Book 6, Chapter 19 — Seventeenth Year of the War—Parties at Syracuse—Story of Harmodius and Aristogiton—Disgrace of Alcibiades
Syracuse argues about whether Athens is really coming; Alcibiades, recalled, defects to Sparta instead.
Summary
The debate at Syracuse between Hermocrates and Athenagoras mirrors, on the Syracusan side, the Athenian debate about the expedition itself. Hermocrates has reliable intelligence about the expedition's scale and argues for immediate preparation — sending embassies to Peloponnesian and Sicilian allies, preparing the fleet, training the army, fortifying the approaches. Athenagoras, a democratic politician who distrusts the source of the warning, argues that the reports are oligarchic propaganda designed to panic the people into concentrating military power in fewer hands. He is wrong about the facts and right about the political dynamics. The generals finally cut off the debate and begin preparations, but without the urgency Hermocrates had recommended.
The Athenian expedition's opening weeks are characterized by confusion about objectives. The three generals cannot agree on a strategy. Nicias wants to show the flag, do the minimum required by their instructions, and return; Alcibiades wants to work through diplomatic means to build Sicilian allies before attacking Syracuse directly; Lamachus wants to sail immediately on Syracuse and attack before it can prepare. Lamachus's plan was almost certainly the most militarily sound — speed, surprise, and the psychological impact of an attack before the Syracusans had organized their defense — but he was outvoted. The expedition spent its first season in indecisive maneuvering and returned to winter quarters having neither won a decisive battle nor established a strategic base.
Alcibiades's recall is, in retrospect, the single most damaging event of the entire Sicilian campaign. The recall was engineered by his political enemies in Athens using the Hermae scandal and the accusation of profaning the Mysteries. Rather than return to face a trial he expected to lose on charges he may not have been guilty of, Alcibiades sailed for the Peloponnese and eventually to Sparta, where he was welcomed and debriefed. His advice to the Spartans — fortify Decelea permanently in Attica, send a Spartan officer to command the Syracusan defense — was specific, strategically sound, and enormously damaging to Athens. Both recommendations were implemented; both had exactly the effects he predicted.
- 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.