V. THE SICILIAN ADVENTURE

It was the imagination of Alcibiades that ruined the work of Pericles. Athens had recovered from the plague and the war, and trade was again bringing her the wealth of the Aegean. But the law of every being is self-development; no ambition, no empire, is ever content. Alcibiades dreamed of carving out a new realm for Athens in the rich cities of Italy and Sicily; there Athens would find grain, materials, and men; there she would control the foreign food supply of the Peloponnesus; there she might double the tribute that was making her the greatest city in Greece. Only Syracuse could rival her; and that was a thought hard for Athens to bear. If she could take Syracuse all the western Mediterranean would fall into her lap, and a splendor would come to Athens such as even Pericles had not conceived.

In 427 Sicily, imitating the mainland, had divided into warring camps, one led by Dorian Syracuse, the other by Ionian Leontini. Leontini sent Gorgias to Athens to seek help, but Athens was then too weak to respond. Now, in 416, Segesta dispatched envoys to Athens to say that Syracuse was planning to subjugate all Sicily, make the island Dorian in government, and supply food and money to Sparta should the great war be renewed. Alcibiades leaped to his opportunity. He argued that the Sicilian Greeks were hopelessly divided, even within each city; that it would be a simple matter—given a little courage—to annex the whole island to the Empire; that the Empire must continue to grow, or begin to decay; and that a little war now and then was a necessary training for an imperial race.²³ Nicias pled with the Assembly not to listen to any man whose personal extravagance tempted him to wild schemes of aggrandizement; but the eloquence of Alcibiades and the imagination of a people now dangerously free from moral scruples won the day. The Assembly declared war against Syracuse, voted funds for a vast armada, and, as if to ensure defeat, divided the command between Alcibiades and Nicias.

Preparations went on with the characteristic fever of war, and the occasion of the fleet’s departure was awaited as a patriotic festival. But shortly before this appointed day a strange occurrence shocked a city that had lost much of its piety but none of its superstitions. Some unknown persons, under cover of night, had knocked off the noses, ears, and phalli from the figures of the god Hermes that stood before public buildings and many private dwellings as an emblem of fertility and a guardian of the home. An excited investigator brought forward the unreliable evidence of aliens and slaves that the prank had been perpetrated by a drunken party of Alcibiades’ friends, led by Alcibiades himself. The young general protested his innocence, and demanded to be tried at once, that he might be convicted or cleared before the departure of the fleet; but his enemies, foreseeing his acquittal, succeeded in postponing the trial. And so in 415 the great flotilla set sail, led by a timid pacifist who hated war, and by an audacious militarist whose genius of leadership was frustrated by the divided command, and the dread, among the crews, that he had incurred the enmity of the gods.

The fleet had been gone some days when new evidence, as unreliable as before, was brought out to the effect that Alcibiades and his friends had participated in an impious mimicry of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Urged on by an enraged populace, the Assembly sent the swift galley Salaminiato overtake Alcibiades and bring him back for trial. Alcibiades accepted the summons and went aboard the Salaminia; but when the vessel stopped at Thurii he secretly made his way to shore, and escaped. The Athenian Assembly, baffled, pronounced judgment of exile upon him, with confiscation of all his property, and a decree of death in case the Athenians should ever capture him. Bitter at the thought that his plans for empire and glory had been frustrated by a condemnation which he continued to call unjust, Alcibiades took refuge in the Peloponnesus, and, appearing before the Spartan Assembly, proposed to help Sparta defeat Athens and establish there an aristocratic government. “As for democracy,” Thucydides makes him say, “the men of sense among us knew what it was, and I perhaps as well as any, as I have the more cause to complain of it; but there is nothing new to be said of a patent absurdity.”²⁴ He advised them to send a fleet to help Syracuse and an army to capture Deceleia—an Attic town whose possession should give Sparta military command of everything in Attica but Athens. The silver mines at Laurium would cease to finance Athenian resistance, and the subject cities, foreseeing the defeat of Athens, would stop their payment of tribute. Sparta took his advice.

The intensity of his own resolution appeared in the completeness with which he, so accustomed to luxury, took up the Spartan way of life. He became frugal and reserved, eating coarse food, wearing a rough tunic and no shoes, bathing in the Eurotas winter and summer, and observing all Lacedaemonian laws and customs faithfully. Even so his good looks and personal fascination ruined his plans. The Queen fell in love with him, bore him a son, and proudly whispered to her friends that he was the father. He excused himself to his intimates on the ground that he could not resist the chance to establish his race as kings over Laconia. King Agis, who had been away with the army, started home, and Alcibiades conveniently secured a commission in a Spartan squadron that was sailing to Asia. The King disowned the child and sent out secret orders for the assassination of Alcibiades; but the latter’s friends warned him, and he escaped and joined the Persian admiral Tissaphernes at Sardis.

At the other end of the war front Nicias was encountering a resistance which only Alcibiades’ genius for strategy and intrigue could have overcome. Nearly all of Sicily came to the aid of Syracuse. In 414 a Spartan fleet under Gylippus helped the Sicilian navy to bottle up the Athenian ships in the harbor of Syracuse, cutting them off from any supply of food. A final chance to escape was lost because of an eclipse of the moon, which frightened Nicias and many of his soldiers into awaiting an opportunity more satisfactory to the gods. On the next day, however, they found themselves surrounded, and were forced to give battle. They were defeated, first on sea and then on land. Nicias, though ill and weak, fought bravely, and at last surrendered to the mercy of the Syracusans. He was at once put to death; and the surviving Athenians, almost all of the citizen class, were sent to die at hard labor in the quarries of Sicily, where they tasted the fate of the men who for generations had worked the mines of Laurium.