Book 6, Chapter 20 — Seventeenth and Eighteenth Years of the War—Inaction of the Athenian Army—Alcibiades at Sparta—Investment of Syracuse
The Athenians nearly cut off Syracuse completely; one counter-wall built in time prevents encirclement.
Summary
Alcibiades's speech at Sparta, delivered to the Spartan assembly, is one of the History's most unsettling documents. He acknowledges openly that he is betraying his city and justifies it by saying that his city first betrayed him — the Athenians who exiled and condemned him are not his patriotic community; real patriotism is service to the best principles of the state, and Athens had violated those principles by acting against him unjustly. The argument is recognizable as the logic of every person who has used personal grievance to justify collaboration with an enemy. Thucydides does not editorialize. He records the speech, notes that the Spartans found it persuasive, and lets the reader observe that Alcibiades's advice was accurate, detailed, and immediately damaging to his former city.
The Athenian operations at Syracuse in the expedition's second year are the last period in which Athens holds genuine strategic initiative. After wintering at Catana, the Athenians establish themselves on Epipolae, the high plateau above Syracuse, and begin the investment walls that would cut off the city from overland supply and reinforcement. Their victory over the Syracusan hoplites in open field gave temporary control of the heights. The construction proceeded rapidly toward completion of the northern wall, then turned south toward the sea. If the double wall reached the harbor, the city would be enclosed.
The arrival of Gylippus changes everything. Gongylus's single ship reached Syracuse before the general with news that Gylippus was coming; the Syracusans, who had been sending envoys to negotiate, stopped the negotiation. Gylippus arrived through the pass the Athenians had left unblocked — he was able to do so because the Athenian wall had not yet reached that point — and immediately organized the Syracusan counter-wall that broke the potential encirclement. Lamachus was killed in a subsequent skirmish, leaving Nicias as the sole Athenian commander: cautious, ill, and constitutionally opposed to the kind of aggressive action that the situation now required. The window in which the expedition could have succeeded closed in a matter of weeks.
- 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.