Kagan - The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition

The Peace of Nicias and
the Sicilian Expedition

DONALD KAGAN

Cornell University Press

ITHACA AND LONDON

For my son Fred

Preface

This book is the third volume of a projected history of the Peloponnesian War, which I will complete with a fourth volume carrying the story down to the surrender of Athens in 404 B.C. The present book deals with the period from the Peace of Nicias in 421 to the destruction of the Athenian expedition against Sicily in 413. Although the period is generally divided into two parts, as it is in this book, I believe that it demonstrates a basic unity; its tale is of the failure of an unsatisfactory peace. The Sicilian expedition, though not the inevitable result of the inadequacies of the peace, arose from those shortcomings. I believe that the period is further unified by its central character, Nicias, whose policy dominated its first part, whose leadership dominated the second, and whose personality, talents, and flaws were so important for the shape and outcome of both. My purpose in this volume, as in the earlier ones, is to illuminate the course of events by examining the ancient accounts critically in order to reveal, especially, the close relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy.

For the reasons given in my preface to The Archidamian War, I have continued to follow Thucydides annalistic organization. I again treat later, non-Thucydidean sources such as Plutarch and Diodorus with respect if not, I hope, with gullibility. This practice has drawn some criticism, but my work persuades me more than ever that the ancients knew more about the fifth century than Thucydides chose, or was able, to tell us, and that careful use of other sources can increase our understanding.

I also continue to treat the speeches in Thucydides as honest attempts to produce some semblance of the arguments made in speeches that were actually given, whatever they may be in addition. I have lately tried to justify this practice in an article called The Speeches in Thucydides and the Mytilene Debate (Yale Classical Studies 24 [1975], 7194). Further arguments in defense of both practices are found at appropriate places in this volume.

Again I must acknowledge my obvious debt to the fundamental work of Georg Busolt. In this volume more than in the earlier ones I have benefited much from the perceptive and pioneering work of George Grote. There are many scholars of our own time to whom I owe important debts; among them I must give special mention to Antony Andrewes and K. J. Dover, whose work on the fourth volume of A. W. Gommes commentary on Thucydides is an indispensable aid to historians, and to Russell Meiggs and David Lewis for their edition of the Greek inscriptions.

I am grateful to Heinrich von Staden, Paul Rahe, Barry Strauss, and Alvin Bernstein for their criticism of parts or all of the manuscript. I am also indebted to the A. Whitney Griswold Fund of Yale University for defraying the cost of typing.

D ONALD K AGAN

New Haven, Connecticut

Contents

Maps

Abbreviations and Short Titles

Part One

The Unraveling of the Peace

In March of 421, after ten years of devastating, disruptive, and burdensome war, the Athenians and the Spartans made peace on behalf of themselves and those of their allies for whom they could speak. Weariness, the desire for peace, the desire of the Athenians to restore their financial resources, the Spartans wish to recover their men taken prisoner at Sphacteria in 425 and to restore order and security to the Peloponnesus, the removal by death in battle of the leading advocate of war in each cityall helped to produce a treaty that most Greeks hoped would bring a true end to the great war. In fact, the peace lasted no more than eight years, for in the spring of 413, Agis, son of Archidamus, led a Peloponnesian army into Attica, ravaged the land as his father had done eighteen years earlier, and took the further step of establishing a permanent fort at Decelea.