Book 7, Chapter 23 — Nineteenth Year of the War—Battles in the Great Harbour—Retreat and Annihilation of the Athenian Army
The Athenian fleet is destroyed in the harbour where it had once ruled; the survivors die in a stone quarry.
Summary
The naval battles in the Great Harbour are Athenian defeats by the logic of terrain as much as by superior Syracusan seamanship. Athenian naval supremacy had always depended on sea-room — the ability to maneuver, to use speed and the diekplous (the rowing-through tactic that broke enemy lines), to choose the moment and angle of engagement. In the narrow Great Harbour, none of this was possible. The Syracusans, advised by Gylippus and the Corinthian naval expert Pythen, reinforced the prows of their ships to take the head-on ramming that confined waters forced. They won the first great harbour battle; they won the second; when the Athenians attempted to break out in force with their entire remaining fleet, they were beaten back and driven ashore.
The overland retreat began with forty thousand men and ended within days. The Athenian army, sick, demoralized, and without cavalry, moved through hostile territory with Gylippus's forces attacking constantly from the flanks and rear. Water was controlled by the Syracusans; the army drank from whatever streams it could reach, men dying of dysentery as they marched. After eight or nine days the rearguard under Nicias was cut off at the Assinarus River; the men broke formation and rushed to drink, and were slaughtered in the water by Syracusan cavalry. Demosthenes had surrendered his force a day or two earlier. Both generals were executed by the Syracusans against Gylippus's wishes — he had wanted to take them to Sparta as trophies.
The survivors — approximately seven thousand — were penned in the stone quarries of Syracuse, the latomiae, open to the sky, overcrowded, with no shelter and minimal food and water. They stayed for seventy days. The dead were left among the living. Thucydides records the mortality with the same clinical precision he had used for the plague at Athens forty years earlier — the numbers, the conditions, the duration. The Athenians who were eventually sold as slaves were the lucky ones. The Sicilian Expedition, which had begun with the largest armada Athens had ever sent from its port, ended in a stone hole in the ground in a foreign island. This, Thucydides concludes, was the greatest action of the war and, in his opinion, the greatest action in Greek history: the most glorious for those who conquered, and the most disastrous for those who were destroyed.
- 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.