Realizing that even their interests might have some play this far away, are
prevailed upon and do send a General Gylippus, who fortifies Syracuse and hopes
and brings them back to the battle in a big way.
The Athenians We are told, have their wall stymied by a counter-wall.
The actual geography of this is a little hard to figure out.
This is sort of a schematic of wall and counter-wall.
And this is the great sort of ear-shaped harbor that we were just talking about.
It's at this point. That Thucydides records for us a letter
home from Nicias. He says, the ships are rotting.
The slaves are deserting. We're losing.
And then he also says that he has an extremely painful disease of the kidneys
and asks for relief for himself. The Athenians don't accede to his request
to be brought home, but I think probably to his shock the send out a massive force
of reinforcements under the general Demosthenes.
The battles pick up around the harbor. And the Athenians suffer a defeat there.
The Athenians don't lose often at sea and they do now.
Moreover the Athenians are encamped in an awful kind of pestilential swamp and
Demostenes the general says we got to get out of here.
They're getting ready to go but there's a lunar eclipse and Nikkius who Thucydides
says is a little over addicted to beliefs of this kind, listens to the soothsayers
and waits out the 27 days of purification after an eclipse.
It's catastrophic, first The Syracusans had wanted nothing more than to drive the
Athenians out of the Great Harbor. But then after defeating them, their plan
changes. They set up a barricade of old ships,
hulks, chained together, and trap the Athenians.
So the Athenians are now trapped behind the counterwall on land Behind this
blockade at sea. There is another battle in the great
harbor and the Athenians are decisively defeated and Nikkius and Demosthenes
decide to flee overland. Thucydides account again is unsparing.
Tormented by heat and thirst, by the constant raiding from the Syracusans and
their allies on land, finally the remaining Athenians come to a small river,
the Assinarus. And if you can picture it, the river is
here. There's a height on the other side.
And the Athenians are so desperate to get to the water that they sort of trample
each other. Whereas from the height on the other side,
the Syracusans are raining down arrows and missles, and the Athenians, so tormented
by thirst, keep going to the water. As fouled as it was by mud and blood and
filth. Demosthenes and Nikkius are killed.
The remaining Atheniana are captures and put in to work in the quarries in
Syracuse. They're enslaved.
This, according to Thucydides, was the greatest Hellenic achievement of this war
or any other. At once most glorious to the victors, most
calamitous to the conquered. They were beaten at all points and all
together; all that they suffered was great.
They were destroyed as the saying goes, with the total destruction.
Their fleet, their army, everything was destroyed and few of the many returned
home. Such were the events in Sicily.
Immediately thereafter, There were, there was a flurry of revolts among the allies.
And there was political upheaval at Athens.
And we'll see what happens next in our next lecture.