The Sicilian Expedition

In winter 415 BC, Athenian envoys from the city of Egesta arrive in Athens with sixty talents of silver and a story about the riches of western Sicily waiting to be tapped. The silver is real; the story is a stage set. Egesta has dressed up its public spaces with borrowed gold plate from neighboring cities and given the Athenian delegation a tour designed to create an impression of inexhaustible wealth. Athens dispatches commissioners to verify the claim. The commissioners return dazzled. The assembly votes to conquer Sicily.

Thucydides' account of the assembly debate that authorizes the expedition is one of his most controlled passages — controlled precisely because it is so devastating. Nicias, the general assigned to lead the force, stands up and argues against his own commission. His speech is a model of strategic analysis: he enumerates the actual strength of Syracuse, lists the Sicilian cities unlikely to defect to Athens, calculates the supply lines, and estimates the force required at a scale large enough that he hopes the assembly will balk. The assembly does not balk. It votes to give Nicias whatever he asks for.

Alcibiades then speaks. Where Nicias argued from probability and logistics, Alcibiades argues from character and momentum. Athens is made for expansion; idleness is more dangerous than activity; Sicily is there to be taken and a great city that does not grow will decay. He is brilliant and almost certainly right that Athens' empire requires perpetual activity to sustain the internal social bargain that funds it. He is catastrophically wrong about Sicily.

Lamachus, the third general, proposes the only actually sound strategy: sail immediately to Syracuse, attack before the city can organize its defense, and use shock to force a quick decision. Neither Nicias nor Alcibiades supports this. They arrive at a compromise — Nicias's force, Alcibiades' ambition, Lamachus's urgency abandoned — which is to say, no coherent strategy at all.

The expedition's political decapitation arrives before it reaches Sicily. Alcibiades is recalled to Athens to face charges of mutilating the Hermai — religious statues vandalized on the eve of departure in what reads like deliberate bad-omen theater by his enemies. Rather than return and face a hostile court, Alcibiades defects to Sparta and begins advising the Spartans on how to defeat the expedition he designed. Nicias, who did not want the command, is now the sole functioning general of an enterprise he argued was a catastrophe. Thucydides notes his temperament: cautious, religiously anxious, constitutionally incapable of the rapid decision the situation will repeatedly require.