Meanwhile, Alcibiades sailed in a freighter to the land of Elis in the western Peloponnesus, where he had friends from the Quadruple Alliance and his campaign to isolate Sparta. He wasted no time planning his revenge. “I’ll show them who’s still alive!” he said of his Athenian persecutors.[38] Contacting the Spartans and gaining the promise of immunity, he traveled to Sparta. There he found envoys from Syracuse seeking help against the Athenian expedition, which was now threatening their city. The Syracusans also appealed to the Corinthians, who immediately voted to send military aid. But the Spartans, who were always more conservative, hesitated.[39] Alcibiades now used his considerable powers of persuasion on behalf of the Syracusans.
After scolding the Spartans for negotiating with his enemies—he reminded them that they had made the peace with Athens through Nicias, not him, which in his egocentric view made them responsible for his campaign against them in the Peloponnesus—he tantalized them with a glimpse of the top-secret master plan of the Athenians. As soon as the teetering Syracuse falls, he warned, the Athenians plan to dominate the whole island of Sicily. Then they will go after the city-states of southern Italy. Then they will go after the colonies of Carthage, the dominant power of the western Mediterranean, and finally the mother city itself. Finally, they will turn the might of their new western empire, augmented by fearsome barbarian mercenaries from Spain and elsewhere, against the beleaguered Peloponnesus and overwhelm it.[40]
This supposed exposé from an insider was calculated to terrify the Spartans. In fact the peace-loving Nicias would have been content with a show of force and a negotiated settlement in Sicily but for Alcibiades’ ambitions.[41] It is possible, indeed, that a plan for world conquest was seething in Alcibiades’ overheated brain, for he had instilled in young men in Athens a sense of geopolitical destiny that had them drawing maps of Sicily and north Africa in the sand of their palaestras.[42] But in reality Athens had not the resources, the infrastructure, or the institutional continuity to build a far-flung empire. The domino theory was a figment of Alcibiades’ imagination. Yet he used it effectively to get the Spartans’ attention, forcing them to see the Athenian action in Sicily as part of a pattern of empire-building. The long reach of Athenian ambition threatened Sparta’s security, he insinuated. If the Athenians should succeed at Syracuse …
Alcibiades dropped another bombshell at the meeting. He revealed to them no less than the secret of how to win the looming war with Athens. Whereas during hostilities they were wont to invade Attica each spring, burn the crops, and then return home, they were missing the opportunity to do real damage to the Athenian economy. Rather than make a token incursion, they should create a permanent fortified base in enemy territory. Then they could permanently disrupt Athenian agriculture. Better yet, they could deny the Athenians the silver they extracted from the mines at Laurion. This would seriously damage their income and their power to conduct war.
The Spartans resolved to send two ships to Syracuse along with the two ships Corinth sent. They would not gamble their own precious troops in far-off Sicily. Rather, they sent Gylippus as a military adviser, who could help organize the defenses of Syracuse.[43] He arrived in Sicily in the spring of 414 on the north coast of Sicily, where he recruited an army, with which he marched to Syracuse. He brought with him not only reinforcements, but hope for more. His energetic leadership reinvigorated the Syracusans.
Meanwhile, back in Sparta, Alcibiades made a show of becoming Spartan. Although he had strutted around in Athens in long purple robes, he now dressed simply, stopped cutting his hair, took cold baths, and ate standard Spartan fare of coarse bread and black porridge. Plutarch calls him a chameleon.[44] But for all his acting, Alcibiades couldn’t stop being Alcibiades. While King Agis was away on campaign, Alcibiades courted and seduced his wife Timaea. When she got pregnant, he bragged that he sired a son so that his descendants might rule the Spartans. But in a tight-knit and xenophobic society like Sparta, the parentage of the baby could not be hidden, and Agis could do the math. Alcibiades had to look around for an exit strategy, and fast. Later, when Agis returned, the king renounced his wife’s son, Leotychides.[45]
Through 414, under the direction of Gylippus, the Syracusan forces got stronger and more confident, while the Athenian attempt to invest the besieged city with a wall sputtered, the first of many setbacks. In 413 the Syracusans received reinforcements of men and ships, and the Athenians were forced to send another large force of sixty-five ships with general Demonsthenes. A series of attacks by the Syracusans bottled up the Athenian fleet in the Great Harbor of Syracuse, so that the besiegers became the besieged. The Athenian forces planned to march out of their camp on the night of August 27 to elude the Syracusans and get to safety. But a lunar eclipse occurred that night. The superstitious Nicias consulted his seers, who advised him to wait “thrice nine days.”[46] He would not hear of carrying out the retreat until the prescribed waiting period was over. When the army did attempt to escape, they were harried by the Syracusans until they were forced to surrender. The entire army and navy were lost. The commanders Nicias and Demosthenes were executed. Many prisoners perished in captivity in the quarries of Syracuse, while others were enslaved. The grand armada was no more.
The massive expedition, the brainchild of Alcibiades, had sent the best men and ships of Athens on a risky foreign adventure. Now Alcibiades had sabotaged it. The campaign had failed miserably and disastrously. Nicias, the great general, stricken by illness and forced to carry out a strategy he opposed, had lost the initiative. He was finally defeated by an eclipse. Thucydides the historian, who was aware of the new astronomy and its rational explanation of eclipses as cosmic conjunctions (see ch. 4*), observed that Nicias was “too addicted to divination and the like.”[47] If courage is knowledge of what is to be feared or trusted, as Socrates held, did Nicias fail for want of courage?
In the spring of 413, the Spartans took Alcibiades’ second piece of advice as well. When the Athenians raided Spartan territory in 414, the Spartans felt released from the Peace of Nicias. Scrupulous in their observance of oaths, they had not until then regarded Athenian provocations as strong enough grounds to abrogate their peace treaty with Athens. But now the Athenians had gone too far. In the spring of 413, consequently, the Spartans sent an army to invade Attica. This time they came to stay. They fortified Decelea as their base of operations in Attica, as Alcibiades had urged them, and cut off Athens permanently from her own territory. Athenian slaves flocked to Decelea to gain their freedom, fields went unplanted, livestock was lost, the silver mines of Laurion were cut off, transportation from the rich produce of Euboea was blocked.
Alcibiades had struck back.
[38].Plutarch Alcibiades 22.2.
[39].Thucydides 6.7-10; Plutarch Alcibiades 23.1 has Alcibiades go first to Argos.
[40].Thucydides 6.90-91.
[41].Thucydides 6.47.
[42].Plutarch Alcibiades 17.2-3; Thucydides take Alcibiades to be planning for international conquests: 6.15.2.
[43].Thucydides 93.2-3.
[44].Plutarch Alcibiades 23.3-4.
[45].Plutarch Alcibiades 23.7-8.
[46].Thucydides 7.50.4.
[47].Thucydides 7.50.4; on eclipses, 2.28, cf. 4.52.1.