the Aegean first placed Athens at the head of the confederation formed
for the further prosecution of the war against Persia. But this titular
ascendency was soon converted by her into practical and arbitrary
dominion. She protected them from piracy and the Persian power, which
soon fell into decrepitude and decay, but she exacted in return implicit
obedience to herself. She claimed and enforced a prerogative of taxing
them at her discretion, and proudly refused to be accountable for her
mode of expending their supplies. Remonstrance against her assessments
was treated as factious disloyalty, and refusal to pay was promptly
punished as revolt. Permitting and encouraging her subject allies to
furnish all their contingents in money, instead of part consisting of
ships and men, the sovereign republic gained the double object of
training her own citizens by constant and well-paid service in her
fleets, and of seeing her confederates lose their skill and discipline
by inaction, and become more and more passive and powerless under her
yoke. Their towns were generally dismantled, while the imperial city
herself was fortified with the greatest care and sumptuousness; the
accumulated revenues from her tributaries serving to strengthen and
adorn to the utmost her havens, her docks, her arsenals, her theatres,
and her shrines, and to array her in that plenitude of architectural
magnificence the ruins of which still attest the intellectual grandeur
of the age and people which produced a Pericles to plan and a Phidias to
execute.
All republics that acquire supremacy over other nations rule them
selfishly and oppressively. There is no exception to this in either
ancient or modern times. Carthage, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Pisa,
Holland, and republican France, all tyrannized over every province and
subject state where they gained authority. But none of them openly
avowed their system of doing so upon principle with the candor which the
Athenian republicans displayed when any remonstrance was made against
the severe exactions which they imposed upon their vassal allies. They
avowed that their empire was a tyranny, and frankly stated that they
solely trusted to force and terror to uphold it. They appealed to what
they called "the eternal law of nature, that the weak should be coerced
by the strong." Sometimes they stated, and not without some truth, that
the unjust hatred of Sparta against themselves forced them to be unjust
to others in self-defence. To be safe, they must be powerful; and to be
powerful, they must plunder and coerce their neighbors. They never
dreamed of communicating any franchise, or share in office, to their
dependants, but jealously monopolized every post of command and all
political and judicial power; exposing themselves to every risk with
unflinching gallantry; embarking readily in every ambitious scheme; and
never suffering difficulty or disaster to shake their tenacity of
purpose: in the hope of acquiring unbounded empire for their country,
and the means of maintaining each of the thirty thousand citizens who
made up the sovereign republic, in exclusive devotion to military
occupations, and to those brilliant sciences and arts in which Athens
already had reached the meridian of intellectual splendor.
Her great political dramatist speaks of the Athenian empire as
comprehending a thousand states. The language of the stage must not be
taken too literally; but the number of the dependencies of Athens, at
the time when the Peloponnesian confederacy attacked her, was
undoubtedly very great. With a few trifling exceptions, all the islands
of the Aegean, and all the Greek cities which in that age fringed the
coasts of Asia Minor, the Hellespont, and Thrace, paid tribute to
Athens, and implicitly obeyed her orders. The Aegean Sea was an Attic
lake. Westward of Greece, her influence, though strong, was not equally
predominant. She had colonies and allies among the wealthy and populous
Greek settlements in Sicily and South Italy, but she had no organized
system of confederates in those regions; and her galleys brought her no
tribute from the Western seas. The extension of her empire over Sicily
was the favorite project of her ambitious orators and generals. While
her great statesman, Pericles, lived, his commanding genius kept his
countrymen under control, and forbade them to risk the fortunes of
Athens in distant enterprises, while they had unsubdued and powerful
enemies at their own doors. He taught Athens this maxim; but he also
taught her to know and to use her own strength; and when Pericles had
departed, the bold spirit which he had fostered overleaped the salutary
limits which he had prescribed.
When her bitter enemies, the Corinthians, succeeded, B.C. 431, in
inducing Sparta to attack her, and a confederacy was formed of
five-sixths of the continental Greeks, all animated by anxious jealousy
and bitter hatred of Athens; when armies far superior in numbers and
equipment to those which had marched against the Persians were poured
into the Athenian territory, and laid it waste to the city walls, the
general opinion was that Athens would be reduced, in two or three years
at the furthest, to submit to the requisitions of her invaders. But her
strong fortifications, by which she was girt and linked to her principal
haven, gave her, in those ages, almost all the advantages of an insular
position. Pericles had made her trust to her empire of the seas. Every
Athenian in those days was a practised seaman. A state, indeed, whose
members, of an age fit for service, at no time exceeded thirty thousand,
could only have acquired such a naval dominion as Athens once held by
devoting and zealously training all its sons to service in its fleets.
In order to man the numerous galleys which she sent out, she necessarily
employed large numbers of hired mariners and slaves at the oar; but the
staple of her crews was Athenian, and all posts of command were held by
native citizens. It was by reminding them of this, of their long
practice in seamanship, and the certain superiority which their
discipline gave them over the enemy's marine, that their great minister
mainly encouraged them to resist the combined power of Lacedaemon and
her allies. He taught them that Athens might thus reap the fruit of her
zealous devotion to maritime affairs ever since the invasion of the
Medes; "she had not, indeed, perfected herself; but the reward of her
superior training was the rule of the sea--a mighty dominion, for it
gave her the rule of much fair land beyond its waves, safe from the idle
ravages with which the Lacedaemonians might harass Attica, but never
could subdue Athens."
Athens accepted the war with which her enemies threatened her rather
than descend from her pride of place; and though the awful visitation of
the plague came upon her, and swept away more of her citizens than the
Dorian spear laid low, she held her own gallantly against her enemies.
If the Peloponnesian armies in irresistible strength wasted every spring
her corn-lands, her vineyards, and her olive groves with fire and sword,
she retaliated on their coasts with her fleets; which, if resisted, were
only resisted to display the preëminent skill and bravery of her seamen.
Some of her subject allies revolted, but the revolts were in general
sternly and promptly quelled. The genius of one enemy had indeed
inflicted blows on her power in Thrace which she was unable to remedy;
but he fell in battle in the tenth year of the war, and with the loss of
Brasidas the Lacedaemonians seemed to have lost all energy and judgment.
Both sides at length grew weary of the war, and in 421 a truce for fifty
years was concluded, which, though ill kept, and though many of the
confederates of Sparta refused to recognize it, and hostilities still
continued in many parts of Greece, protected the Athenian territory from
the ravages of enemies, and enabled Athens to accumulate large sums out
of the proceeds of her annual revenues. So also, as a few years passed
by, the havoc which the pestilence and the sword had made in her
population was repaired; and in 415 Athens was full of bold and restless
spirits, who longed for some field of distant enterprise wherein they
might signalize themselves and aggrandize the state, and who looked on
the alarm of Spartan hostility as a mere old-woman's tale. When Sparta
had wasted their territory she had done her worst; and the fact of its
always being in her power to do so seemed a strong reason for seeking to
increase the transmarine dominion of Athens.
The West was now the quarter toward which the thoughts of every aspiring
Athenian were directed. From the very beginning of the war Athens had
kept up an interest in Sicily, and her squadron had, from time to time,
appeared on its coasts and taken part in the dissensions in which the
Sicilian Greeks were universally engaged one against the other. There
were plausible grounds for a direct quarrel, and an open attack by the
Athenians upon Syracuse.
With the capture of Syracuse, all Sicily, it was hoped, would be
secured. Carthage and Italy were next to be attacked. With large levies
of Iberian mercenaries she then meant to overwhelm her Peloponnesian
enemies. The Persian monarchy lay in hopeless imbecility, inviting Greek
invasion; nor did the known world contain the power that seemed capable
of checking the growing might of Athens, if Syracuse once should be
hers.
The national historian of Rome has left us an episode of his great work,
a disquisition on the probable effects that would have followed if
Alexander the Great had invaded Italy. Posterity has generally regarded
that disquisition as proving Livy's patriotism more strongly than his
impartiality or acuteness. Yet, right or wrong, the speculations of the
Roman writer were directed to the consideration of a very remote
possibility. To whatever age Alexander's life might have been prolonged,
the East would have furnished full occupation for his martial ambition,
as well as for those schemes of commercial grandeur and imperial
amalgamation of nations in which the truly great qualities of his mind
loved to display themselves. With his death the dismemberment of his
empire among his generals was certain, even as the dismemberment of
Napoleon's empire among his marshals would certainly have ensued if he
had been cut off in the zenith of his power. Rome, also, was far weaker
when the Athenians were in Sicily than she was a century afterward in
Alexander's time. There can be little doubt but that Rome would have
been blotted out from the independent powers of the West, had she been
attacked at the end of the fifth century B.C. by an Athenian army,
largely aided by Spanish mercenaries, and flushed with triumphs over
Sicily and Africa, instead of the collision between her and Greece
having been deferred until the latter had sunk into decrepitude, and the
Roman Mars had grown into full vigor.
The armament which the Athenians equipped against Syracuse was in every
way worthy of the state which formed such projects of universal empire,
and it has been truly termed "the noblest that ever yet had been sent
forth by a free and civilized commonwealth." The fleet consisted of one
hundred and thirty-four war-galleys, with a multitude of storeships. A
powerful force of the best heavy-armed infantry that Athens and her
allies could furnish was sent on board it, together with a smaller
number of slingers and bowmen. The quality of the forces was even more
remarkable than the number. The zeal of individuals vied with that of
the republic in giving every galley the best possible crew and every
troop the most perfect accoutrements. And with private as well as public
wealth eagerly lavished on all that could give splendor as well as
efficiency to the expedition, the fated fleet began its voyage for the
Sicilian shores in the summer of 415.
The Syracusans themselves, at the time of the Peloponnesian war, were a
bold and turbulent democracy, tyrannizing over the weaker Greek cities
in Sicily, and trying to gain in that island the same arbitrary
supremacy which Athens maintained along the eastern coast of the
Mediterranean. In numbers and in spirit they were fully equal to the
Athenians, but far inferior to them in military and naval discipline.
When the probability of an Athenian invasion was first publicly
discussed at Syracuse, and efforts were made by some of the wiser
citizens to improve the state of the national defences and prepare for
the impending danger, the rumors of coming war and the proposal for
preparation were received by the mass of the Syracusans with scornful
incredulity. The speech of one of their popular orators is preserved to
us in Thucydides.
The Syracusan orator told his countrymen to dismiss with scorn the
visionary terrors which a set of designing men among themselves strove
to excite, in order to get power and influence thrown into their own
hands. He told them that Athens knew her own interest too well to think
of wantonly provoking their hostility: "Even if the enemies were to
come," said he, "so distant from their resources, and opposed to such a
power as ours, their destruction would be easy and inevitable. Their
ships will have enough to do to get to our island at all, and to carry
such stores of all sorts as will be needed. They cannot therefore carry,
besides, an army large enough to cope with such a population as ours.
They will have no fortified place from which to commence their
operations, but must rest them on no better base than a set of wretched
tents, and such means as the necessities of the moment will allow them.
But, in truth, I do not believe that they would even be able to effect a
disembarkation. Let us, therefore, set at naught these reports as
altogether of home manufacture; and be sure that if any enemy does come,
the state will know how to defend itself in a manner worthy of the
national honor."
Such assertions pleased the Syracusan assembly; but the invaders of
Syracuse came, made good their landing in Sicily; and if they had
promptly attacked the city itself, instead of wasting nearly a year in
desultory operations in other parts of Sicily, the Syracusans must have
paid the penalty of their self-sufficient carelessness in submission to
the Athenian yoke. But, of the three generals who led the Athenian
expedition, two only were men of ability, and one was most weak and
incompetent. Fortunately for Syracuse, Alcibiades, the most skilful of
the three, was soon deposed from his command by a factious and fanatic
vote of his fellow-countrymen, and the other competent one, Lamachus,
fell early in a skirmish; while, more fortunately still for her, the
feeble and vacillating Nicias remained unrecalled and unhurt, to assume
the undivided leadership of the Athenian army and fleet, and to mar, by
alternate over-caution and over-carelessness, every chance of success
which the early part of the operations offered. Still, even under him,
the Athenians nearly won the town. They defeated the raw levies of the
Syracusans, cooped them within the walls, and, as before mentioned,
almost effected a continuous fortification from bay to bay over
Epipolae, the completion of which would certainly have been followed by
a capitulation.
Alcibiades--the most complete example of genius without principle that
history produces; the Bolingbroke of antiquity, but with high military
talents superadded to diplomatic and oratorical powers--on being
summoned home from his command in Sicily to take his trial before the
Athenian tribunal, had escaped to Sparta, and had exerted himself there
with all the selfish rancor of a renegade to renew the war with Athens
and to send instant assistance to Syracuse.
When we read his words in the pages of Thucydides--who was himself an
exile from Athens at this period, and may probably have been at Sparta,
and heard Alcibiades speak--we are at a loss whether most to admire or
abhor his subtle counsels. After an artful exordium, in which he tried
to disarm the suspicions which he felt must be entertained of him, and
to point out to the Spartans how completely his interests and theirs
were identified, through hatred of the Athenian democracy, he thus
proceeded:
"Hear me, at any rate, on the matters which require your grave
attention, and which I, from the personal knowledge that I have of them,
can and ought to bring before you. We Athenians sailed to Sicily with
the design of subduing, first the Greek cities there, and next those in
Italy. Then we intended to make an attempt on the dominions of Carthage,
and on Carthage itself.[24] If all these projects succeeded--nor did we
limit ourselves to them in these quarters--we intended to increase our
fleet with the inexhaustible supplies of ship timber which Italy
affords, to put in requisition the whole military force of the conquered
Greek states, and also to hire large armies of the barbarians, of the
Iberians,[25] and others in those regions, who are allowed to make the
best possible soldiers. _Then_, when we had done all this, we intended
to assail Peloponnesus with our collected force. Our fleets would
blockade you by sea and desolate your coasts, our armies would be landed
at different points and assail your cities. Some of these we expected to
storm,[26] and others we meant to take by surrounding them with
fortified lines. We thought that it would thus be an easy matter
thoroughly to war you down; and then we should become the masters of the
whole Greek race. As for expense, we reckoned that each conquered state
would give us supplies of money and provisions sufficient to pay for its
own conquest, and furnish the means for the conquest of its neighbors."
[Footnote 24: Arnold, in his notes on this passage, well reminds the
reader that Agathocles, with a Greek force far inferior to that of the
Athenians at this period, did, some years afterward, very nearly conquer
Carthage.]
[Footnote 25: It will be remembered that Spanish infantry were the
staple of the Carthaginian armies. Doubtless Alcibiades and other
leading Athenians had made themselves acquainted with the Carthaginian
system of carrying on war, and meant to adopt it. With the marvellous
powers which Alcibiades possessed of ingratiating himself with men of
every class and every nation, and his high military genius, he would
have been as formidable a chief of an army of _condottieri_ as Hannibal
afterward was.]
[Footnote 26: Alcibiades here alluded to Sparta itself, which was
unfortified. His Spartan hearers must have glanced round them at these
words with mixed alarm and indignation.]
"Such are the designs of the present Athenian expedition to Sicily, and
you have heard them from the lips of the man who, of all men living, is
most accurately acquainted with them. The other Athenian generals, who
remain with the expedition, will endeavor to carry out these plans. And
be sure that without your speedy interference they will all be
accomplished. The Sicilian Greeks are deficient in military training;
but still, if they could at once be brought to combine in an organized
resistance to Athens, they might even now be saved. But as for the
Syracusans resisting Athens by themselves, they have already, with the
whole strength of their population, fought a battle and been beaten;
they cannot face the Athenians at sea; and it is quite impossible for
them to hold out against the force of their invaders. And if this city
falls into the hands of the Athenians, all Sicily is theirs, and
presently Italy also; and the danger, which I warned you of from that
quarter, will soon fall upon yourselves. You must, therefore, in Sicily,
fight for the safety of Peloponnesus. Send some galleys thither
instantly. Put men on board who can work their own way over, and who, as
soon as they land, can do duty as regular troops. But, above all, let
one of yourselves, let a man of Sparta, go over to take the chief
command, to bring into order and effective discipline the forces that
are in Syracuse, and urge those who at present hang back to come forward
and aid the Syracusans. The presence of a Spartan general at this crisis
will do more to save the city than a whole army."
The renegade then proceeded to urge on them the necessity of encouraging
their friends in Sicily, by showing that they themselves were in earnest
in hostility to Athens. He exhorted them not only to march their armies
into Attica again, but to take up a permanent fortified position in the
country; and he gave them in detail information of all that the
Athenians most dreaded, and how his country might receive the most
distressing and enduring injury at their hands.
The Spartans resolved to act on his advice, and appointed Gylippus to
the Sicilian command. Gylippus was a man who, to the national bravery
and military skill of a Spartan united political sagacity that was
worthy of his great fellow-countryman Brasidas; but his merits were
debased by mean and sordid vices; and his is one of the cases in which
history has been austerely just, and where little or no fame has been
accorded to the successful but venal soldier. But for the purpose for
which he was required in Sicily, an abler man could not have been found
in Lacedaemon. His country gave him neither men nor money, but she gave
him her authority; and the influence of her name and of his own talents
was speedily seen in the zeal with which the Corinthians and other
Peloponnesian Greeks began to equip a squadron to act under him for the
rescue of Sicily. As soon as four galleys were ready, he hurried over
with them to the southern coast of Italy, and there, though he received
such evil tidings of the state of Syracuse that he abandoned all hope of
saving that city, he determined to remain on the coast, and do what he
could in preserving the Italian cities from the Athenians.
So nearly, indeed, had Nicias completed his beleaguering lines, and so
utterly desperate had the state of Syracuse seemingly become, that an
assembly of the Syracusans was actually convened, and they were
discussing the terms on which they should offer to capitulate, when a
galley was seen dashing into the great harbor, and making her way toward
the town with all the speed which her rowers could supply. From her
shunning the part of the harbor where the Athenian fleet lay, and making
straight for the Syracusan side, it was clear that she was a friend; the
enemy's cruisers, careless through confidence of success, made no
attempt to cut her off; she touched the beach, and a Corinthian captain,
springing on shore from her, was eagerly conducted to the assembly of
the Syracusan people just in time to prevent the fatal vote being put
for a surrender.
Providentially for Syracuse, Gongylus, the commander of the galley, had
been prevented by an Athenian squadron from following Gylippus to South
Italy, and he had been obliged to push direct for Syracuse from Greece.
The sight of actual succor, and the promise of more, revived the
drooping spirits of the Syracusans. They felt that they were not left
desolate to perish, and the tidings that a Spartan was coming to command
them confirmed their resolution to continue their resistance. Gylippus
was already near the city. He had learned at Locri that the first report
which had reached him of the state of Syracuse was exaggerated, and that
there was unfinished space in the besiegers' lines through which it was
barely possible to introduce reënforcements into the town. Crossing the
Straits of Messina, which the culpable negligence of Nicias had left
unguarded, Gylippus landed on the northern coast of Sicily, and there
began to collect from the Greek cities an army, of which the regular
troops that he brought from Peloponnesus formed the nucleus. Such was
the influence of the name of Sparta, and such were his own abilities and
activity, that he succeeded in raising a force of about two thousand
fully armed infantry, with a larger number of irregular troops. Nicias,
as if infatuated, made no attempt to counteract his operation, nor, when
Gylippus marched his little army toward Syracuse, did the Athenian
commander endeavor to check him. The Syracusans marched out to meet him;
and while the Athenians were solely intent on completing their
fortifications on the southern side toward the harbor, Gylippus turned
their position by occupying the high ground in the extreme rear of
Epipolae. He then marched through the unfortified interval of Nicias'
lines into the besieged town, and joining his troops with the Syracusan
forces, after some engagements with varying success, gained the mastery
over Nicias, drove the Athenians from Epipolae, and hemmed them into a
disadvantageous position in the low grounds near the great harbor.
The attention of all Greece was now fixed on Syracuse, and every enemy
of Athens felt the importance of the opportunity now offered of checking
her ambition, and, perhaps, of striking a deadly blow at her power.
Larger reinforcements from Corinth, Thebes, and other cities now reached
the Syracusans, while the baffled and dispirited Athenian general
earnestly besought his countrymen to recall him, and represented the
further prosecution of the siege as hopeless.