Book 7, Chapter 21 — Eighteenth and Nineteenth Years of the War—Arrival of Gylippus at Syracuse—Fortification of Decelea—Successes of the Syracusans
The besiegers become the besieged; Sparta occupies Decelea in Attica; the empire begins to contract.
Summary
Nicias's letter to the Athenian assembly is unlike anything else in the History. Most generals, Thucydides observes, either exaggerate their successes to avoid criticism or understate their difficulties to avoid alarm. Nicias, ill and without hope of personal recovery, tells Athens exactly what is happening. The fleet is rotting in the harbor; the crews are sick and deserting; the army is hemmed in on its own fortifications and no longer able to operate freely; the Syracusan counter-walls have broken the encirclement; Gylippus is moving freely through Sicily gathering additional forces; Athens must either send an entirely new expedition or recall the existing one. The assembly, reading the letter, votes to send more: Demosthenes with seventy-three ships and reinforcements nearly equal to the original expedition. The decision prolongs the agony.
The Spartan occupation of Decelea, implemented on Alcibiades's advice, changes the character of the war in Attica in ways that compound Athens's Sicilian difficulties. Previously the Spartan invasions were seasonal — the army came in summer, ravaged the countryside, and withdrew before winter. Decelea was permanent: a fortified position from which raiding parties operated year-round. The silver mines of Laurion were effectively closed; twenty thousand slaves deserted; the Long Walls required constant garrison; every supply had to come by sea, through a fleet that was simultaneously committed in Sicily. Athens was paying for the Sicilian expedition with revenues that the Sicilian expedition's strategic context had already diminished.
The allied cities of Athens's empire read the position correctly. Lesbos, Chios, Euboea — the largest and most important of the allied states — began negotiating defection and revolt. Sparta and Persia began coordinating, with Persia offering subsidies for a Spartan fleet large enough to challenge Athens at sea. The single thread holding Athens together was the fleet — its training, its numbers, the revenue that paid it, and the strategic geography that made every Athenian maritime supply route defensible if the fleet held. In Sicily, that fleet was being degraded engagement by engagement, and Nicias had neither the health nor the strategic imagination to stop the degradation.
- 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.