Expedition to Disaster

The Athenian Mission to Sicily 415 BC

Philip Matyszak

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781848848870
• eBook ISBN: 9781783036271
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

This thrillingly vivid history recounts a pivotal battle of the Peloponnesian War, bringing the drama and personalities of the Sicilian Expedition to life.

The Athenian expedition to conquer Sicily was one of the most significant military events of the classical period. At the time, Athens was locked in a decades-long struggle with Sparta for mastery of the Greek world. The expedition to Sicily was intended to win Athens the extra money and resources needed to crush the Spartans. With the aid of new archaeological discoveries, Expedition to Disaster reconstructs the mission, and the ensuing siege, in greater detail than ever before.
The cast of characters includes Alcibiades, the flamboyant, charismatic young aristocrat; Nicias, the ageing, reluctant commander of the ill-fated expedition, and Gylippus, the grim Spartan general sent to command the defense of Syracuse. It was he who turned the tables on the Athenian invaders. They were surrounded, besieged, and forced to ask for mercy from a man who had none. Philip Matyszak's combination of thorough research and gripping narrative presents an episode of ancient history packed with colorful characters and dramatic tension.

Chapter 1

Events Leading to a Very Warm Cold War

Gentlemen, you have an empire. No one in your situation can afford to consider what is right and what is wrong … if you won’t focus on your own best interests you might as well chuck it all in and take up philanthropy.

The Athenian leader Cleon advocates
massacring the population of Mytilene¹

In the year 416 BC, the Athenians divided the rest of the world into two basic categories – enemies and people they hadn’t met yet. The few allies the Athenians possessed were temporary partners of convenience, with each side prepared to betray the other as soon as it became expedient to do so.

Yet this warlike city was the Athens that later ages were to revere; the city of Socrates, Sophocles and Euripides, where ground-breaking innovations in philosophy, architecture and the arts happened almost annually. At this time one could barely throw a lump of marble in the agora without hitting one of the Athenians responsible for the very foundations of later Western European culture.

It would also be fair to say that contemporary Greeks regarded this explosion of energy with a mixture of awe and trepidation. This was because, as the Persian empire across the Aegean Sea had already discovered, Athenian enterprise also extended into the military sphere. Athens was an aggressive and expansionist power, and the Athenians were unconventional and ferocious fighters who swiftly overcame setbacks and ruthlessly exploited victories. Both Sophocles and Socrates, for example, were every bit at home on a battlefield as in a symposium. This made Athens very discomforting for the city’s less dynamic neighbours.

A Corinthian ambassador complained:

You have no idea what it is like to have to fight the Athenians. The Athenian is an innovator. He rapidly decides what to do, and does it just as quickly … He dares to attempt more than his resources allow, and remains confident even during the subsequent crisis … While you [Spartans] hesitate, they always plunge right in. You stay at home, they are always abroad, because they think that the greater the distance, the larger the reward. If they win a victory, they follow it up at once, if defeated, they hardly fall back at all …

If they set their minds on something and do not get it, they act as though they were deprived of something entitled to them. Then they immediately start looking for a different way to make good on their desires. If on the other hand, they do get what they want, they immediately regard it as a stepping-stone to something much greater.

With them, action follows ambition so closely that you might almost say that they get something as soon as they want it. Yet they never enjoy what they have, because they spend their lives enduring danger and difficulty to get more. And no matter how frantic or exhausting it might be, doing whatever has to be done to get what they want is their idea of a holiday.

To summarize – these people are congenitally incapable of either living in peace and quiet or of letting anyone else do so.

Thuc. 1.70

The Persian wars – where it all began

The traits described by the Corinthian ambassador had been amply demonstrated by the Athenians for most of the preceding century and the Corinthians, along with the Boeotians, Arcadians and Spartans, to name but a few, were heartily sick of it.

Athens had become top dog in Greece thanks to the Persians. In the previous century the fast-growing Persian empire had conquered the eastern shores of the Aegean Sea. The Greek cities of Ionia (roughly the western Aegean islands and the seaboard of modern Turkey) began the fifth century BC by rebelling against their Persian overlords. Athens enthusiastically supported the revolt, partly because Athens claimed leadership of the Ionians, who were allegedly descendants of a legendary Athenian king called Ion. The Athenians inspired an expedition to inland Asia Minor, which succeeded in burning down the Persian provincial capital of Sardis.

Up to this point, Persia had done nothing to the Athenians. Indeed, the Persians were barely aware that Athens existed. So both the Persian provincial governor and his sovereign, Darius, the Persian King of Kings, took deep offence at this unwonted aggression by a tiny upstart state from beyond their frontiers.

Nothing was done immediately. Darius was master of the largest empire in the world to date and had military business elsewhere. Nevertheless, seeing to Athens was high on the king’s agenda. To keep it there, a slave was instructed to remind his royal master every day at dinner ‘O King, remember the Athenians’.²

Once the Ionian revolt had been duly crushed, Darius followed up on these reminders. Starting with the island of Naxos, the Persians methodically subjugated their way westward through the Cyclades. Eventually, they conquered Euboea, an island across the strait from Attica. By now it was amply clear that Athens had provoked the Persians into undertaking the conquest of all Greece.

A Persian ambassador had already come to Sparta demanding that Sparta give earth and water as tokens of submission. Not unexpectedly, the Spartans told the emissary to get his own water and earth, and threw him down a well to find them. Nevertheless, many in the city probably held Athens responsible for provoking the entire crisis. Consequently, when a messenger arrived from Athens to say that the city expected to be invaded at any moment, the Spartans replied that help would be slow in coming.³

The Persian host had landed at Marathon, a wide sandy bay to the north east of Athens. With the help of a small contingent from the nearby city of Plataea, the Athenian army was blocking the exits from the beach. No one expected the Persians to sportingly refrain from hostilities until the Spartans eventually turned up.

So with the odds stacked at roughly 20 – 1 and any hope of immediate reinforcements gone, the Athenians did what anyone who knew them better might have expected. They attacked. In fact, they attacked at a flat-out run, which was not something that armies of the time were supposed to do. This surprised the archers who made up the bulk of the Persian force and the first volley of arrows perforated nothing but sand some distance behind the charging Greeks. There was no second volley, because by then the Athenian hoplites were on top of the bowmen. The ensuing combat proved that when a few heavily armed and desperate hoplites meet a mass of lightly armoured archers, quantity is no substitute for quality.

The epic victory at Marathon in 490 BC was a massive boost for Athenian prestige. It gave the Athenians a military reputation approaching that of the Spartans, and gave the world a long-distance foot race. The messenger who ran to Sparta and back with the unhelpful response then took part in the battle. Afterwards he sprinted the final 20 miles back to Athens with news of the victory. Having given the glad tidings, he promptly died, secure in the knowledge that he had impressed even a city of consummate over-achievers.

Marathon was the opening clash in a series of conflicts known today as the Persian Wars. Darius was unable to respond to the defeat, partly because lost Persian prestige inspired a series of revolts elsewhere. By 480, when Darius’s successor Xerxes (Ḫšayāršā to his Persian subjects) was ready to resume where his father had left off, he found that the Greeks had largely united against him in an alliance called the Peloponnesian League. This was led by the Spartans, who were now prepared to fight, and comprehensively proved it at Thermopylae, where Leonidas and his heroic 300 held back the entire Persian army for three days.

The self-sacrifice of Leonidas allowed time for Athens to be evacuated. Nothing but empty buildings and stripped temples awaited the Persians, who took their vengeance on everything that could be burned or demolished. The people of Athens had taken to the sea, and when the Persians tried to follow them, their fleet was defeated at Salamis.

While the battered Persian ships withdrew to Mycale to patch their wounds, the Persian army retreated to Plataea in Boeotia. There the Persians were confronted by the largest combined army ever assembled in Greece. By coincidence, rather than a planned combined forces operation, the afternoon of the same day in August 479 BC saw the army demolish the Persian land forces while the Greek fleet did the same to the ships. The Persian invasion of Greece was literally an epic failure.

The Delian League

Before the Persians attacked, Athens had but an average navy. However, in 482 BC the city discovered what the later historian Xenophon called ‘a divine bounty’ – a huge and apparently inexhaustible vein of silver at Laurion, on the east coast of Attica. This bonanza gave the Athenians the most solid currency in Greece, and coins stamped with the owl of Athena soon became the currency against which other coinages were judged (and generally found wanting).

Rather than sit back and enjoy their good luck, the Athenians demonstrated exactly the sort of energy and enterprise that so upset the Corinthian ambassador. The money was invested in a large battle fleet of triremes, kitted out with the best that contemporary technology could provide. It was these ships that fought at Salamis, and these ships were at the spearhead of the force that destroyed the Persian fleet at Mycale. Unbeknownst to the rest of Greece, it was also the fleet with which Athens would build an empire.

Unlike the Athenians, the Spartans were a naturally conservative people. They had no great wish to continue fighting once the Persians had been forcibly ejected from the Greek mainland. Though practically invincible on the battlefield, the Spartan army was not large. And while that army was far from home, the Spartans fretted that their serf population of helots might rise in rebellion. There was good reason for this fear, for the Spartans brutally oppressed their helots, who hated them heartily in return.

As it happened, not only did the Spartans want their army back, but the rest of the Greeks strongly wanted them to have it. The difference between the Spartan lifestyle of his homeland and the relative decadence of Ionia had gone to the army commander’s head. The man had discovered a very un-Spartan taste for luxury and wealth and had few scruples about how he helped himself to either. Since he retained the Spartan characteristics of abruptness, arrogance and dogmatism, this left him with few redeeming features. By popular request, he and his army were recalled,⁴ and the Spartans neither offered nor were asked for replacements.

Without Sparta, the Peloponnesian League became defunct. Most who wanted to continue the war were Ionian, and Athens was in any case their de facto leader, so by default leadership of the war fell to Athens. The spiritual centre of the Ionian people was Delos. Here, on the sacred island birthplace of Artemis and Apollo, the Ionians had gathered since time immemorial for their folk festivals. So the Ionians repaired to Delos, there to form a new alliance known today as the Delian League.

The Delian League originally had three purposes: to prosecute the war against Persia; divide up any spoils of that war; and co-ordinate a response if Persia threatened to invade again. ‘Hellenic treasurers’ appointed by Athens assessed each state for its contribution to the war.

In 477 BC the league consisted of more or less equal partners in a voluntary confederacy. It was true that the war with Persia had by now subsided into the occasional violent skirmish, but this was arguably because the very existence of the confederacy restrained Persian aggression. Therefore, if contributions to the league kept them free and at relative peace, members felt it was a price worth paying.

In fact, membership grew slightly easier after a helpful offer from Athens. Since many island states had limited reserves of ships and manpower, providing these for the league was an onerous task. Athens had abundant ships and soldiers, so any city could let Athens provide their ships and manpower in return for a cash payment.

The Athenian empire is born

The first shadow fell over this happy arrangement when it was pointed out that the city of Carystus on the island of Euboea was not in the league. Euboea (as history had demonstrated) was a convenient staging post for the invasion of Attica, so the league had to defend it anyway. In effect, Carystus had a free ride on security.

Ambassadors came twice to Carystus bearing invitations for that city to join the Delian League. Each time Carystus asked why it should pay for protection it was already getting for free. In 472 BC the answer arrived. It took the form of the Athenian fleet and a swarm of hoplites. The Carystians promptly confessed themselves persuaded of the benefits and immediately joined the League. They were probably not the League’s first involuntary members – considerable pressure had also been applied to cities on the coast of Asia Minor – but this was the first coercion applied to a city far from the front line.

Another turning point came the following year. Naxos in the Cyclades islands was a founder member of the League. The city contributed ships and manpower, but had become increasingly dissatisfied with a war that was doing little for Naxos, but much for the benefit of Athens. The Athenians responded that there was not a lot the Naxians could do, as joining the League had been an irrevocable commitment. Naxos withdrew anyway.

It took a substantial siege before the Naxians changed their minds. It appears that the city walls of Naxos were torn down to prevent similar disagreements in future. While they were at it, the Athenians confiscated the city’s fleet and demanded a monetary membership contribution henceforth.

During the next decade Athens continued to expand its control over the League and to force member states to co-operate with Athenian aims. That co-operation did not extend far in the other direction. This was made abundantly clear to the people of Thasos, a League city that had become wealthy in part from gold mines in nearby Thrace.

To Thasian dismay, the Athenians disputed the ownership of certain gold mines and began to force their way into markets on the Thracian mainland, which the Thasians had always considered their own. When Thasos protested by threatening to leave the League, Athens responded with the now-standard invasion force. Thasos appealed to Sparta for help, but before Sparta could act, a devastating earthquake crippled the country. The helots saw this as an opportunity to rise in rebellion. Not only was Sparta unable to aid Thasos but the Spartans had to make a humiliating appeal to Athens for military support.

The Spartans later repented of their offer and asked the Athenians to leave again, but Sparta’s reputation was so damaged that a former ally, the city of Megara, volunteered to join the League. This infuriated the Corinthians, who had hopes of making Megara a satellite state, but for the moment there was little Corinth could do. Meanwhile, Thasos was duly subjugated, and to no one’s surprise a league court awarded Athens the Thasian assets in mainland Thrace. A colony – Amphipolis – was established on the mainland to hammer home the point of Athenian dominance. Like Naxos, Thasos also lost its navy, and thereafter was forced to pay for the maintenance of the very ships that subjugated it.

It was becoming plain to even the most self-deluding members of the League that the ‘equal partnership’ to which they had signed up was gone. Their confederacy had somehow morphed into what some Athenians were openly calling their ‘empire’, and the purpose of that empire was not the defeat of Persia but the aggrandizement of Athens.

The next step came in 454 BC, when the league voted to move its treasury from Delos to the ‘greater security’ of Athens. By now Athens had garrisons ‘protecting’ many of the smaller cities. Being under what was in effect military occupation, these smaller cities took their voting orders from Athens. The league treasury had a substantial surplus of 9,000 talents of gold, for even as the war had been winding down, assessments for contributions (now redefined as tribute) had been creeping up.

Pericles, the Athenian leader, had an idea of what to do with the surplus cash. The League had been founded to mitigate Persian aggression. Therefore the current financial surplus should be used to undo the damage that Persian aggression had already wrought. The Ionians were a god-fearing folk, so temples ravaged by the Persians should be the first priority of a League-financed re-building project. This should be done one city at a time, and where better to start than Athens?

One of the many the temples rebuilt (with no expense spared) was on the Acropolis. It is a sad irony that the Parthenon, one of the greatest architectural expressions of the human spirit, was built on contributions extorted by Athens from former allies who had become subjects.

At least the Athenian empire was no grim tyranny. Many Ionians voluntarily made their way to Athens to revel in the sheer dynamism of a state that questioned everything and believed that anything was possible. Even as far back as the 490s an exile from the isle of Lesbos had reduced his audience to tears with The Fall of Miletos, the heart-rending play about the reconquest of his rebel city by the Persians. Many others had followed, including Herodotus of Halicarnassus, whose account of the Persian wars is the world’s first work of history. And Athens might despotically rule the League, but the city itself was a democracy.

Democracy was a new concept. The rest of the world was still coming to grips with the idea of citizens coming together and deciding the fate of their...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Events Leading to a Very Warm Cold War
• Chapter 2 - From Melos to Sicily
• Chapter 3 - Travel Plans
• Chapter 4 - The Athenians are Coming!
• Chapter 5 - The Gloves Come Off
• Chapter Six - The Siege of Syracuse
• Chapter 7 - A Little Local Difficulty
• Chapter 8 - The War Goes to Sea
• Chapter 9 - The Final Phase
• Chapter 10 - The End
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index