Eric Driscoll Greek Thought and Literature 2 Paper 1, Thucydides 1/21/07

The Threefold Failure of Athens in Sicily

Thucydides does not offer a succinct explanation of the reasons for the failure of the Sicilian expedition. Nevertheless, his view on the matter can be extracted with little difficulty from his account of the affair. There are roughly three grounds on which the failure can be examined, each representing an abstraction of the preceding. First, there is the simple fact of the expeditions military shortcomings. Next, the ill-suited leadership of Nicias contributed to its demise. Finally, the destruction of the expeditionary force can be ultimately attributed to the Athenian constitution. There is, then, a multiplicity of explanations for the failure of the Athenians. The first, most mundane, of these was the simple fact that the Athenian forces were unable to cope with the struggles of a long campaign far from home. Most important was the series of naval defeats that the Syracusans inflicted upon the Athenian fleet in 413 (at 7.25, 7.40, 7.52, and 7.71), which severely limited their ability to effectively campaign against Syracuse, as it was impossible to carry on the blockade of the Syracusan harbor with an increasingly demoralized force of sailors (7.12-14) manning a fleet, which, as Nicias complains in 7.12.3-4, was in a state of ill repair. As their fleet was the backbone of Athenian power, it is unsurprising that its decay was correlated with the falling fortunes of the expedition as a whole. However, the military losses need to be explained, obviously, in terms of leadership. The most simple observation one can make is that the Athenian leadership, originally consisting of three generals, Nicias, Alcibiades, and Lamachus, grew poorer when Alcibiades was recalled to Athens and then worse still when Lamachus died in an operation during the siege of Syracuse, leaving Nicias in sole command of the expedition. In spite of Thucydides somewhat mystifying praise of

Nicias in 7.86.5, he is shown throughout the work to have been a completely ineffectual commander. During the affair of Pylos, Nicias had been in command of the Athenian forces attempting to force the surrender of the Spartans on Sphacteria, with very little success, until Cleon (himself later shown to be a truly inept general in 5.6-10, and described by Thucydides as possessed of weakness and incompetence in 5.7.2) was able to persuade the Athenian assembly to grant him a force and its leadership, upon which he immediately accomplished a successful capture of the Spartan forces. This was not on account of Cleons military genius or anything of the sort, but simply because he was more willing to take swift action than Nicias had been. In 426 when the Athenians wished to bring Melos into their empire, Nicias was dispatched with two thousand hoplites and sixty ships, accomplishing nothing (3.91). His lack of daring is best illustrated by Thucydides in 5.16.1: Niciaswished to secure his good fortune, to obtain a present release from trouble for himself and his countrymenand thought the way to do this was to keep out of danger and commit himself as little as possible to fortune This attitude, of course, comes up again during the Sicilian expedition, where Nicias flits about the island to no result before finally settling into a siege of Syracuse. By contrast, Nicias original co-general, Alcibiades, however much calumny Thucydides directs against him in 6.15 (more on this later), is generally portrayed as effective. Throughout books seven and eight, his intrigues and changing affiliations have real and important effects on the course of the war as a whole. Although he is ultimately seen by Thucydides as one of the major reasons for Athens losing the war, this is not because he was ineffective but rather precisely because he was devastatingly so while of questionable loyalty. Of Lamachus we know little except that he advocated an immediate attack on Syracuse, which, in view of the way that the expeditions military capacity deteriorated over time, seems like sound advice, although not as prudent as

Nicias wish to simply fulfill the (nominal) goal of the expedition by cowing the Egestaeans enemies and returning home. In sum, while it is quite unfair to blame Nicias for the failure of the expedition (as he consistently opposed it and advocated for returning home), the sense one gets from Thucydides is that the Athenian force had been, in 415, powerful enough to temporarily dominate Sicily, although it is unlikely that he thought they could ever secure it as a stable member of the empire, as in 6.11.1 where he has Nicias saying, ...the Sicilians, even if conquered, are too far off and too numerous to be ruled without difficulty. Now it is folly to go against men who could not be kept under even if conquered The more interesting level on which one can account for the failure of the Sicilian expedition is related to Athenian leadership and the structure of their democracy. Much like the poor leadership of Nicias explains the military losses, so the Athenian constitution was responsible for the sending the expedition off with poor leadership. However, Thucydides seems to have multiple positions on the matter. On one hand, as explained earlier, Thucydides seems to think that the expedition could have succeeded. However, on the other hand, he has clearly come to adopt a view that strongly condemns the expedition as a whole by the time he had finished book six (or, alternatively, he had had this view when he began writing and later changed his mind, but this seems unlikely on account of him having more knowledge of the difficulties faced by the expedition after it had been destroyed, which event probably accounts for his change of mind anyway). This is evidenced by statements throughout his entire account of the Athenians decision to go to war, from the condescendingly condemnatory opening passage, which reads, the same winter the Athenians resolved to sail again to Sicilyand, if possible, to conquer the island; most of them being ignorant of its size and the number of its inhabitantsand of the fact that they were undertaking a war not

much inferior to that against the Peloponnesians (6.1.1), to his characterization of the Athenians official motivation of aiding the Egestaeans as specious (6.6.1), and perhaps culminating in his caustic denunciation of Alcibiades in 6.15.2-3: By far the warmest advocate of the expedition was, however, Alcibiades son of Clinias, who wished to thwart Nicias both as his political opponent and also because of the attack he had made upon him in his speech, and who was, besides, exceedingly ambitious of a command by which he hoped to reduce Sicily and Carthage, and personally to gain in wealth and reputation by means of his successes. For the position he held among the citizens led him to indulge his tastes beyond what his real means would bear, both in keeping horses and in the rest of his expenditure; and this later on had not a little to do with the ruin of the Athenian state.1 If Thucydides did view the expedition as doomed from the start, its failure cannot be attributed to any one person or event, by his account, but rather simply to the forces that led to the decision to send it off in the first place. In Athens, this was, of course, the assembly itself. He says of the peoples motivation for war that it was based on the desire for wealth: those in the prime of life felt a longing for foreign sights and spectacleswhile the idea of the common people and the soldiery was to earn wages at the moment, and make conquests that would supply a never-ending fund of pay for the future (6.24.3). This condemnation is further compounded by statements that the state was not well advised [in deciding to invade Sicily], but upon a slight and specious pretext was aspiring to the conquest of the whole of Sicily (6.8.3) and the like.

Even set aside from the characterization of Alcibiades as interested mostly in himself, this last remark requires some explanation, as it is particularly fierce considering that it is, I believe, the only example of Thucydides employing litotes. While it is easy to see this as a simple denunciation of Alcibiades, and certainly to some extent it is, it seems more fair to say that Thucydides is assigning responsibility for the Athenian defeat to Alcibiades, but not also assigning blame, which rests with the Athenian people for having first of all embarked on the venture in the first place and then not seen to its proper leadership by recalling Alcibiades and forcing Nicias to undertake a command for which he had no enthusiasm. As a side note, it seems especially unlikely that Thucydides thought any of the charges against Alcibiades were justified in light of his comments on the whole affair, particularly some graver charge which they would the more easily trump up in his absence (6.29.3) and instead of testing the informers, in their suspicious temper welcomed all indifferently, arresting and imprisoning the best citizens upon the evidence of rascals (6.53.2).

In a sense, this is a condemnation of Athenian democracy itself. Unrestrained by a good leader such as Pericles, the assembly, incited by a demagogue like Alcibiades who equates the course of action he desires with the national interest and spirit (in 6.18.7), is willing to enact foolish measures that can only lead to its own ruin on the false belief that they will be securing ever greater possessions for the empire, and for themselves acquiring great wealth. Although the unbounded ambition of Athens, as characterized by the Corinthians in 1.70, is often said to be best exemplified by the case of the Sicilian expedition, which is then taken as an example of their supposed hubris, this is based on a fallacious view of the Athenian spirit that Thucydides surely never intended to convey to his readers. It is countered, for example, by the more trustworthy description of Athenian character in Pericles Funeral Oration: Again, in our enterprises we present the singular spectacle of daring and deliberation, each carried to its highest point, with both united in the same persons (2.40.3). While it is certainly true that boldness and adventurousness and even, perhaps, daring beyondjudgment (1.70.3) are all characteristics of the Athenians, they are not supposed to eclipse wisdom and prudence, all of which are bound up most strongly in Pericles, who exemplifies both Athenian boldness and confidence when he demands (in 1.140 and following) that Athens go to war with Sparta, and then prudence and wisdom when he refuses to let the Athenians go out and fight against the Spartans invading Attica (in 2.21 and elsewhere). On the other hand, Nicias and Alcibiades each contain only half of the true Athenian spirit. Nicias is the cautious one whereas Alcibiades reads like the personification of all the characteristics ascribed to Athens by the Corinthians in 1.70; perhaps this is why Thucydides seems to think that the expedition to Sicily would have succeeded, or at any rate not failed so dramatically, if they had retained joint command. At the same time, his disparaging comments regarding the whole idea of

the expedition, quoted above, provide evidence that he thought it was an ill-considered idea beyond the power of Athens in the first place. All in all, the picture painted by Thucydides of the Sicilian expedition reveals three intertwined explanations for its destruction. Most importantly, the Athenian people were uninformed about the magnitude of the war they undertook; the internal politics of their polis undermined its unity, as exemplified by the unjustified recall of Alcibiades which proved to be so catastrophic, and which was the result of the omnipresent fear of an oligarchic coup; and the fact that the Athenian democracy itself made it difficult for the city to be well-governed in the absence of a popular but wise leader such as Pericles. These problems led to the poor leadership of the expedition, through no one particular individuals own fault, and ultimately to its total destruction. In the final assessment, one can draw from Thucydides that the demagogical character of politicians like Alcibiades was so fundamentally dangerous to the state because they exemplified only part of the true Athenian spirit, instead of organically uniting both daring and deliberation.