2 and 3
BAD OMEN
By Bill Fawcett
An unnecessary war.
It took two mistakes, both classical in all senses of the word, to bring down the world’s first democracy. There have been times when superstition in the form of omens and prophecies affected a battle, but there was one omen that lost Athens the entire Peloponnesian War. Athens had been winning a protracted war with Sparta and that city’s allies. It appeared to almost everyone that Sparta was about to lose and just one more push was needed. But military actions were expensive, particularly for Athens, which traditionally paid the rowers and other sailors. This meant they had the best and most enthusiastic crews, but this was costly. Then one of the city’s most ambitious and controversial figures, Alcibiades, began to push for Athens and its allies to invade Sicily and conquer Syracuse. The fabled treasury of Syracuse could then be used to finance the rest of the war.
No one, except the most conservative Athenians, cared that they were starting a second war with one of the other democratic cities on a distant island. They were defeating Sparta; how difficult could Syracuse be? Everyone expected to win quickly, long before a battered Sparta could react. Athens, as head of the Delian League, literally voted to open a second front against a powerful and rich enemy in the middle of war. This was so classic a mistake that, even then, there were already a thousand years full of examples of why it shouldn’t be done. Then, to make sure the mistake was really serious, it was decided to double the expedition to Sicily and so jeopardize a large part of their army and navy. A good decision if the numbers led to victory, but a risk that Athens simply did not have to take. Another world-changing military disaster that did not need to happen that can be attributed to the heady and blinding optimism of “victory disease.” No one considered what it meant if the invasion failed. So the first mistake was starting the war to begin with.
From the beginning things did not go well in Sicily. The reason for this was the choice of commanders. At first it looked like Athens was going to make the traditional mistake of splitting command. Both the impulsive Alcibiades and perhaps the most reverent and hesitant noble in the city, Nicias, were put in command of the invasion of Sicily. Likely the idea was for the two to balance out each other. What happened was that, due to a scandal involving the destruction of sacred statues of Hermes just before they left, Alcibiades was recalled shortly after arriving. Since it appeared that he was about to be railroaded on the charge, Alcibiades sailed not home, but to Sparta—and changed sides.
Alcibiades’ defection left Nicias in charge of the entire invasion. But this meant that it was to be run by a hesitant commander who had originally opposed it. In the first months, the Athenians missed two chances to easily conquer Syracuse. One where they had quick access to the unready city and then another when Syracuse’s army ventured off to a distant corner of Sicily and left the city virtually unprotected. But both times Nicias dithered, waiting or marching indirectly. Both opportunities for a quick victory were missed.
For the next two years neither of the two sides was able to strike a winning blow. Battles over walls that should have cut Syracuse off and fleet actions in their small harbor eventually tilted the victory against Athens. Nicias called for reinforcements and, just when Syracuse thought they were about to win, five thousand additional hoplites and sixty-five warships arrived, under the command of Demosthenes. The morale of the Athenians soared and that in Syracuse plummeted. Then Demosthenes, looking for a quick win, made a night attack on Syracuse’s allied city of Epipolae. At first things went well. Then the certain chaos caused by a night battle was increased by a counterattack that forced the Athenians to retreat in confusion. Athenian morale crashed and never recovered.
The fighting continued in bursts until it was finally decided, more than two years after landing and after another naval defeat, that the Athenian force needed to simply retreat back to Athens. There still remained forty thousand Athenian hoplites and sailors and enough ships for them, too, to leave. They were preparing to do this when there was an eclipse. Nicias, commanding with Demosthenes, announced that he needed to interpret the omen before they could leave. He retreated to his tent for twenty-seven days. By the time he emerged and announced they could finally retreat, it was too late. The situation was desperate. The army was almost out of food, had lost more ships, and was nearly surrounded. Finally, it managed to break out across Sicily in two columns. The one under Demosthenes was forced to surrender first; he tried to negotiate, but got only the assurance that his men would not be killed outright. At this point, only six thousand of his original twenty thousand still survived. Nicias was later surrounded by the entire might of Sicily and, after an intense battle, forced to surrender as well. He may have had fewer than five thousand of his original twenty thousand left. All the surviving Athenians were sold into slavery or worked to death in the local quarries. Demosthenes and Nicias were executed.
Making a military decision, or rather not making it, for twenty-seven days on the basis of one general’s reverence for, and fear of, an omen was the second mistake. Between the two mistakes, the Delian League and Athens turned near-certain victory into defeat. It took ten more years to lose. Athens held on and raised fleets whenever it could. But the Delian League had lost tens of thousands of soldiers, citizens, and sailors, and nearly its entire fleet in an unnecessary war. The city of Athens and its League were literally and monetarily spent. Eventually, the Spartan side, helped by the defections of Athens’ former allies, won the war and doomed the city. The Delian League was dissolved. Because of two mistakes—fighting a war on two fronts and allowing superstition to override military necessity—Athens was never again the center of Greece or its culture.
Your life would today be different had the Delian League prevailed, which it almost certainly would have if its ill-fated invasion of Syracuse had not happened. Greece might have united as a nation. Macedonia would not have been able to overwhelm a united Greece. Persia might well have hesitated to make its many invasions, or perhaps Alexander would have partnered with Greece to invade Persia and change the world. Or Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander might have been obscure footnotes in books about the Delian League’s defeat of Persia. Or there might be chapters about Persia defeating Greece. If Athens had been dominant for more centuries, then would democracy in some form have become the conventional form of government, not the exception, for the next twenty-five hundred years? That surely would have changed everything.