Script for War Room 26: The Sicilian Expedition, 415-413 BC (Patreon)

This script was actually a bit of pain- I kept getting bogged down in details, which makes life difficult when you're dealing with something almost 2500 years ago for which the details are naturally pretty skimpy. Anyway, it's a really interesting chunk of the ever-facinating Peloponnesian War.

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War Room XXVI- The Sicilian Expedition, 415-413 BC

Welcome back to the War Room, where we’re going to look at the classic overseas adventure gone wrong: the Athenian Expedition to Sicily during the Peloponnesian War. This was a major event in that conflict, very justifiably the turning point of the war that marked the beginning of the end for Imperial Athens and set the stage for ultimate Spartan victory in 404 BC.

The Peloponnesian War in 415 BC

In 415, though, Athens and Sparta were officially at peace. The first stage of the Peloponnesian War, known as the Archidamian War, was fought between 431 and 421 BC. The Athenian Empire and the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League essentially fought each other to a standstill.

Previous conflicts between Greek city states were stereotypically decided by hoplite battles that produced clear victors. Here, however, the two sides were not only large and resilient enough to sustain battlefield defeats and keep going, but dominant in opposing domains.

The Athenian Navy won repeated engagements against Peloponnesian League fleets and conducted a variety of successful amphibious operations to both maintain its Empire and bring the fight to Sparta. But they could not threaten the Spartan state itself in the centre of the Peloponnesus, nor effectively neutralise significant Spartan allies such as Thebes or Corinth.

At the same time, the Spartans found themselves frustrated on land. Almost every year, they gathered their allies and marched into Attica in order to provoke the Athenians into facing them in a pitched battle. And every time, the Athenians retreated into their city and refused to fight. Safe from direct assault behind their fortifications and linked by the Long Walls to the port of Piraeus, Athens was proof against both nascent Peloponnesian siege-craft and could be supplied indefinitely by sea.

With both sides essentially unable to get to grips with the other, the war expanded into secondary theatres as Sparta and Athens worked to attack the economic base of the other, attempting to neutralise or subvert allied and subject city states around the periphery of the Aegean and change the balance of the war.

This too was ultimately indecisive. The Athenians had an opportunity to end the war after their victory at Pylos in 425, but rejected Spartan peace feelers believing they now had the advantage. The next year, they tried to knock Thebes out of the war but instead suffered a major defeat at the Battle of Delium.

Eventually, after ten years of war both principal belligerents were exhausted and sought peace. The result was the Peace of Nicias, negotiated between the Athenian statesman Nicias and the Spartan King Pleistioanax.

This certainly stopped the fighting, but it failed to satisfy Sparta’s allies in the Peloponnesian League. As a result, various elements of the treaty went unfulfilled and the details quickly unravelled, particularly the stipulations for Spartan allies like Thebes to return land and prisoners, which were in turn mirrored by Athenian refusals. Peace between Athens and Sparta prevailed despite this, but a kind of Cold War descended on the Greek world.

The Athenians began flexing their naval muscle in the Aegean, shoring up their Empire and punishing island city states that had remained neutral or supported the Peloponnesians. Various parties in Athens also sought to precipitate war in the Peloponnesus by encouraging Argos to take on the Spartans.

Sparta and Argos were longtime rivals for control of the peninsula, but from the Athenian perspective a Spartan defeat would shatter the Peloponnesian League. This all came to a head in 418 at the Battle of Mantinea, where the Spartans smashed the Argives and drew a line under that threat for the time being. Notably, an Athenian contingent fought in the battle, and it’s plausible that the Athenians could have made a decisive difference if they had sent more troops, but there were still strong pro-peace factions in Athens that prevented a greater commitment and the Spartans were not willing to restart the war over their presence.

By 415 then, a kind of uneasy stalemate had settled over the Aegean world. Both the Athenian Empire and the various allies of the Peloponnesian League had unfinished business. The Athenians had conducted themselves with a degree of ruthlessness in their maritime sphere of influence that the Peloponnesians could only find threatening, while the Spartans had regained their status as Greece’s pre-eminent land power after embarrassing defeats in the Archidamian War, cementing their position as the head of the Peloponnesian League against looming competition from Thebes.

Sicily

Into this state of affairs came a delegation from the island of Sicily. Very broadly, Sicily at this time was in a similar situation to the American colonies in the early 1700s vis-a-vis Europe, if they were all ready to fight one another. The island had its own native population, the Sicles, but these had been mostly displaced by Greek colonists arriving from the east and the rising power of Carthage from the south-west.

The coast of the island was studded with small city states and benefitted from significant resources, particularly grain, while also dominating the straits of Messina and controlling access to other Greek colonies on the Western coast of Italy.

It was also relatively detached from the Aegean world of Athens and Sparta. It was physically distant. The Greeks were essentially restricted to coastal voyages which vastly increased the length of the journey- and increased the chances of vessels running into all kinds of trouble, especially in the winter.

So the Greek cities on Sicilians were by necessity independent. They inhabited their own world where they had to fend for themselves against the native Sicilians, the Carthaginians and- increasingly- each other. Syracuse, the most powerful of the Sicilian Greek cities, had grown to such a point by the beginning of the Peloponnesian War that it could feasibly dominate the other city states on the island.

As a result, several of the weaker states, principally Segesta and Leontini, had reached out to Athens for support. This offered the Athens the opportunity to extend their influence to the West and undermine potential support for Sparta. Most of the Sicilian cities were originally colonies of Sparta’s Peloponnesian allies- principally Corinth and Megara- and they shared the same Dorian cultural background. This meant that, in the eyes of the Athenians, the possibility existed for sympathetic Sicilian city states to provide support to the Peloponnesian League in the form of grain, ships and troops.

It shouldn’t be too surprising then that the Athenians sent a small fleet in the early stages of the war over to Sicily, where they worked with the more pro-Athenian states to offset the power of Syracuse and other more pro-Sparta cities.

This ultimately came to nothing. The Athenians had intended to reinforce their Sicilian operations with more ships, but these were delayed and then fully occupied by the battles of Pylos and Sphacteria in 425. By the time reinforcements arrived in Sicily the next year, the situation had changed.

The Sicilian cities had made peace amongst themselves and agreed to a kind of Monroe Doctrine under the slogan “Sicily for the Sicilians” whereby they would keep to themselves and reject outside interference. That meant that the Athenians had to return home, where the generals commanding the contingent were prosecuted for dereliction of duty. They had not carried out the orders assigned to them by the Athenian assembly, which did not much care that a change in circumstances had rendered them irrelevant.

By 415 though, tensions on the island were rising again. The cities of Segesta and Silinus went to war. After suffering a defeat and seeing Syracuse waiting in the wings to exploit their vulnerability, Segesta reached out to Athens for help, bringing with them representation from Leontini, which had been destroyed by Syracuse earlier.

The Debate

The Athenians agreed to send aid. They decided to send a fleet of 60 ships under the command of three generals: Alcibiades, a young, ambitious, pro-intervention aristocrat; Nicias, an elder statesman who had negotiated the end of the Archidamian War and had argued against intervention; and Lamachus, who was a professional soldier. They were to help the Segestans, help re-establish the city of Leontini and if things went well, take whatever actions they felt were necessary to further Athenian interests, which would essentially mean confronting Syracuse.

As Alcibiades pitched it, he would take 60 ships to Sicily, assemble an alliance against Syrcause and take that city, at which point the entire island would be simultaneously unable to support Sparta and open to Athenian control.

Overall, this was neither unreasonable, nor particularly unrealistic. It was pretty much exactly what the Athenians had intended to do in Sicily in the Archidamian War. 60 ships was a considerable deployment, but the Athenian navy maintained 200 ships on active duty plus another 100 in reserve, then there were contributions from subject states in the Empire, so it left plenty on hand to deal with any sudden crises at home.

Should Alcibiades’ plan fail, then Athens would have lost 60 ships. If he succeeded, he would deliver Syracuse and thus Sicily into the Athenian Empire at minimal cost, given that it would be locals doing the bulk of the fighting.

As the Athenian assembly began to debate the fine details, however, things rapidly began to go sideways.

Nicias tried to talk the assembly out of the whole thing. He was an extremely cautious leader, he gravitated to everything that could go wrong with the expedition and the difficulties it would present, but he framed his argument as a personal attack on Alcibiades. This was grist to the mill for Alcibiades, who was a much better political operator than Nicias and easily rebutted him, so Nicias changed tack and doubled down on the difficulties of the expedition and the strength of the opposition. In short, he argued that sixty ships was not enough and that they would have to send a much larger force, including a land contingent, thinking that this would cause the assembly to reconsider the entire expedition.

Instead, his effort backfired. The assembly agreed that they should sent a greater force and the size of the expedition ballooned to 134 ships and 5000 hoplites, plus supporting light infantry and archers.

Suddenly, the Sicilian Expedition had become a major commitment. But at the same time, the objectives didn’t change. Such a large force was overkill for the initial, concrete objectives of aiding Segesta and Leontini: instead, focus inevitably shifted to displacing Syracuse as the dominant power on Sicily. This was a very important shift for the three generals who lead the expedition because their degree of success would be judged by the Athenian assembly. If they failed to return with a victory commensurate with the new, much expanded force, then could face prosecution when they returned.

Arriving in Sicily

The expansion of expedition had major physical consequences too. First of all, despite arriving in Italy in good time without disaster the Athenians found themselves unwelcome. Alcibiades had originally intended to operate out of Rhegium, a pro-Athenian city on the Italian coast opposite Messina.

This was unlikely to be have been a problem for the purely naval original effort of 60 ships, but when an Athenian fleet of more than twice that size with an accompanying invasion force arrived at Rhegium, the city became understandably nervous of their intentions and refused them entry.

This immediately threw a lot of the expedition’s underlying assumptions into doubt. With such a large force, the Athenians appeared as a threat to the Sicilian cities they sought to bring over as local allies. Anyone who allowed them inside their walls might, as the people of Rhegium feared, find themselves forcibly becoming subjects of the Athenian Empire.

Worse, the Athenians now had significantly greater logistical demands. At the time, a Greek trireme was generally crewed by 200 men. With 60 ships in total, as originally planned the expedition would have a strength of about 12,000. There was no way for the fleet to support itself by bringing enough food for the men and materials to maintain the fleet for an extended period, so it would have to depend on the grace of local allies to supply or sell them most of what they required.

This would be a significant burden for any minor city state, but the expedition as it was actually despatched was significantly larger. 134 ships makes for almost 27,000 sailors, to which we can add the 5000 plus of the army. In other words, the Athenians would need to secure the aid of multiple Sicilian or Italian cities if they were going to operate on the island for any length of time… cities that saw their arrival as a greater threat than the Syracusans.

With the safe base of operations of Rhegium denied to them, and looming difficulties of supply, the three generals differed on how to proceed. Nicias, ever cautious and against the entire expedition, argued that they should sail round to Segesta and get them to supply the fleet on the basis that they had requested their aid, then force a conclusion to their conflict with Silinus and return home, serving greater Athenian interests by essentially conducting a gigantic show of force to the Sicilian cities.

Alcibiades insisted on continuing on with his plan to negotiate a pro-Athenian alliance on the island. He was a very effective orator and diplomat, he was used to getting results from complex negotiations, he had contacts all over the Greek world. This was his big chance to succeed in a foreign adventure and establish himself as first amongst equals in Athens. Given his successful diplomatic shenanigans before and after the Sicilian Expedition, he could well have pulled this off.

Lamachus, meanwhile, felt they should sail straight for Syracuse. His opinion was that they still had surprise on their side and that the combination of a rapid attack and the sheer size of the Athenian fleet would either precipitate a battle outside the walls that they could win, or intimidate Syracuse into surrender.

Ultimately, Lamachus dropped his own suggestion in order to support Alcibiades’ plan, but before that scheme could bear any fruit, a ship arrived from Athens to recall Alcibiades.

A secondary impact of the size of the Sicilian expedition was that it had altered the voting blocks back in Athens. Much of Alcibiades’ support came from the thetes, who rowed in the fleet: now that many of them were at sea on the expedition, his political opponents were able to push through a vote recalling him to face trial.

He was accused of two crimes: the mutilation of the Herms and profaning the Elusinian Mysteries. Without getting into the details of either those, as well as being a very capable political operator with a lot of enemies, Alcibiades also had a deserved reputation as a debauched hedonist and while it’s not clear if he was guilty in either case, his guilt was certainly plausible. Athenian trials were essentially popular votes and with Alcibiades’ political support away from the city, he would likely be convicted and, whether he was heavily fined, exiled or worse, his political career would be over and his ambitions denied.

Without any choice but to acquiesce, Alcibiades left the expedition, leaving Nicias and Lamachus in command. This immediately removed the main driving force behind the effort, it really was to a great extent Alcibiades’ show. Nicias and Lamachus were very specifically also assigned as generals to counter-balance his ambition and enthusiasm, Nicias because he was opposed to the entire affair and Lamachus to mediate between the two as a politically neutral military professional.

First Moves on Syracuse

The expedition spent the rest of the year aiding Segesta and attempting to overawe Sicilian cities into joining their cause to little success.

The expedition returned to the east coast in order to winter at the city of Catana. Here they were in much closer proximity to the Syracusans, who were now well aware of the Athenians and spoiling for a fight. Hoping to catch the Athenians unawares, they marched up to Catana, hoping to surprise them in the night courtesy of pro-Syracusan elements in the city.

This was actually an Athenian ruse though and they found the city empty and the expedition having sailed south past them in the night. The Athenians landed in the great harbour of Syrcause, set up a defensive position and waited for the Syracusan army to return and face them.

This very much seems to be a plan from Lamachus: Nicias was far too cautious to come up with and carry out something so aggressive. It may even be that Lamachus intended to attempt a sudden storm if the situation was favourable, but the Syracusans had had enough time since the arrival of the Athenians in Sicily to bring their walls into a state of repair, making that option extremely risky while their army was still in the fight.

Regardless, the Athenians still had an opportunity to destroy the Syracusans when they arrived to fight. They did manage to overwhelm them in the hoplite clash, the Syracusans breaking under pressure and fleeing for their city, but the Athenians were unable to effectively pursue thanks to the Syracusan cavalry.

As a result, the Syracusans were able to disengage intact. Not prepared to settle in for a siege at the start of winter, the Athenians got back on their ships and sailed back to Catana.

They came back in the spring and focused on investing the city. At the time, Syracuse was confined to a small peninsula. To the north, there was a small harbour accessible from the city itself, to the south was the much larger Great Harbour. North-west though, was the Epipolae- the high ground between Syracuse and the Sicilian interior.

The Athenians set up camp on the Epipolae, fortified their position, then set about building a wall across the peninsula to isolate the city. The Syracusans attempted to resist, first trying- and failing- to stand up to the Athenians in battle and then starting to build counter-walls to intercept the circumvallation.

This provoked skirmishes and some minor battles and, although the Athenians were successful in countering the Syracusan efforts, Lamachus was killed.

Under Siege

That left Nicias in command: the man who thought the entire expedition was a bad idea and would really rather just go home. Work continued on the wall, but progress was slower without the driving force of Lamachus behind it.

Alcibiades had, in the meantime, not returned to Athens as ordered. Understanding that it was political- and potentially literal- suicide to be go on trial before the assembly, he had jumped ship in Italy and from there made his way to Sparta.

There, he was able to position himself as an advisor to King Agis and amplify Spartan concerns about Athenian operations in Sicily and their longer term intentions. As a result, the Spartans reluctantly declared that the Athenians had broken the terms of the Peace and declared war.

The Syracusans had long being petitioning the Spartans for aid, so it wasn’t long before the attention of the Peloponnesian League turned to the isolated Athenian force on Sicily.

A small fleet was despatched from Corinth, which evaded the Athenian blockade and made it into Syracuse’s lesser harbour, and although the Spartans did not send an army, they sent an officer named Gylippus to advise the Syracusans.

Gylippus wasted no time whipping the Syracusan army into shape and, under his leadership, they army managed to finally compete a counter-wall, head off the Athenian circumvallation and establish positions on the northern side of the Epipolae to block future Athenian efforts and maintain an open land route in and out of the city. At the same time, the Corinthians started to help the Syracusans rebuild their fleet so they could challenge the Athenians at sea.

This was a severe reversal of fortune for the Athenians. On top of the fact that they could not complete their investment of Syracuse without both defeating the Syrcausans on the heights and penetrating the counterwall, this all played to Nicias’ misgivings and cut the army off from the fleet, which had established itself at Thapsos to the north.

In response, Nicias made two fateful decisions. He abandoned the fleet’s base at Thapsos and brought it round into the Great Harbour to co-locate with the army. Then, he sent a message to Athens.

Informing them of the situation, he pointed out the increasing difficulties of supply, the effects of marauding Syracusan cavalry, the impact of disease now that the fleet was encamped near marshy ground on the inside of the great harbour and his doubts as to the success of the operation, combined with his own degrading health.

At the same time, he understood that it would be political suicide to appear defeatist, so he advised the assembly to either recall him in favour of a more capable general or to send enough reinforcements to get the job done. Just like before the Expedition set sail, Nicias was banking on the Athenians baulking at the difficulty of the task presented to them. He almost certainly hoped that, given the resumption of the war against the Peloponnesian League, marauding Spartan armies once again ravaging Attica and the looming threat of rebellions across the Empire, the assembly would allow him to call off the siege and return home.

Instead, Nicias’ attempt to manipulate the assembly misfired again and they sent out another 70 ships and another 5000 hoplites under command of the veteran generals Demosthenes and Eurymedon.

The End

Demosthenes had a record of success in unconventional actions- most famously at Pylos and Sphacteria over a decade earlier- and on arriving and seeing the situation at Syracuse he immediately committed to an attack across the Epipolae to destroy the counterwall.

Nicias reluctantly agreed and the Athenians staged a night attack, hoping to catch the Syracusans off guard. This briefly succeeded in overcoming the counter-wall, but soon the dangers and frictions of fighting at night took over. Confusion descended on the Athenians, elements got lost and clashed with one another in the dark, some even fell from the cliffs of the Epipolae. The Syracusans counterattacked amidst the chaos, forcing Demosthenes to call off the attack and fall back.

Soon afterwards, the Athenian generals all agreed that the situation was untenable and that they should abandon the siege. That, however, meant getting the fleet out of the Great Harbour.

By now, the Syracusan fleet was in a position to contest any Athenian withdrawal and repeatedly entered the harbour to engage them. They were no match for the Athenians in open water, but their disadvantages in skill and experience were somewhat compensated for by the confines of the harbour, they had the advantage of much better port facilities on hand and better opportunities for cooperation with land forces.

The first battle in the harbour was inconclusive, but it provided cover for Gylippus to storm the Athenian fort of Plemmyrion on the southern side of the exit. With Syracuse itself dominating the northern side, the Athenians were trapped. The Syracusans quickly installed a boom of anchored ships across the mouth of the harbour, penning them in.

There were several more naval battles that saw the Athenians not only unable to force a way out, but slowly ground down to parity and then numerical disadvantage against the Syracusans.

Finally accepting that there was no naval exit, and running low on supplies, Nicias and Demosthenes reluctantly gave the order to burn the ships, then for the entire expedition to march into the Sicilian interior.

They were no doubt seeking to find a friendly city where they could hole up, reconstruct the fleet or await aid from Athens, but they had a long way to go and they were subjected to constant raids and ambushes by Syracusan cavalry and light infantry.

Demosthenes was separated from the main body with 6000 men and forced to surrender. Nicias was able to keep going a bit further until his force reached the river Assinarus and found the Syracusans waiting for them.

Here, the Athenian army disintegrated. Supplies of water had rapidly run out on the march and discipline collapsed as the soldiers and sailors surged into the river. Some of them were drowned or crushed in the press or even fought one another as they tried to get a drink, others were picked off by the skirmishers and archers on the far bank, more were rounded up by the Syracusan cavalry. Faced with massive casualties and no hope of escape, Nicias had no choice but to surrender.

Aftermath

The entire Expedition was lost. Nicias and Demosthenes were both executed, of the roughly 40,000 men who set out and arrived as reinforcements, only 7000 survived as prisoners of the Syracusans, who locked them up in a series of quarries where they starved to death or died of disease.

This was a significant blow to Athens. By some estimates, 40,000 men was the equivalent of the adult male population of the city at the start of the Peloponnesian War in 431. That was hardly the limit of Athenian manpower- they could call on men from the surrounding district of Attica, as well as from subject states in the empire, allies and mercenaries, but the loss was devastating.

Worse, many of these men were irreplaceable veterans with experience of the first stage of the war and Athens’ imperial conquests, more of them were skilled specialists. The Athenian Navy in particular, the cornerstone of Athenian power thanks to the skill, traditions and experience of its rowers and captains, was gutted. Before the Sicilian Expedition, Athens was unchallenged at sea. After the disaster, the Spartans and the Peloponnesians were able to go toe to toe with the Athenian Navy and- eventually- emerge victorious.

That’s not to say that Athens didn’t go down without a fight: their eventual defeat was still a decade away, but the disaster also had a clear psychological effect. The magnitude of the defeat was as much a blow to Athenian morale as it was a boost to their enemies. The possibility of victory over Athens and the collapse of the Athenian Empire became much more realistic, not only to the Peloponnesians, but in the eyes of the Persians, who finally decided to add their thumb to the scales and offer financial and material support to the Spartans.

Analysis

The disaster was not inevitable though. There are certainly question marks about the strategic sense in opening a hot new theatre in a Cold War and how much support Sparta was liable to receive from Sicily, but in its original conception, the expedition was limited in scale and scope.

Had it failed with 60 ships, it would have been a comparative footnote of the phoney-war manoeuvrings in the Peace of Nicias. Had it succeeded, it had the potential to be a coup that radically altered the strategic balance between the Athenian Empire and the Peloponnesian League. How much is hard to say: Syracuse certainly lent its support to Sparta in the years after the expedition, but while its contributions were important, they didn’t make a decisive impact and they were forced to withdraw from the Aegean when Carthage tried to take advantage of the situation back in Sicily.

At the same time, the size of the expedition had its advantages. Towards the end of the 415 the Athenians did manage to pull off a surprise attack in front of the walls of Syracuse and defeat the Syracusan army, sending them packing back inside the city.

Had they arrived earlier, if they had followed Lamachus’ advice and attacked immediately, then it’s entirely plausible- or even more likely- that they could have achieved the same battlefield result. But instead of being forced to immediately return to winter quarters, they could have begun to invest a Syracuse that was not prepared for a siege, if indeed they couldn’t storm it outright on the heels of their victory.

Defeat and the loss of the expedition were hardly pre-ordained. But they did become ever more likely with all the time that was wasted and all the opportunities that were missed. And worse, once the expedition had culminated- once it had done all it could do under Nicias after the Syracusan’s had completed their counterwall and prevented the investment- the Athenian assembly voted to double down instead of to pull out.

The strategic situation had changed, they were once again at war with the Spartans and the Peloponnesian League and that conflict was much closer to home- literally outside the walls of Athens itself- than a sideshow on the edge of the Greek world that could only offer an incremental advantage to either side. Even had the Athenians succeeded and conquered Syracuse, they would then be faced with a long term commitment to hold the city. Given the distance and the fact that winter weather would effectively isolate Sicily from Greece, even a substantial garrison could find itself in a very vulnerable position. There’s a good argument that, despite his rolling mishandling of the expedition, Nicias was right all along.

Endex

So, that was a very quick and broad overview of the Sicilian Expedition. It’s a staple military and foreign policy disaster. Again, as with a lot of the elements of the Peloponnesian War, it’s fascinating to see how modern it is. It’s easy to draw parallels with more contemporary operations.

Anyway, hope you all enjoyed this one. If you’d like to see these videos early and support the channel you can do so via Youtube and Patreon memberships. Whether you do or not, thanks for watching, and I’ll catch you in the next one.