By the advice of Alcibiades, a permanent fortified station was established at Decelea, a village on the ridge of Mount Parnes, about fourteen miles north of Athens. The Lacedæmonian garrison were always ready to sally forth to ravage the plain of Athens; and, among innumerable other annoyances, a constant refuge was provided for the fugitive slaves. Supplies were cut off from the city, which was now placed in a permanent state of siege on the land side; and scarcity was soon felt within the walls. Of all imaginable plans, this was the best fitted to wear out the Athenians into submission.

But all this could not turn aside the Athenians from their great scheme of conquest. They not only sent out to Sicily a fleet of 75 triremes, with 5000 hoplites and a corresponding light-armed force, but they spared 30 triremes more to ravage the coasts of Laconia. At Syracuse, meanwhile, their affairs seemed desperate. They had lost their fortified station at Plemmyrium, with most of their stores and provisions; they had suffered the disgrace of a naval defeat; and now they were reduced to a fortified camp at the innermost part of the Great Harbour, where their ships were hauled up on the beach. It was but a deceitful hope that raised their spirits, when the splendid armament of Demosthenes sailed into the Great Harbour. The new general was foiled in his attempts to retake the suburb of Epipolæ, on the heights commanding the city on the land side. Reduced again to inaction, and with sickness breaking out among the troops, he saw that a retreat had become inevitable; and he proposed to use the splendid force that still remained in expelling the Lacedæmonians from their new position in Attica. But Nicias did not dare to return to Athens unsuccessful. His colleague at last prevailed upon him to extricate the armament from the Great Harbour, and take up a new position at Catana. The fleet was ready to sail on the following morning, when the superstition of Nicias was alarmed by an eclipse of the moon, and the soothsayers bade him postpone the departure for a month (B.c. 413, August 27). Meanwhile Gylippus attacked the Athenians both by land and sea. He was again victorious in the naval engagement, and the general Eurymedon was slain. The Syracusans now blockaded the mouth of the harbour, and Nicias gathered his whole fleet, still numbering 110 ships, to force the passage. The Syracusans had only 76 triremes; but to these were added a number of small vessels, manned by young men. of the best families, like the Danish floating batteries at the battle of Copenhagen. The Great Harbour of Syracuse is about five

B.C. 413.]

DESTRUCTION OF THE ATHENIANS.

523

miles in circuit; and within this space the two fleets joined battle in full sight of the people of Syracuse and the land force of the Athenians. The conflict was such as might have been expected from those who fought, on the one side for liberty, on the other for safety and the last hope of empire. When at last the Athenians began to retire towards the shore, no deity appeared, as at Salamis, to upbraid their retreat and reanimate them to new efforts; but a despairing cry arose from the soldiers on the shore, some of whom rushed into the water to aid in saving the ships. With their force reduced to 60 vessels, the generals would still have made one more effort to break out, but the crews refused; and it only remained to abandon the ships and draw off the land forces to some friendly city, while the Syracusans were occupied with rejoicings for their victory, and with a feast of Hercules. A stratagem of Hermocrates induced Nicias to postpone the departure till the next day; when a retreat began, as disastrous as any that history records. The two generals having been compelled to divide their forces, Demosthenes was first surrounded by the pursuers, and surrendered after a brave resistance, with 6000 men. Nicias continued his retreat, pursued by Gylippus, till he reached the river Asinarus, in the attempt to cross which the army became a confused struggling mass, and Nicias had no choice but to surrender.* Only a few stragglers escaped to Catana. The survivors, who did not exceed 10,000 men out of 40,000, were crowded together in the quarries about the city, with no shelter from the burning sun and cold nights of autumn, supplied with only half of a slave's rations of bread, and half a pint of water for every man each day. The sick and wounded soon died, and their unburied bodies filled the pits of the quarries with stench and disease; till, after seventy days, the Syracusans, who had at first come daily to the quarries, with their wives and children, to gloat over the sufferings of the captives, were driven by regard to their own safety to remove all except the native Athenians and the Greeks who had joined them from the Italian and Sicilian cities. While these remained to work in the pits, which we may suppose to have been cleared of some of their horrors, the survivors were sold as slaves. Many captives of both classes would doubtless ultimately be admitted to ransom; and their fate is gilded by a ray of that light which the gentler arts have often shed over the passions of war.

*The surrender was probably made about twenty-four or twenty-five days after the eclipse of August 27, that is, on the 21st or 22nd of September. (See Grote, History of Greece, vol. vii., p. 479, with his remarks on the earlier date of Clinton.)

The popularity of Euripides, then at its height, was almost as great in Sicily as at Athens; and the poet is said to have lived to receive the thanks of many of the returned prisoners for the kindness they had obtained from their masters through being able tc recite scenes and passages from his dramas. Nicias and Demosthenes were both condemned to death by the council of the Syracusans and their allies,—a measure urged especially by the Corinthians, in opposition both to Hermocrates, who wished to spare them, and to Gylippus, who would gladly have carried to Sparta the great enemy who had fortified Pylos, and the friend who had always pleaded for peace. Their bodies were exposed before the gates of Syracuse; and when a monument was erected at Athens to the memory of those who had fallen in the expedition, it was inscribed with the name of Demosthenes, while that of Nicias was omitted. The energy and courage he displayed in the retreat, though suffering from an incurable malady, were not deemed a sufficient atonement for the irresolution which ruined the enterprise from the first. The calm judgment of history on the general ought neither to be blinded by the virtues of the man, nor to withhold its admiration from those virtues and its pity from his fate.

As the expedition to Sicily was the greatest military effort ever made by a Grecian power, so its destruction was the heaviest blow short of destruction that any Greek state had ever suffered. Combined with the constant pressure from the garrison in Decelea, it was decisive of the issue of the war, the last nine years of which (B.c. 413—404) were occupied with the brilliant but unavailing efforts of the Athenians to retrieve the disaster. Worse even than the consumption of their resources in men, ships, and money, was the loss of their naval prestige; and that not in Sicily alone, for a Corinthian fleet had lately fought a drawn battle with them near Naupactus. There remained, however, to Athens her elasticity of spirit, which soon rebounded from the first blow of the fatal news. While the people were occupied with measures for defending the city, providing a new fleet, and repairing the embarrassment of the finances, a fresh calamity was announced, in the revolt of Chios, hitherto the most faithful of the allies (B.c. 412).

The news of the Sicilian disaster had been received in Persia as a signal for a great effort to overthrow the empire of Athens in Asia Minor; and the satraps of that country began now to take a prominent part in the affairs of Greece. The most powerful of these was Tissaphernes, the satrap of Ionia and the south-western coast; and next to him, Pharnabazus, who governed the country

REVOLT OF CHIOS AND OTHER ALLIES.

525

B.C. 412.] near the Hellespont. During the winter, both sent embassies to Sparta, where envoys appeared also from Chios, Lesbos, Eubœa, and other subject allies of Athens, seeking encouragement to revolt. Their appeal was eagerly supported by Alcibiades, who prevailed on the Lacedæmonians to begin operations at Chios. While their armament was preparing, he himself sailed with the advanced squadron under Chalcideus to Chios, where his presence was the signal for revolt. Erythræ, Clazomenæ, Teos, Miletus, and the island of Lesbos were led by the energy of Alcibiades to follow the example; while Chalcideus made a treaty with Tissaphernes, promising the restoration to Persia, not only of the Greek cities in Asia, but of all the territory the king had ever held in Greece, and placed Miletus in his hands as an earnest. Thus did the Spartans complete the shameful alliance with the common enemy, which they had contemplated from the beginning of the war. The combined revolt of the Asiatic Greeks from Athens was only prevented by the fidelity of Samos; but the Athenians had now to contend with the whole force of Sparta, supported by Tissaphernes, in the waters which she had long regarded as her own. From this first peril she was extricated by her own energy and the jealousies of her foes.

As soon as the news of the revolt of Chios reached Athens, the 1000 talents, set aside by Pericles as a sacred reserve, were devoted to the emergency,* and a fleet was sent out to Samos as the head-quarters. Lesbos and Clazomena were soon recovered, the Chians were defeated, and a victory was gained over the Peloponnesians at Miletus. The fresh Lacedæmonian fleets, which appeared on the coast of Asia, were occupied less in supporting the revolt than in pressing Tissaphernes to modify the late treaty, till the satrap and his new allies became mutually disgusted. This result was owing chiefly to the restless intriguer, who seemed created to be in turn the evil genius of all who trusted him.

It was in the nature of things that the popularity of Alcibiades at Sparta should be short-lived. The volatile Athenian temperament, exaggerated in him to the highest pitch, would have been disgusting enough to the Spartan gravity, even if the reckless voluptuary had been able to control his actual profligacy. Instead of this, he chose for his victim the wife of Agis himself, and so made the king his relentless enemy. Meanwhile, the people began to ascribe their want of success on the coast of Asia to the treachery of Alcibiades; and Agis procured a decision of the * See p. 496.

Ephors to send out instructions for his death. He was warned in time to escape to Tissaphernes, on whom he urged it as the interest of Persia not to give a decisive superiority to either of the contending parties. Tissaphernes was induced to keep the Peloponnesian fleet inactive, first on various pretexts, and then by bribing the Spartan commander; but, when Alcibiades tried to persuade him to make a treaty with Athens, the satrap remained faithful to his neutral policy.

Alcibiades seems now to have satisfied his resentment against Athens, and to have convinced himself that his native state was the best field for his ambition. Failing to secure the aid of Tissaphernes, he opened negotiations with the Athenian commanders at Samos, offering the alliance of Persia as the price of his restoration. He proposed, as an essential condition of aid from Persia, that the democratic government should be overthrown at Athens, where the recent disasters had encouraged the aristocratic party to prepare for a revolution. The discovery that Alcibiades was unable to perform his promises on behalf of Tissaphernes came too late to stay the intrigue at Athens. The clubs paved the way by indirect attacks on the constitution as unsuited to the present exigencies of the state; while private assassinations spread terror through the democratic party. An irregular ecclesia adopted a new constitution, which vested the whole power of the state in a body of Four Hundred, subject to no other check than that supplied by the convocation of five thousand citizens, of their own selection, at such times and in such manner as they chose. The Five Thousand were, in fact, a mere pretence of popular government, added to the despotism of the Four Hundred. The principal leaders in the revolution were Pisander and the orator Antiphon (B.c. 411).

When the news of the revolution reached Samos, the army, convoked by Thrasybulus and Thrasyllus, took an oath to maintain the democracy, and constituted themselves as an ecclesia, in place of the popular assembly that no longer existed at Athens. Thus the two parties formed, as it were, two republics on the opposite shores of the Ægæan, and a conflict for the mastery seemed imminent. The army at Samos was tempted by the weight which Alcibiades could throw into their scale through his own ability and the alliance of Tissaphernes. Distrust was still strong, however, and it was not without reluctance that the military ecclesia passed the vote for his recall and for his appointment as one of the generals. The envoys of the Four Hundred were sent back to Athens with a