Book 6, Chapter 18 — Seventeenth Year of the War—The Sicilian Campaign—Affair of the Hermae—Departure of the Expedition
Athens votes to conquer an island larger than most Greek states, for reasons no one can clearly articulate.
Summary
The debate over the Sicilian Expedition reveals the democratic assembly at its most susceptible to collective delusion. Most Athenians, Thucydides notes, had no accurate idea of the size of Sicily or the number of its inhabitants — a staggering admission about a project on which they were about to stake enormous resources. Nicias argues against the expedition on the grounds of strategic overextension: Sparta is still hostile, Sparta's allies are restless, Euboea is disaffected; this is not the moment to divide Athenian resources between a home front and a western campaign. Alcibiades argues for it on the grounds of historical momentum, imperial ambition, and his own reading of Sicilian weakness — an argument more confident than its evidence warranted.
Nicias's attempt to dissuade the assembly by describing the enormous resources the expedition would require had the opposite of its intended effect. The assembly, far from being sobered by the logistics, voted more ships, more infantry, more cavalry, more money. They added two more generals — Alcibiades and Lamachus — to join Nicias, who had been trying to avoid the command. The appointment of three generals of radically different strategic temperaments to joint command of a single operation, with no clear decision-making hierarchy, was itself a recipe for the disasters that followed.
The Hermae affair — the mutilation of Athens's boundary markers, the square-cut busts of the god Hermes that stood at every door and crossroads — shook the city on the eve of departure. The mutilation was simultaneous and widespread, suggesting organization; it was impious in a way that touched deep Athenian anxieties about sacrilege and its consequences. Alcibiades was accused, probably falsely, of involvement; his enemies used the charge to block his recall for trial before departure, knowing that in Athens during the expedition he would be more powerful than his colleagues and more difficult to prosecute. They preferred to let him command the expedition and recall him later — which is what happened, with the consequences the History records.
- 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.