to overseas expeditions,  they don't send large armies.  So they send one Spartan, Gyllipus,  along with a bunch of mercenaries  and freed helots  which is what they have been doing for some time.  Like, this is Brasidas in Thrace as well  during the Arcadian War,  they like these expeditions  because basically all of those guys are expendable.  They don't care if they live or die,  they're just helots or mercenaries,  they're people that get paid to do a job  and whatever they can achieve  is in Sparta's interest.  

So he sends a fairly small contingent of troops  but the idea is that if a Spartan arrives  to advise you militarily,  that's going to make a big difference  and that does seem to happen  when he arrives in Syracuse.  He sneaks in through that corridor  that I mentioned,  he has to approach over land,  of course the thing is still rule the sea  so he has to sail all the way around the island  with a few ships and then land,  and then approach over land to sneak into Syracuse.  But then he takes charge of the army.  He actually loses his first battle  which is very interesting.  They fight a battle over the counter works,  so they fight a battle in the open ground  outside the walls,  which Gyllipus loses. 

But he again like the Syracusans  sort of takes that as a learning opportunity,  figures a couple things out,  does it better next time  and then the Athenians really start losing on land.  So they become sort of the initiative shifts  to the Syracusan side  because this proactive and daring  Spartan commander Gyllipus has taken over,  but perhaps more importantly than that  there's also the arrival of  essentially Corinthian naval advisors  along with a couple of ships  and those guys are really going to make a difference  when the Syracusans decide  to confront the Athenian fleet in the Great Harbor.  

So is anything at this point going well for the Athenians?  

I mean they got this far, but no.  The thing is like not only are we in a situation  where they really are struggling to figure out  how to now crack the nut of Syracuse,  I mean it's a well-fortified city,  they haven't been able to blockade it effectively.  Their expeditionary force has been out there for a long time  and camping to besiege Syracuse notoriously  comes with the problem that you have to…  there's really only one place  where you can build your army camp,  and it's near a swamp,  and so people besieging armies around Syracuse  always fall to disease. Disease breaks out in the camp  because of the bad conditions.  Essentially they get malaria  or they get whatever it is,  the water is good,  so they basically are catching all sorts of illnesses  people are dropping like flies.

The fleet which has been out in continuous action  at this point for more than a year.  That means these triremes which are built for speed,  they become waterlogged  and when they become waterlogged,  they become slower and less maneuverable.  So the Athenians  all of the Greek states know  that if you have triremes in action over the winter, ideally  when it's not sailing season  you have to pull them into dry dock  to make sure that they are  their hulls are out of the water completely  and not resting on sand or anything. Tthey're in special built dry dock  to dry out the hull  and that keeps them in fighting condition. These ships have been in continuous action  for more than a year  which means that they are becoming very sluggish  and that runs exactly counter  to the Athenian strength,  which is quick nimble naval maneuvering  that is basically how they win naval battles.

So their fleet is losing its effectiveness,  their men are dying,  they don't have a good solution  to the problem of the siege of Syracuse,  and now the Syracusians are receiving  reinforcements and are starting to  gain the courage to confront them  both in land battles  and in battles at sea.  Also Lamachus dies at one point  but that is very predictable,  he gets ahead of the rest of the troops,  gets cornered by some cavalry  and gets stabbed to death.  That's pretty much the ending  that Lamachus was always going to have  so I don't think anybody's  really concerned about that.

Right okay, it does sound in keeping  with what you said about him.

It's very in character.  He never drops character  because he has only one thing,  but I do love Lamachus.  I mean sometimes you just want  somebody who's very straightforward.

  So Nicias is left alone  as the last general standing. Is there anything he can do  at this point to win against Syracuse  or is this now becoming  something that he will never ever succeed? 

He can do one more thing  which is cry to daddy.  He basically sends a big letter home  saying wah it's not working out,  can we please go home?  He doesn't want to do it  obviously, I mean I say  I don't mean to say Nicias is whining,  Nicias is very ill.  I mean he wants to go home  and he's right,  let's put that up front,  afraid to just go home  because he knows that ( I mean just like with Thucydides)  if you fail as an Athenian general  you face consequences right?  So he's afraid that the people  will punish him  if he just abandons the expedition  even though it's at this point  fairly helpless. So he writes a letter home  just describing the situation,  you know he says  oh this is all going really badly  and I don't have enough resources  to manage it.  I don't know how I can break the deadlock  and so the Athenians  do the only sensible thing  and they say  double the troops!  

Of course…

 Send out another fleet!  I mean I laugh, but it's tragic.  They send out another fleet  and another set of thousands of hoplites  and additional troops  and that huge amount of money  to support them,  in order to break the deadlock,  in order to to get things moving again.  And so this is this huge dramatic moment  in Thucydides  where it seems like everything's going wrong  and suddenly Demosthenes no less,  the most incredibly successful general  of the first stage of the Peloponnesian war,  the guy who solves problems,  you send him out  if something is happening  that is absolutely impossible to solve  like the Sphacteria situation.  He solves it immediately.   Tis his whole MO right?  Like he does things  in very unorthodox ways  that solve problems.  he's Mr. Wolfe right?  That's basically… they're calling  Marcellus Wallace to send Mr. Wolfe,  so this is basically what's happening  is they're sending Demosthenes  with additional reinforcements.  

And there's this great moment  where he sails into the Great Harbour  and the Syracusans  are really gaining confidence,  they think we've finally got them  on the ropes,  you know the Athenians  they're about to be beaten , we can do it  we can do it guys!  And then Demosthenes sails in  with this whole other army  and everybody just goes oh my god  like how many Athenians are there?  And the answer is yes,  basically. there's just loads  and loads of reinforcements coming in  and Demosthenes who is  very much more of a proactive figure  in terms of generalship right,  very much somebody who is known for,  as I said, for ambitious unorthodox approaches  to difficult situations.  

And so when he comes in, he assesses the situation and says  right well there's one thing we can do here,  and we can't blockade them  so we just have to storm the place right?  Like we just got to get in there  because we have the strength,  we can take some losses,  we don't need to worry too much about this. Tthey can't fight us hand like one to one,  so we just got to make use of our  vastly superior strength  and just, you know, just break in.  

So he organizes this really risky night assault  over the heights into the city,  tries to get everybody to overwhelm the defenses  and break in quickly,  while they're overawed by his arrival right? While they're all still shaking their boots.  And it goes terribly wrong,  it's an utter disaster  for all the reasons that you can imagine  when you're advancing in the night  over unknown ground  with troops who haven't seen battle yet. These are fresh, right?  They're just coming off the ships more or less,  they don't know the terrain,  they're confused by the moonlight  giving them sort of shadows,  everybody's showing shadows everywhere,  they see silhouettes,  they don't know who those people are,  there's confusion in the lines  as some are advancing  and others are trying to find the position,  trying to retreat,  moving around.  There's watchwords being called out constantly  because people can't find each other.  As a result so that the enemy learns the watchword , so they can sort of shout that back at them,  they just constantly confuse them,  and people are singing the paeans  or the song that you sing before you go into battle.  But unfortunately because the Athenians are allied  with the Argives who are Dorians,  there are people singing the Dorian paean on their side  and the Athenians all get terrified  because they think it's the enemy coming,  right? That's the Spartan song!  

Dorians are enemies normally  so there's this kind of confusion and terror  that's spreading for various reasons  among the troops that are advancing  among the heights,  and when the Syracusan resistance stiffens  the initial outposts are easily overrun,  but eventually some of them start to resist  and the whole thing falls into chaos.  

Athenians start running away,  they're running for their lives,  they're jumping off cliffs  trying to save their skins,  they're falling into holes,  getting lost,  getting ridden down and stabbed.  Innumerable men die in one night  and all of the hope  that Demosthenes brought with his reinforcements  essentially perishes immediately.  

In one night?  

In one night  That sounds horrific  This should be a movie  because that sounds like a proper horror movie.  

It's one of those episodes that you really  really want to see a dramatization of this  just because it is pure drama,  it is literally the hope sort of swinging up and down  in this episode  and the daring of the attack  where you're just like this just might work,  and initially it does,  like I said you know  they're driving the Syracusans before them  because they're terrified as well. All of these Athenians  swarming over the heights  approaching them suddenly,  nothing like anything Nicias would do,  right? Like this is a complete surprise,  and then suddenly it collapses on itself  and it's just the most horrific human tragedy  that follows when these guys  are all just trying desperately  to save their own lives.  

So is this the end of the expedition?  

Well so this is the moment,  but Demosthenes( I mean to his credit  he knows he knows when he's beaten,)  so he immediately says  right Nicias we gotta go home. There's no hope now right  we gotta go.  But Nicias, having first desperately wanted to go home  for such a long time  is now dithering about going home  and this is really not easy to explain.  It seems to have something to do  with his understanding  that there might be people in the city  who might surrender the city to him;  he has connections,  he has sort of secret communications  that no one else shares  so they can't verify it,  that seem to suggest to him  that there is a fifth column  and this often happens in Greek sieges,  so it's really quite reasonable to expect  that there will be some faction of Syracusans  who are very happy to see a change of regime  who might be willing to welcome the Athenians,  even if just to make the war go away.  

You know, to return life to normal,  and so there are people  who supposedly are talking to the Athenians,  talking to Nicias in particular  and saying look  if you just wait for this particular moment  we'll sort of open a gate somewhere  and then you can infiltrate  and take the city back.  So he seems to be waiting for that.  

The alternative suggestion is of course  is that they're stringing him along, right? That they are telling him that,  not because that's going to happen  but because they benefit  from keeping him in place. He's slowly dying, both himself and his army,  and the longer they wait  the more likely that the defeat will be complete.  But he lingers, he waits,  and eventually when he does decide to leave  there is an eclipse of the moon  which terrifies him  at which point he thinks  they need to wait for another month.  Bbviously this is literally just them waiting around  in a swamp,  where they're all catching malaria and dying,  and he says no we need to wait for a month  to see if the moon recovers its normal course.  So he has to wait an entire cycle of the moon  before he feels that it's safe to  to retreat from the city.  

So in that time  you know both before and during  they are fighting naval battles  against the Syracusans,  trying to break out of the Great Harbor  because at this point  they're basically trapped in there,  so they are being encircled  by the emboldened Syracusan fleet  but increasingly they're not even winning those battles,  because as I said their fleet's exhausted,  their ships are worn out,  and they don't have the people anymore  to man all their ships.  

So they are essentially losing a battle  in their own element right,  the Athenians losing a battle at sea,  and they repeatedly do that  at which point eventually it just  their fleet is so weakened  that they can't really contemplate it anymore. 

They know they have to retreat by land  and at that point,  there is nothing they can achieve anymore.  The only hope that they have  is that they can pull their troops out  to neutral ground somewhere nearby  or possibly find a friendly city somewhere,  so they can sort of rally  and put themselves back together,  and then figure out a way to get home.  And that is essentially the best  they can hope for at that point  

So Nicias, who never wanted to go in the first place,  he's finally told it's okay  we can go home now,  he's been given permission almost by Demosthenes. Does he get home?  

No. So firstly,  it's not really that he's given permission  by Demosthenes  I mean he himself is obviously still scared of this  right for the same reason  and Demosthenes has actually done this before  so I don't know how confident he is. He lost a battle once in Aetolia in 427  and then decided not to go home to Athens  that winter, and just stay put  because he was worried if he went home  that he would suffer consequences,  right? So this is a tactic that is well known to Demosthenes,  he's also like a bit of a scoundrel that way  but he fundamentally he thinks  that there's no more hope, right?  So that's basically the good thing they have  that he has to persuade Nicias of  is that there really is no other choice,  and when he's finally managed that, Nicias is been carried in a litter at this point  because he's so ill himself,  he is also persuaded that they have to retreat,  and so they finally retreat over land.

But of course retreating over land  has all the same problems  as trying to forage on land:  the Syracusans have domination and cavalry,  they have way more troops  that can pursue a broken column of troops that is already demoralized,  poorly organized and generally  in a state of absolute despondence  about its chances.  And so they're being harassed all along the way,  they're being blocked whenever they try to cross a pass  or a road into friendly territory,  the Syracusans are always there ahead of them  because they know the terrain.

Everything is going wrong. Tthey do try their best to protect the column,  they march in a hollow square  which is really like rare in Greek warfare,  troops rarely have the level of coordination  needed to protect their baggage that way  but they try their best to sort of stick together,  but they're being picked off left and right  and they have essentially no defense left,  and obviously also these troops  are just desperate to get home  or to get to safety  and they don't really have  the spirit needed to put up a strong fight. So that army is slowly melting away as it goes.  Eventually after days of this  they're already starving obviously,  they don't have any way of foraging effectively  because of the cavalry  so they can't get food,  they can't get water. Tthey're exhausted,  they're sick,  they had to leave their own wounded behind  and this is a huge dramatic moment  when the wounded are sort of crying out  to be brought along  and they just have to leave them.  

This is just sort of a desperate retreat  and they finally reach a river  which they have to cross  and the Syracusians are already waiting  on the other side. There is already an ambush essentially,  but they're so thirsty  that according to Thucydides,  the troops just run into the water anyway  and they don't even care  that people are being speared down  and shot down left and right,  and that there's blood and mud in the river,  they just drink it anyway  because they're that thirsty.  So these people are dying of thirst  and essentially ready to surrender.  At that point half the army surrenders,  the other half has already been surrounded  in an enclosure and surrendered,  so the whole rest of the Athenian forces wiped out,  something like 7,000 taken prisoner , we don't know the total of forces  but Thucydides suggests  there may have been as many as 40,000  altogether in the expeditionary force  so all the others we have to assume  were either taken prisoner earlier  or they've died.  

This sounds like one of the most  traumatic experiences  an Athenian can go through.

  Yeah there's not really any other way to say it, it's absolutely horrific from beginning to end  and Thucydides really gives it its due  in terms of this is the most  tragedy that he gets  right as many commentators noted,  it's a very moving narrative  especially towards the end  of the horrific suffering of the Athenians  and the hopelessness of their situation,  and the extent to which… I mean the generals to their credit  both Nicias and Demosthenes  try their best to keep order  and to continually think of some other way  to get out just to keep the troops going,  just to never give up hope,  that there might be a possibility.  But at some point it's just  there's just nothing,  there's nothing they can do,  and so I mean their troops  are just melting away.  Eventually they said  the only way we can save these lives  is to surrender  and then they are captured by the Syracusans,  they're kept captive in a quarry,  they're given starvation rations  and they're basically starved,  they're suffering exposed to the heat  with no hygienic facilities of any kind.  They're basically, even in captivity,  they're still dying until the remainder,  except for the ones that according to the story  could recite Euripides  who were sort of moved  to move the Syracusans to save them,  but the others are ultimately sold into slavery  and sort of melt into the Sicilian slave market  

So for those of us who don't know  anything else about Demosthenes  but specifically Nicias,  if we've only learned about them  from this episode  and we know nothing else  we might be forgiven for thinking  that Demosthenes is too cocksure,  that Nicias is a bit of a wimp,  can't make his mind up,  needs to make a decision.  From this discussion  we might come to the conclusion  that they, despite being famous Athenian generals , are incompetent.  But is that a fair assessment  or is it a little bit more complicated than that?  

I mean it's never just bad luck is it?  I mean like Nicias is rightly criticized  for how timid he is  through much of this campaign. That is obvious from all of the events,  even if you could say like  well would you do any better?  I'm obviously not going to claim  that I would know how to resolve this situation,  it's just that you see him  often doing nothing  or behaving or responding too slowly  to the developing situation  and leaving the initiative to others  and that is obviously in any military situation,  that is really like a losing game.  You have to try and do something,  you can't just wait for the enemy to do something  and so that is something  you could definitely lay at his feet.

With Demosthenes it's almost the opposite, is daring to a fault  in a way that maybe somebody  like Alcibiades would respect . I mean he is somebody who will take the risk  even when it is too much of a risk,  even when it's perhaps irresponsible,  because he thinks that it is only  these unorthodox approaches  like a night attack that will actually achieve results  and he does this on various other occasions as well.  I mean this is very much his trademark  is to do the unexpected,  and there's a great book by Joseph Reusman  which is specifically about  the generalship of Demosthenes  and he just analyzed this  and it's the idea like Demosthenes  always does the unexpected  because he thinks the unexpected  will always work,  and it doesn't mean of course  there are moments when this is not  the right approach  and you need to think differently about this,  but the problem is both of these generals also  are very very conscious of the idea  that they can't fail  like because if they fail  then the Athenian democracy will punish them,  and so they feel that it is not an option  for either of them to just say  well let's just go home,  this doesn't work you know  because then they will come home and say  well we've wasted all of your money  and we've lost a whole bunch of men,  and these ships are all waterlogged  so you're gonna have to replace them  but we achieved absolutely nothing.

And so they don't want to come home empty-handed  because of course people will be angry with them,  they thought we put this together  this mighty fleet  why did you not achieve anything?  Was this not enough? If we can't achieve anything  with this fleet  like how can we achieve anything  with any of our forces?  And so for them there's also this impossibility of failure  that drives them to continue,  even beyond the point of good sense.  

I think and that is not necessarily  something that you can accuse them of  if, you know,  can you ever accuse someone of self-preservation essentially?  Obviously they should have retreated  but only if they were willing  to stare death in the face, right?  Because that may well have been  what would have happened  if they were exiled or executed for their failures.  

And just to be clear right, Athens did at least on one occasion  execute generals who failed to fulfill the brief. 

 Absolutely yes,  and you know many many generals  were at least brought to court  through this process called Eisengalia  which is specifically  essentially generals who fail  are accused of treason,  because of course failure  works for the enemy,  so they're accused of treason  and the charge is the capital charge, right? You would be executed if you're convicted. We know of a couple of cases of that happening,  we know of people being acquitted,  but it's very common for Athenian generals  to be accused of treason for failing their mission  and this is a very realistic thing for Nicias to assess  that if he comes home empty-handed with a fleet that's strong,  with an army that's strong,  that the people will not forgive him  and so it's hard to judge  if he sticks with it  and squanders the lives of others instead.  

I mean I'm not defending that.  I'm not saying that that was the right move,  but you can definitely imagine  that a lot of these generals would say  well I would keep on trying  until I absolutely run out of options,  or even beyond that point,  rather than go home.

 So how does Nicias die? 

 So Nicias and Demosthenes both are captured  when their respective detachments surrender,  they split off at some point  in the course of their retreating,  they separately surrender  and then according to Thucydides  it's fairly straightforward;  they just get executed right?  They're just killed by the Syracusans  as the ringleaders of the invading army.  According to Diodorus there is a whole debate  which is a very very interesting stretch of text  where basically an old Syracusan  whose children died in the war  and who everybody in the assembly of Syracuse  expects to advocate the most ruthless policy  actually stands up and says  it is wrong to execute the surrendered enemy, this is something that we should not do  because you know  eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, all sorts of arguments  that we're kind of familiar with,  but he stands up for the morality  of not being the one to escalate  by not being the one to continue  the cycle of violence.  

Which is a really fascinating morality study.  Undoubtedly didn't happen,  but it's really a very interesting way  of opportunity for this author essentially  to explore the question of what should be done  with prisoners of war  and actively making the argument on both sides  Gilippos is the one who argues  like no we should kill them, we should make the point  and this old man who's clearly fictional, who sort of shuffles out of the crowd  to say my sons died fighting this war  and I will not have you kill these captive men,  and that is it's very beautiful in a lot of ways.It's very noble  but it is the existence of that passage shows  that this is one of those classic moments  where orators in the ancient world  saw this as an opportunity  to essentially practice their skills  this is one of those debates where okay,  here's the moral question,  like this is a scenario  this is a trolley problem right?  Here's the scenario:  the Athenians unprovoked invasion of Sicily  attack on Syracuse,  siege of more than a year,  terrible situation,  loads of people died for absolutely no reason,  you've captured them, what do you do with these captives?  Especially the generals. What do you do with these people  who led this expedition?  There's obviously not a single right answer to that right  there's obviously not a single way to answer that question  morally  because there is a real sort of sense  in which justice needs to be served,  in which examples needs to be set,  in which states that defend themselves against imperialism  have to be able to assert the consequences  of trying to mess with them,  but on the other hand  there is this the humanity of a helpless victim  at your mercy.  You have to show that you are a better person,  you have to show the power of  not necessarily forgiveness  but mercy right?  That this is the kind of  these are the kind of questions that come into it  so it's a really really interesting passage in Diodorus  which doesn't exist at all in Thucydides  and clearly is just a writing exercise  that now made its way into historical narratives,  but I really enjoy reading that over and over again,  just because it's so typical of the way that  a lot of sources from the spirit essentially tweak history,  right? It's a series of scenarios  that you can think about and consider  both in terms of its political and military implications  but also in terms of what it says about morality.  

So the poor guy faffed about going home  because he didn't want to be executed,  gets executed anyway.  Athens has lost thousands of men,  a heck ton of money.  What are the ramifications of this failure  for Athens at the time? 

 I mean the ramifications are huge. Firstly they lose half of their fleet  which is their main strategic asset.  This is the thing that keeps the rest of the Aegean  under their sway  and they lose half of all of their ships,  just completely lost,  not even oh we dragged some of them home  we can repair them,  they're all gone. All of that is gone.  So they have to start rebuilding their fleet  more or less from scratch. They have some ships still in the docks  but those are the ones  that didn't go along with the expedition,  those are the older ones,  the ones that need maintenance  or may not even be fit for service anymore. Ttheir naval assets are cut in half,  their money is gone,  all of that stuff that they've been building up,  it's all gone,  so their resources that they've been building up  since the end of the Archidamian War,  they've squandered all of it . 

Now they're at war with Sparta again.  They're at the start of a war  that's going to drag on for another nine years  and the point of that is  they have nothing to fight it with, essentially.  They've just squandered it all  on this expedition to Sicily  and on top of that  not only have they been beaten,  but they've been beaten at sea  and that has genuinely never happened before. There is no record of a moment before this time  when the Athenians fought a naval enemy and lost.  I mean they went to Egypt  and lost a lot of ships,  but that's mainly because  the expeditionary force was on land  and was sort of ambushed and destroyed.  they haven't encountered an equal enemy,  you know a Greek state,  that raised a fleet against them and beat them.  and this is a moment at which obviously  just like the Spartans on Sphacteria  who suffered so much for surrendering,  you know their reputation took such a blow.  This is the same thing for the Athenians,  suddenly the other Greeks say  maybe we don't need to do what the Athenians tell us  because you can beat them if you just get your troops together,  if you just get them in the right situation,  you can beat them.

And so from that moment on  the Spartans are willing to take up the gauntlet.  they're willing to say like  let's just fight them at sea,  which they never did, not seriously  like not in a sort of concerted effort  during the first stage of the war,  they sent out fleets,  they fought some battles,  they always lost  but they never actually tried to wrest control  of the Aegean from the Athenians.  And now they're basically like  let's just go, we can do it . Reinforced of course at this point  by the utterly unprovoked Syracusans  who are also sending ships to help them,  because of course they are war with Athens now.  Athens made that happen,  they wanted it,  let's bring it to them,  so you know the consequences for Athens are negative across so many different factors  that it's almost difficult to sort of  sum that up briefly in a few sentences.

  So I mean it sounds like it wasn't a cakewalk,  so it sounds like provoking Syracuse  was like poking a hornet's nest.  What about the 'allies',  are they getting a bit more truculent  now that Athens has been  brought down a rung or two?  

So this is the the other big thing  that the Athenians had always been worried about,  is that if the allies revolt  then the money dries up,  and if the money dries up  then Athenian fleet can't be paid,  and if the fleet can't be paid  the allies can't be brought back in line.  So if one ally revolts  they will come down on that like a ton of bricks,  but if all the allies revolt  Athens is in serious trouble  and that doesn't happen immediately,  but it happens the year after  in 412. You have a large number of allies  including some very large contributors  that all rebel at the same time  and try to shake off the Athenian yoke,  and then they have to try  and do something about that  and that is when the Athenians  actually do slam the panic button  open the last of their monetary reserve  and try to do what they can  to salvage the situation.  

But it's already in 413  it becomes very obvious  that the allies are seeing their chance  and they are seeing this happen,  they're just waiting for the Spartans  to show up with that fleet  to support their efforts  and once the Spartans arrive  with their Syracuse and help  and everything else  that is when the allies see their moment  and decide to try it on,  that is the sort of kick-off point  of the Ionian war  which is the final stage  of the Peloponnesian War.  

So the Sicilian expedition then,  if I have to sum it up in one sentence,  is a huge, undeniable fuck-up  

You could say that, yeah?  Yeah!  I mean, it's pretty much a disaster  from beginning to end  and it's not because they didn't know. 

So for all of these great men  that we hear about being involved  what happens to their reputations  in the immediate aftermath?  Are they given a huge amount of blame  so that the rest of the Athenians  can say it was all of them,  we're not to blame,  the democracy isn't at fault,  It's these guys who convinced us  in the assembly?  

It doesn't seem to be the case  No, this is the thing about it  I mean,  Alcibiades obviously  I mean, he defects to the Spartans,  in absentia  he is sentenced to death  because of course  if you don't show up for your trial  what other options are there?  But they mellow on that quite quickly  because they seem to realize  that he is just too much of an asset  both as a strategic thinker  and as an inspiring leader.  

And so pretty soon after that  they start to want to recall him  which happens in the course  of the Ionian War  they recall  Alcibiades  and they undo the  you know, they waive their punishments  He doesn't suffer reputationally  from advising them to do this  Nicias, I guess  has been saddled with reputation.  It's not really the Athenians  putting this on him,  he's been saddled with reputation  for being overly cautious  and being sort of pious to a fault  and not making the most  of his opportunities.  And I guess that is the extent  to which they blame their generals.  But it's not really like  they single out a scapegoat or anything  and if anything,  Thucydides really takes this  to be a sign that exactly  as you said, democracy is to blame,  the system is at fault.  

And so a lot of Athenian  members of the socio-political elite  may have taken this  as one of the reasons  to start thinking  that maybe democracy  isn't the ideal option  for the Athenian political community  and that other options  may be better for the long run.  But that is something  that we can't directly connect  to this situation.  What's very interesting  is that Thucydides says  right when he picks up the narrative  again after saying  all was lost in Sicily,  everybody died  and then he reverts  to the Athenian democracy  he says actually at that moment  when they heard about the disaster  when they realized how much they'd lost  and how vulnerable they were now,  they did actually come to their senses  and as he says  is usual with democracies,  it's really unusual.  He doesn't have to give them that  but he says  what is usual with democracies  is that when there's a real emergency  they become very sober  and very focused  and they approach the problem head on,  so they did exactly  what they needed to do in the moment  in order to try and clean up the mess  and try to get ready  for what was coming,  which is this a big reason why  they managed to drag this war out  for nine more years.

  So we've mentioned the name Thucydides a lot. Is he our main source  for the Sicilian expedition?  

He is the main source yeah,  he's pretty much the only source  that gives us a lot of this detail.  We have Plutarch's life with Nicias  and Alcibiades  which talk about some of these episodes  in some detail,  obviously Plutarch's life with Nicias  in particular,  but there's a really interesting study  by Christopher Pelling  which showed that really  Nicias is just using Thucydides.  Plutarch has access to other sources  of Sicilian history  that we don't have anymore:  Timaeus and Philistus  who are very important,  Diodorus  of Sicily  (Diodorus  writing the history of his native island.)  When Diodorus is writing about Sicily he very often leans on these lost historians,  but for the narrative  of the Sicilian expedition  it really seems like Thucydides  is the gold standard  and that a lot of later authors,  even though they had access  to these other sources  which we don't have anymore,  they were still mainly relying on Thucydides  and then just kind of filling in the blanks.

And we've kind of touched on it  a little bit already,  but just to really hammer it home, what is Thucydides saying about  the Sicilian expedition  as a cautionary tale?  

There's a couple of different things actually.  I mean one of them is about the democracy  obviously trying to overreach  and becoming uncontrolled by  or being either being controlled by demagogues,  or becoming a slave to its desires, to its ambitions,  losing sight of a realistic assessment  of the facts.  So that's definitely one part of it.  Another part is this warning  against the overreaching ambitions  of imperialist states  which is very much where  the parallel with Xerxes comes in,  like this is very knowing.  They all read each other. Thucydides read Herodotus,  he wants to give a similar warning,  which is what Herodotus was doing,  against the kind of dynamics of imperialism  where you always want more  and you always think you can take  that little bit extra ground,  that little bit extra territory,  beat that extra enemy, whatever,  and you always reach a point  as Xerxes did in Greece  where that stops, right?  Where you have to acknowledge  that you can't beat these people  and you just lose horribly,  and that is very much the kind of warning  that they all want to give  against imperial overreach.  And that's very much what Thucydides is doing  with the Sicilian Expedition as well  but the rest of it,  I mean it is a nuanced story, a lot of these characters  are nuanced as well.  It's not so easy to say  oh Nicias is an idiot, Alcibiades is a wild arrogant man. There's so much…  so there are moments  when they do the right thing,  there's moments when they have the right sense  of what needs to be done,  and then there's moments  where they really mess it up  and so  Thucydides can never be accused  of writing a straightforward simple narrative  with a simple moral lesson.  There is a huge amount of complexity there  which is one of the big reasons  why we're still reading this  

Now let's go back to Syracuse  because I'm fascinated by this city. We've talked about how much of a tough nut  it is to crack in a siege. Does anyone in antiquity  manage to take Syracuse  and how far into the future  is it for these Athenians  to have to watch it happen?  

Yeah so actually the Carthaginians  tried on a few years after this,  so 406 is literally within a decade,  the Carthaginians are on the doorstep of Syracuse,  but for very similar reasons  (I mean they encamp in the same swamp  they catch the same disease  and they're driven off again,)  I mean these kinds of things  are sort of cyclical almost in Syracuse.  Their city is just very well sited,  especially afterwards  when Dionysus of Syracuse  the tyrant of the early fourth century,  he fortified this height  that Demosthenes used  to approach the city from above,  this night attack that Demosthenes launched.  It becomes impossible  by these enormously extensive  fortification works  that enclose that entire geographical feature  and the result of that  Syracuse becomes immensely strong.  It becomes very very difficult  to take this city  and it finally happens  only 200 years later  during the Second Punic War,  when Syracuse ends up…   initially they're one of the allies of Rome  but due to the death of a particular king  in Syracuse at that point  and they change their allegiance,  Romans besieged the city for two years.  Again this is very difficult,  not least because one of the defenders  is none other than Archimedes  the inventor who is extremely good  at building artillery and devices  and cranes and things  to make an attack on the walls  practically impossible,  but they do eventually manage to overcome  to sneak into the city,  overcome the defenses and sack Syracuse,  and this is something that hasn't happened  at that point. Like at all.  Except within internal wars  for rulership over Syracuse,  so there are a number of cases  where this happens  without necessarily outright siege warfare,  but with armies encamped  in different parts of the cities  and infiltration missions  to try and oust each other  from the seat of power.  It is the Romans that finally  actually manage as an outsider  to besiege Syracuse successfully.  

I don't like giving Romans  too much credit,  so let's move on.

  I don't like giving them any credit either. The famous story is that  in Marcellus the Roman general  brought all his loot to Rome  and this is supposedly the moment  when the Romans became  so enamored of Greek culture  that they changed their whole elite material culture  as well as their culture  like literary and artistic proclivities,  so this is one of those big steps  in the process of Greece  quietly conquering the Romans culturally  once they've been conquered militarily  by the Romans.

So the Sicilian expedition…  In the last couple of centuries  how have scholars assessed  the Sicilian expedition,  what have they been saying about it?  

Is there something in particular  that you have in mind  because I don't honestly know?  This is one of those episodes  of history that  largely as we analyze it,  we just kind of adopt the narrative  that we're given  and there isn't  there aren't that many  sort of controversies or questions  surrounding what happened,  and so in those kind of episodes  very often what you get  is that there isn't that much  in terms of new revelations  or interpretations.  I mean we obviously have come  to understand the nuances  of Thucydides  and his assessment of democracy  and intertextual features  of how Syracusan leaders  like Hermocrates  and Athenogenes  have interesting things to say  about his understanding  of leadership  and political systems etc.  There's a lot of stuff  that sort of really digs into  the narrative  of what Thucydides is doing,  but in terms of how  we understand the expedition  it is pretty much straightforwardly what Thucydides tells us  that informs  our best understanding  of the situation.  And there's some really interesting  work done recently  by Stephen O'Connor  on armies abroad,  essentially Greek armies  when they're in foreign territory,  how they supply themselves  which really fills in  sort of a missing element  in the way that we understand  how this expedition  could go so badly wrong.  It's because of  their lack of logistical expertise  and their reliance  on local support  from markets and merchants  selling them grain.  I mean these kinds of processes  are better understood now  and I think that helps us  complete the picture  but I don't think generally  there's been any major shifts  in our understanding  of the expedition as such.  

I quite like that actually,  that it's unchanging -  a bit of firm ground!  It's rare!

  It's a nice change. I'm not saying  that this will always  remain the case,  I mean there's always  always going to be ways  in which we can try  and challenge this  there's definitely a degree  to which detailed  campaign narratives like this  are less I guess  open to being radically moved,  you know you just have  a lot of events happening  in sequence that it becomes  difficult to move any of them  out of place or to  radically reassess  any of the particulars.  This is kind of similar  to  Alexander's campaigns,  there are lots of features  of them that are controversial  but the order of events  is more or less  as we understand it  and this is the kind of thing  where we have so much detail  that it becomes  the foundations are fairly firm.  

I love a firm foundation.  I'm very happy with that.  So anyone going to Sicily  as a tourist,  is there any site,  any ruins,  anything at all  that we can still see  and look at it  and say yes! This is from  the Sicilian expedition,  this is relevant. 

 I mentioned the temple  at Segesta,  absolutely beautiful,  see this unfinished temple  in the hills  in inland Sicily,  it's beautiful.  The site of Syracuse.  Syracuse is a beautiful city,  you can see a lot of  really well-preserved ancient remains.  Most of them post-date  the events of the Sicilian expedition.  There are some temples  including very famously,  the Duomo of Syracuse  is a fifth century BC temple.  it's literally  the walls are filled in  and a baroque front  is slapped against it  but that is a temple  from this period,  so that is absolutely incredible  when you're there  to see the Duomo  and you can walk along  this alley along the outside  where you can see  the Dorian order columns  forming integrated into the wall,  but when you walk around  Syracuse now  you're walking  the old center of the city,  the Syracuse acropolis, the island  Ortigia is their acropolis,  so this  offshore sort of oblong island  which is where the old town is now,  and which is where the old town was then,  I mean that is the center of the city  and when you're there  you can see  on one side  you can see the small harbor  which is now a marina  and you can see on the other side  the great harbor  which is where all these events took place.  You can just trace the coast  and say that's where  the Athenian camp was  that's the temple of Zeus  over there on the other side  that's where the camps of Sumerian  which are relevant to the story  would have been  and you can see the heights  of Epipoli  where Demosthenes came down  in the night  you can see them rising  over the city  you can walk out there to see  you know beyond the theater  of Dionysus  you're walking onto  the heights of Epipoli  from which the Athenians approached  during their attack  and where they built their wall  to try and block it off.  There are no traces of that left  because of later embellishments  of the city expansion,  but you can see it  in the landscape very clearly.  

I think one of the most emotional places  I visited was the quarries.  I was completely astonished by those,  they are huge for a start.  

so the ear of Dionysus right there,  Dionysus where supposedly  these captives were held  although we're not exactly sure  if that's the same location,  but the quarries  that are just outside the city  near the theater,  this enormous pit  this sort of hollowed out mountain  right with caves running quite deep  and and bits being carved out  of the of the side walls,  and that is the quarry  where the Athenian captured  survivors would have been  parked essentially  while they awaited their fate.  It's not exactly sure  because again of course  that space has been expanded afterwards  and there are features  that may or may not have been there  but that is generally where  that is a place that we  we can probably point to most  most easily and say  that is where where it happened.  

And now it's a beautiful  botanical garden  which seems kind of fitting  as a kind of war memorial almost,  it's really peaceful there now.

But as as I said,  it's hardly the only time  that Syracuse is  under terrible strain of war  and and had to  had to suffer horrible things  so it's it's easy for us to imagine  given that Thucydides  is by far the most famous  of the Greek historians  and these events seem  enormously momentous , that this must be the the event  that they're commemorating,  you know that that when you go there  this is what's hanging in the air,  but you could really keep going  with the incredible events  that occurred in and around Syracuse  both in this period  and and in the centuries that followed,  just because it was  one of the biggest  and for a little while  probably the biggest Greek city  and and it just was involved  in all of the major  historical movements of the period,  and so you know  well definitely you can walk there  and give a thought to the to the Athenians  who were starving in those quarries,  there is also the city of Syracuse  to admire and all of its  its wealth and its enormous achievement.

  Thank you so much  for coming on to the show again.  I need a horror film  about the Sicilian expedition,  I desperately need it. 

 I want a movie about Sphacteria  and I want a movie about  the siege of Syracuse.  It is high drama. 

 It is right there  all you have to do  is write some dialogue.  Actually,  we need like an extended  prestige tv show 10 episodes.  

Yeah yeah yeah yeah.  So an expedition is ready-made.  I mean you could do a whole Peloponnesian war series,  of course I mean let's not  be modest here,  but I mean this  part  in particular is so ready-made.  You just wish  that there is more awareness  because the problem is always that  you know if the producers  think that the audience  doesn't know anything about this  then they're not going to watch it,  so they want only the stories  that people already know  this is going to be  yet another documentary  about Alexander. When are we ever going to get  our Sicilian expedition!?  

So for anyone listening  if you happen to be friends  with a Hollywood producer,  just pass this episode on, let's get it made. My god if HBO can make Rome…

If Indiana Jones can have  the siege of Syracuse in it,  right but the Roman  siege of Syracuse…  with Nazis…  but if they can have that  then we can have  we can have the Sicilian expedition  of 415 to 413 surely.

Well it might not have been  made into a great movie  or show yet,  but it's definitely made a great episode,  so thank you so much  for coming up to the show again!  

It's my absolute pleasure,  always happy to be here.