Accordingly, the question which we have to put is, not whether Thucydidês did all that could be done, after he received the alarming express at Thasos, which is the part of the case that he sets prominently before us, but whether he and Euklês jointly took the best general measures for the security of the Athenian empire in Thrace; especially for Amphipolis, the first jewel of her empire. They suffer Athens to be robbed of that jewel, and how? Had they a difficult position to defend? Were they overwhelmed by a superior force? Were they distracted by simultaneous revolts in different places, or assailed by enemies unknown or unforeseen? Not one of these grounds for acquittal can be pleaded. First, their position was of all others the most defensible: they had only to keep the bridge over the Strymon adequately watched and guarded, or to retain the Athenian squadron at Eion, and Amphipolis was safe. Either one or the other of these precautions would have sufficed; both together would have sufficed so amply, as probably to prevent the scheme of attack from being formed. Next, the force under Brasidas was in noway superior, not even adequate to the capture of the inferior place Eion, when properly guarded, much less to that of Amphipolis. Lastly, there were no simultaneous revolts to distract attention, nor unknown enemies to confound a well-laid scheme of defence. There was but one enemy, in one quarter, having one road by which to approach; an enemy of surpassing merit, indeed, and eminently dangerous to Athens, but without any chance of success except from the omissions of the Athenian officers.
Now Thucydidês and Euklês both knew that Brasidas had prevailed upon Akanthus and Stageirus to revolt, and that too in such a way as to extend his own personal influence materially: they knew that the population of Argilus was of Andrian origin,[670] like that of Akanthus and Stageirus, and therefore peculiarly likely to be tempted by the example of those two towns. Lastly, they knew, and Thucydidês himself tells us,[671] that this Argilian population—whose territory bordered on the Strymon and the western foot of the bridge, and who had many connections in Amphipolis—had been long disaffected to Athens, and especially to the Athenian possession of that city. Yet, having such foreknowledge, ample warning for the necessity of a vigilant defence, Thucydidês and Euklês withdraw, or omit, both the two precautions upon which the security of Amphipolis rested; precautions both of them obvious, either of them sufficient. The one leaves the bridge under a feeble guard,[672] and is caught so unprepared everywhere, that one might suppose Athens to be in profound peace; the other is found with his squadron, not at Eion, but at Thasos; an island out of all possible danger, either from Brasidas, who had no ships, or any other enemy. The arrival of Brasidas comes on both of them like a clap of thunder. Nothing more is required than this plain fact, under the circumstances, to prove their improvidence as commanders.
The presence of Thucydidês on the station of Thrace was important to Athens, partly because he possessed valuable family connections, mining property, and commanding influence among the continental population round Amphipolis.[673] This was one main reason why he was named; the Athenian people confiding partly in his private influence, over and above the public force under his command, and looking to him, even more than to his colleague Euklês, for the continued security of the town: instead of which they find that not even their own squadron under him is at hand near the vulnerable point, at the moment when the enemy comes. Of the two, perhaps, the conduct of Euklês admits of conceivable explanation more easily than that of Thucydidês. For it seems that Euklês had no paid force in Amphipolis; only the citizen hoplites, partly Athenian, partly of other lineage. Doubtless, these men found it irksome to keep guard through the winter on the Strymonian bridge: and Euklês might fancy that, by enforcing a large perpetual guard, he ran the risk of making Athens unpopular: moreover, strict constancy of watch, night after night, when no actual danger comes, with an unpaid citizen force, is not easy to maintain. This is an insufficient excuse, but it is better than anything which can be offered on behalf of Thucydidês; who had with him a paid Athenian force, and might just as well have kept it at Eion as at Thasos. We may be sure that the absence of Thucydidês with his fleet, at Thasos, was one essential condition in the plot laid by Brasidas with the Argilians.
To say, with Dr. Thirlwall, that “human prudence and activity could not have accomplished more than Thucydidês did, under the same circumstances,” is true as matter of fact, and creditable as far as it goes. But it is wholly inadmissible as a justification, and meets only one part of the case. An officer in command is responsible, not only for doing most “under the circumstances,” but also for the circumstances themselves, in so far as they are under his control; and nothing is more under his control than the position which he chooses to occupy. If the emperor Napoleon, or the duke of Wellington, had lost, by surprise of an enemy not very numerous, a post of supreme importance which they thought adequately protected, would they be satisfied to hear from a responsible officer in command: “Having no idea that the enemy would attempt any surprise, I thought that I might keep my force half a day’s journey off from the post exposed, at another post which it was physically impossible for the enemy to reach; but, the moment I was informed that the surprise had occurred, I hastened to the scene, did all that human prudence and activity could do to repel the enemy; and though I found that he had already mastered the capital post of all, yet I beat him back from a second post which he was on the point of mastering also?” Does any one imagine that these illustrious chiefs, smarting under the loss of an inestimable position which alters the whole prospects of a campaign, would be satisfied with such a report, and would dismiss the officer with praises for his vigor and bravery, “under the circumstances?” They would most assuredly reply, that he had done right in coming back, that his conduct after coming back had been that of a brave man, and that there was no impeachment on his courage. But they would at the same time add, that his want of judgment and foresight, in omitting to place the valuable position really exposed under sufficient guard beforehand, and leaving it thus open to the enemy, while he himself was absent in another place which was out of danger, and his easy faith that there would be no dangerous surprise, at a time when the character of the enemy’s officer, as well as the disaffection of the neighbors (Argilus), plainly indicated that there would be, if the least opening were afforded, that these were defects meriting serious reproof, and disqualifying him from any future command of trust and responsibility. Nor can we doubt that the whole feeling of the respective armies, who would have to pay with their best blood the unhappy miscalculation of this officer, would go along with such a sentence; without at all suspecting themselves to be guilty of injustice, or of “directing the irritation produced by the loss against an innocent object.”
The vehement leather-seller in the Pnyx, at Athens, when he brought forward what are called “his calumnies” against Thucydidês and Euklês, as having caused, through culpable omission, a fatal and irreparable loss to their country, might perhaps state his case with greater loudness and acrimony; but it may be doubted whether he would say anything more really galling than would be contained in the dignified rebuke of an esteemed modern general to a subordinate officer under similar circumstances. In my judgment, not only the accusation against these two officers—I assume Euklês to have been included—was called for on the fairest presumptive grounds, which would be sufficient as a justification of the leather-sell Kleon, but the positive verdict of guilty against them was fully merited. Whether the banishment inflicted was a greater penalty than the case warranted, I will not take upon me to pronounce. Every age has its own standard of feeling for measuring what is a proper intensity of punishment: penalties which our grandfathers thought right and meet, would in the present day appear intolerably rigorous. But when I consider the immense value of Amphipolis to Athens, combined with the conduct whereby it was lost, I cannot think that there was a single Athenian, or a single Greek, who would deem the penalty of banishment too severe.
It is painful to find such strong grounds of official censure against a man who, as an historian, has earned the lasting admiration of posterity,—my own, among the first and warmest. But in criticizing the conduct of Thucydidês the officer, we are bound in common justice to forget Thucydidês the historian. He was not known in the latter character, at the time when this sentence was passed: perhaps he never would have been so known, like the Neapolitan historian Colletta, if exile had not thrown him out of the active duties and hopes of a citizen. It may be doubted whether he ever went home from Eion to encounter the grief, wrath, and alarm, so strongly felt at Athens after the loss of Amphipolis. Condemned, either with or without appearance, he remained in banishment for twenty years;[674] nor did he return to Athens until after the conclusion of the Peloponnesian war. Of this long exile, much is said to have been spent on his property in Thrace: yet he also visited most parts of Greece, enemies of Athens as well as neutral states. However much we may deplore such a misfortune on his account, mankind in general have, and ever will have, the strongest reason to rejoice at it. To this compulsory leisure we owe the completion, or rather the near approach to completion, of his history: nor is it less certain that the opportunities which an exile enjoyed of personally consulting neutrals and enemies, contributed much to form that impartial, comprehensive, Pan-Hellenic spirit, which reigns generally throughout his immortal work.
Meanwhile, Brasidas, installed in Amphipolis about the beginning of December, 424 B.C., employed his increased power only the more vigorously against Athens. His first care was to reconstitute Amphipolis; a task wherein the Macedonian Perdikkas, whose intrigues had contributed to the capture, came and personally assisted. That city was going through a partial secession and renovation of inhabitants, and was now moreover cut off from the port of Eion and the mouth of the river, which remained in the hands of the Athenians. Many new arrangements must have been required, as well for its internal polity as for its external defence. Brasidas took measures for building ships of war, in the lake above the city, in order to force the lower part of the river:[675] but his most important step was to construct a palisade work,[676] connecting the walls of the city with the bridge. He thus made himself permanently master of the crossing of the Strymon, so as to shut the door by which he himself had entered, and at the same time to keep an easy communication with Argilus and the western bank of the Strymon. He also made some acquisitions on the eastern side of the river. Pittakus, prince of the neighboring Edonian-Thracian township of Myrkinus, had been recently assassinated by his wife Brauro, and by some personal enemies: he had probably been the ally of Athens, and his assassins now sought to strengthen themselves by courting the alliance of the new conqueror of Amphipolis. The Thasian continental colonies of Galêpsus and Œsymê also declared their adhesion to him.
While he sent to Lacedæmon, communicating his excellent position as well as his large hopes, he at the same time, without waiting for the answer, began acting for himself, with all the allies whom he could get together. He marched first against the peninsula called Aktê,—the narrow tongue of land which stretches out from the neighborhood of Akanthus to the mighty headland called Mount Athos,—near thirty miles long, and between four and five miles for the most part in breadth.[677] The long, rugged, woody ridge,—covering this peninsula so as to leave but narrow spaces for dwelling or cultivation, or feeding of cattle,—was at this time occupied by many distinct petty communities, some of them divided in race and language. Sanê, a colony from Andros, was situated in the interior gulf, called the Singitic gulf, between Athos and the Sithonian peninsula, near the Xerxeian canal: the rest of the Aktê was distributed among Bisaltians, Krestônians, and Edonians, all fractions of the Thracian name; Pelasgians, or Tyrrhenians, of the race which had once occupied Lemnos and Imbros, and some Chalkidians. Some of these little communities spoke habitually two languages. Thyssus, Kleône, Olophyxus, and others, all submitted on the arrival of Brasidas; but Sanê and Dion held out, nor could he bring them to terms even by ravaging their territory.
He next marched into the Sithonian peninsula, to attack Torônê, situated near the southern extremity of that peninsula, opposite to Cape Kanastræum, the extreme headland of the peninsula of Pallênê.[678]
Torônê was inhabited by a Chalkidic population, but had not partaken in the revolt of the neighboring Chalkidians against Athens. A small Athenian garrison had been sent there, probably since the recent dangers, and were now defending it, as well as repairing the town-wall in various parts where it had been so neglected as to crumble down. They occupied as a sort of distinct citadel the outlying cape called Lêkythus, joining by a narrow isthmus the hill on which the city stood, and forming a port wherein lay two Athenian triremes as guard-ships. A small party in Torônê, without privity[679] or even suspicion of the rest, entered into correspondence with Brasidas, and engaged to provide for him the means of entering and mastering the town. Accordingly, he advanced by a night-march to the temple of the Dioskuri, Kastor and Pollux, within about a quarter of a mile of the town-gates, which he reached a little before daybreak, sending forward one hundred peltasts to be still nearer, and to rush upon the gate at the instant when signal was made from within. His Torônæan partisans, some of whom were already concealed on the spot, awaiting his arrival, made their final arrangements with him, and then returned into the town, conducting with them seven determined men from his army, armed only with daggers, and having Lysistratus of Olynthus as their chief: twenty men had been originally named for this service, but the danger appeared so extreme, that only seven of them were bold enough to go. This forlorn hope, enabled to creep in, through a small aperture in the wall towards the sea, were conducted silently up to the topmost watch-tower on the city hill, where they surprised and slew the guards, and set open a neighboring postern gate, looking towards Cape Kanastræum, as well as the great gate leading towards the agora. They then brought in the peltasts from without, who, impatient with the delay, had gradually stolen closely under the walls: some of these peltasts kept possession of the great gate, others were led round to the postern at the top, while the fire-signal was forthwith lighted to invite Brasidas himself. He and his men hastened forward towards the city at their utmost speed and with loud shouts, a terror-striking notice of his presence to the unprepared citizens. Admission was easy through the open gates, but some also clambered up by means of beams or a sort of scaffolding, which was lying close to the wall as a help to the workmen repairing it. And while the assailants were thus active in every direction, Brasidas himself conducted a portion of them, to assure himself of the high and commanding parts of the city.