Book 4, Chapter 13 — Seventh and Eighth Years of the War—End of Corcyraean Revolution—Peace of Gela—Capture of Nisaea
Sicily makes a separate peace; Corcyra's civil war ends with the survivors hunted down and murdered on a mountain.
Summary
The Congress of Gela in 424 BCE is the first great appearance of Hermocrates, the Syracusan statesman who will be the central figure in the defense of his city against the Athenian expedition eleven years later. His speech at Gela is the earliest version of his characteristic argument: Sicilian cities, whatever their quarrels with each other, share a common interest in preventing any outside power from establishing a dominant position in the island. Athens, present in Sicily with a force too small to conquer anything but large enough to play local rivalries against each other, is the immediate threat. Hermocrates persuades the congress. The Sicilian peace is made; the Athenian generals return to Athens and are tried for not having exploited their position when they could — two are exiled, one fined.
The end of the Corcyrean revolution is brutal in exact proportion to the length and ferocity of the struggle. The oligarchic survivors who fled to a mountain after the democratic victory eventually surrender under promise of a fair trial in Athens. The democrats, knowing Athens might ransom or release them, promptly try and execute them in Corcyra. Four hundred or so prisoners are brought out in groups of twenty and made to walk between two lines of armed men who are ordered to strike anyone they recognized personally; the personal element ensures that executions are thorough and motivated. Thucydides records the scene without comment and without elaboration. The revolution that had, in an earlier chapter, given him the occasion for his analysis of how civil war corrupts political language, ends here in a massacre managed with bureaucratic efficiency.
The Megarian episode is tactically interesting for what it reveals about how close great opportunities can come to being seized. Athens, using a combination of treachery within Megara and surprise movement, takes the long walls connecting the city to its port at Nisaea and then the port itself. If Megara fell, Athens would control the land route from the Peloponnese to Boeotia and beyond — a strategic acquisition that might have altered the war's course. But Brasidas arrives with a Peloponnesian force before the city can be taken, and the moment passes. The Megarians who had admitted the Athenians are identified and killed; the pro-Spartan faction takes control; the city remains Spartan. A single day's difference in the timing of Brasidas's march changes what was briefly possible.
- Book 1Book 1 opens not with battle but with argument.
- Book 1The immediate causes of the war begin with Epidamnus — a small colony on the Adriatic whose civil strife triggers a chain of interventions that pulls Corinth against Corcyra and Corcyra toward Athens.
- Book 1The congress at Lacedaemon is the Peloponnesian War's diplomatic overture.
- Book 1The Pentecontaetia — the fifty years between the Persian Wars and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War — is Thucydides's compressed account of how Athens turned from war-leader to empire.
- Book 1Chapter 5 is the last diplomatic chapter before war breaks out.
- Book 2The war formally begins with the Theban attack on Plataea.
- Book 2The plague of Athens is the History's most famous sustained passage outside the Funeral Oration.
- Book 2Chapter 8 covers the third year of the war across multiple theatres.
- Book 3Book 3 opens with the revolt of Mytilene, the largest and most strategically significant of the Athenian allied cities.
- Book 3Two episodes in Book 3's second half illustrate what civil and inter-state war does to the norms that normally govern violence.
- Book 3Chapter 11 follows the Athenian general Demosthenes through a remarkable arc: from the catastrophic defeat in Aetolia, where he led light-armed Athenian troops into wooded hill country they were utterly unequipped to fight in and lost the greater part of them, to the brilliant campaign in Acarnania, where he used his knowledge of irregular warfare, learned at severe cost, to ambush and nearly annihilate a Peloponnesian and Ambraciot force.
- Book 4The Pylos campaign is the tactical and psychological turning point of the war's first decade.
- Book 4Chapter 13 moves across multiple theatres in the war's seventh and eighth years.
- Book 4Book 4's final chapter belongs to Brasidas — the one Spartan commander who combined military brilliance with political intelligence, the qualities Sparta as an institution consistently undervalued.
- Book 5The tenth year of the war produces one of history's more striking coincidences of elimination.
- Book 5The peace after Cleon and Brasidas is a peace in name only.
- Book 5The Melian Dialogue is ten pages in most editions and has been discussed for two and a half thousand years.
- Book 6Book 6 opens with the debate and vote on the Sicilian Expedition — one of the History's great scenes of collective irrationality.
- Book 6While the Athenian expedition crosses the sea, Syracuse holds its own debate about whether to believe the threat.
- Book 6With Alcibiades gone and Lamachus increasingly the operational commander, the Athenian force finally moves seriously against Syracuse in the expedition's second year.
- Book 7Book 7 opens with the Athenian position deteriorating on every front simultaneously.
- Book 7Demosthenes arrives with the reinforcements and immediately does what Nicias had been unable to do: he assesses the situation, decides on a bold stroke, and acts.
- Book 7Book 7's final chapters are the most sustained tragic narrative in classical literature.
- Book 8Book 8 opens with Athens after Sicily — a city that could not believe what it had done to itself, then could not stop the consequences.
- Book 8Chapter 25 covers one of the strangest episodes in Athenian history: the oligarchic revolution of 411 BCE, in which a conspiracy of four hundred men overthrows the Athenian democracy at the city's moment of maximum strategic vulnerability.
- Book 8The History's final chapter covers the collapse of the Four Hundred, the restoration of a modified democracy in Athens, the recall and rehabilitation of Alcibiades, and the Athenian naval victory at Cynossema — a victory that demonstrates Athens's ability to recover even now.