Book 8, Chapter 24 — Nineteenth and Twentieth Years of the War—Revolt of Ionia—Intervention of Persia—The War in Ionia
The news from Sicily reaches Athens; the empire begins to come apart; Persia enters the war with its treasury.
Summary
Athens received the news from Sicily with a disbelief that Thucydides notes as psychologically telling: the scale of the disaster was simply too large to be immediately comprehensible. When disbelief gave way to knowledge, the city experienced something close to collective paralysis — then, within weeks, began the organizational recovery that is one of the History's most striking demonstrations of what a city-state under mortal pressure can accomplish. The Athenians established a board of elder advisors (probouloi), restricted non-essential expenditure, began systematic shipbuilding with timber reserves held for emergency, and continued fighting on every front while building the forces to fight on new ones.
The Ionian revolt that followed immediately on the Sicilian news was the strategic consequence Athens had most feared. The allied cities of Ionia — Chios, Miletus, Lesbos, Erythrae — had been the most important members of the empire: large, prosperous, autonomous, capable of providing ships rather than merely tribute. Their defection, triggered by the news that Athens was no longer invincible, was supported by the Spartan fleet, which was now being funded by Persian subsidies organized through the satrap Tissaphernes. Alcibiades had brokered the initial arrangement; Tissaphernes managed it with the deliberate slowness and ambiguity that Alcibiades subsequently encouraged — each side weakening the other, Persia benefiting from the continued exhaustion of both.
The war in Ionia in 412-411 BCE is a naval war of positioning, raiding, and attrition fought across a chain of islands and coastal cities, with Athenian and Peloponnesian fleets seeking decisive engagement and both avoiding it when the odds seemed unfavorable. Thucydides's account of this phase is deliberately compressed — he is moving toward the oligarchic revolution at Athens and the recall of Alcibiades, and the Ionian campaign serves mainly to establish the strategic context in which those political events occur. The result is a narrative that moves faster than Books 6 and 7, with less elaboration of individual engagements and more attention to the diplomatic maneuvering between Athens, Sparta, and Persia.
- 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.