Book 7, Chapter 22 — Nineteenth Year of the War—Arrival of Demosthenes—Defeat of the Athenians at Epipolae—Folly and Obstinacy of Nicias
Demosthenes arrives with fresh forces, launches a night assault that nearly works — then collapses into chaos.
Summary
Demosthenes's strategic assessment on arrival was correct and rapid: the expedition's position was untenable unless the Syracusan counter-wall could be captured and the encirclement restored. The night assault was the only way to attempt it — a daytime assault up the narrow approaches to Epipolae would be suicidal against prepared defenders. The assault went in at night with a force of ten thousand men, moving in columns up the cliff path. They took the Syracusan outpost, continued to the counter-wall, routed the Boeotian contingent guarding it, and began advancing toward the city. For perhaps half an hour, the plan appeared to be working.
Then the night became an enemy. The Athenian army was a coalition of contingents from many allied cities, each with its own battle cry, its own officers, its own formation habits. In the dark, men who had advanced too far heard what they thought was an enemy battle cry — it was Athenians from another contingent, lost and calling their own signal — and turned to fight each other. The Boeotian contingent on the Syracusan side, disciplined and holding its formation, charged into the confusion. The rout became general. Athenians who knew the paths down from Epipolae fled safely; those who did not jumped from the cliffs. More than two thousand were killed.
After the disaster, Demosthenes argued immediately and correctly for withdrawal. The position was hopeless; every day's delay increased losses, consumed supplies, and allowed Syracuse to grow stronger. Nicias refused to order the retreat. His reasons are complex and not entirely dishonest: he knew that returning to Athens without success would mean trial and probable execution; he had better intelligence about the political situation inside Syracuse than Demosthenes, and believed the city was closer to internal collapse than it appeared; he may have been physically incapable of the decision. The refusal was fatal. The expedition waited through weeks of disease and demoralisation for the withdrawal Nicias could not bring himself to order.
- 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.