This communication, reaching the Syracusan generals at a moment when they were themselves elate and disposed to an aggressive movement, found such incautious credence, that they sent back the messenger to Katana with cordial assent and agreement for a precise day. Accordingly, a day or two before, the entire Syracusan force was marched out towards Katana, and encamped for the night on the river Symæthus, in the Leontine territory, within about eight miles of Katana. But Nikias, with whom the whole proceeding originated, choosing this same day to put on shipboard his army, together with his Sikel allies present, sailed by night southward along the coast, rounding the island of Ortygia, into the Great Harbor of Syracuse. Arrived thither by break of day, he disembarked his troops unopposed south of the mouth of the Anâpus, in the interior of the Great Harbor, near the hamlet which stretched towards the temple of Zeus Olympius. Having broken down the neighboring bridge, where the Helôrine road crossed the Anâpus, he took up a position protected by various embarrassing obstacles,—houses, walls, trees, and standing water, besides the steep ground of the Olympieion itself on his left wing; so that he could choose his own time for fighting, and was out of the attack of the Syracusan horse. For the protection of his ships on the shore, he provided a palisade work by cutting down the neighboring trees; and even took precautions for his rear by throwing up a hasty fence of wood and stones touching the shore at the inner bay called Daskon. He had full leisure for such defensive works, since the enemy within the walls made no attempt to disturb him, while the Syracusan horse only discovered his manœuvre on arriving before the lines at Katana; and though they lost no time in returning, the march back was a long one.[328] Such was the confidence of the Syracusans, however, that even after so long a march, they offered battle forthwith; but as Nikias did not quit his position, they retreated, to take up their night-station on the other side of the Helôrine road, probably a road bordered on each side by walls.
On the next morning, Nikias marched out of his position and formed his troops in order of battle, in two divisions, each eight deep. His front division was intended to attack; his rear division—in hollow square, with the baggage in the middle—was held in reserve near the camp, to lend aid where aid might be wanted; cavalry there was none. The Syracusan hoplites, seemingly far more numerous than his, presented the levy in mass of the city, without any selection; they were ranged in the deeper order of sixteen, alongside of their Selinuntine allies. On the right wing were posted their horsemen, the best part of their force, not less than twelve hundred in number; together with two hundred horsemen from Gela, twenty from Kamarina, about fifty bowmen, and a company of darters. The hoplites, though full of courage, had little training; and their array, never precisely kept, was on this occasion farther disturbed by the immediate vicinity of the city. Some had gone in to see their families; others, hurrying out to join, found the battle already begun, and took rank wherever they could.[329]
Thucydidês, in describing this battle, gives us, according to his practice, a statement of the motives and feelings which animated the combatants on both sides, and which furnished a theme for the brief harangue of Nikias. This appears surprising to one accustomed to modern warfare, where the soldier is under the influence simply of professional honor and disgrace, without any thought of the cause for which he is fighting. In ancient times, such a motive was only one among many others, which, according to the circumstances of the case, contributed to elevate or depress the soldier’s mind at the eve of action. Nikias adverted to the recognized military preëminence of chosen Argeians, Mantineians, and Athenians, as compared to the Syracusan levy in mass, who were full of belief in their own superiority,—this is a striking confession of the deplorable change which had been wrought by his own delay,—but who would come short in actual conflict, from want of discipline.[330] Moreover, he reminded them that they were far away from home, and that defeat would render them victims, one and all, of the Syracusan cavalry. He little thought, nor did his prophets forewarn him, that such a calamity, serious as it would have been, was even desirable for Athens, since it would have saved her from the far more overwhelming disasters which will be found to sadden the coming chapters of this history.
While the customary sacrifices were being performed, the slingers and bowmen on both sides became engaged in skirmishing. But presently the trumpets sounded, and Nikias ordered his first division of hoplites to charge at once rapidly, before the Syracusans expected it. Judging from his previous backwardness, they never imagined that he would be the first to give orders for charging; nor was it until they saw the Athenian line actually advancing towards them that they lifted their own arms from the ground and came forward to give the meeting. The shock was bravely encountered on both sides, and for some time the battle continued hand to hand with undecided result. There happened to supervene a violent storm of rain, with thunder and lightning, which alarmed the Syracusans, who construed it as an unfavorable augury, while to the more practised Athenian hoplites, it seemed a mere phenomenon of the season,[331] so that they still farther astonished the Syracusans by the unabated confidence with which they continued the fight. At length the Syracusan army was broken, dispersed, and fled; first, before the Argeians on the right, next, before the Athenians in the centre. The victors pursued as far as was safe and practicable, without disordering their ranks: for the Syracusan cavalry, which had not yet been engaged, checked all who pressed forward, and enabled their own infantry to retire in safety behind the Helôrine road.[332]
So little were the Syracusans dispirited with this defeat, that they did not retire within their city until they had sent an adequate detachment to guard the neighboring temple and sacred precinct of the Olympian Zeus, wherein there was much deposited wealth, which they feared that the Athenians might seize. Nikias, however, without approaching the sacred ground, contented himself with occupying the field of battle, burnt his own dead, and stripped the arms from the dead of the enemy. The Syracusans and their allies lost two hundred and fifty men, the Athenians fifty.[333]
On the morrow, having granted to the Syracusans their dead bodies for burial, and collected the ashes of his own dead, Nikias reëmbarked his troops, put to sea, and sailed back to his former station at Katana. He conceived it impossible, without cavalry and a farther stock of money, to maintain his position near Syracuse or to prosecute immediate operations of siege or blockade. And as the winter was now approaching, he determined to take up winter quarters at Katana; though considering the mild winter at Syracuse, and the danger of marsh fever near the Great Harbor in summer, the change of season might well be regarded as a questionable gain. But he proposed to employ the interval in sending to Athens for cavalry and money, as well as in procuring the like reinforcements from his Sicilian allies, whose numbers he calculated now on increasing by the accession of new cities after his recent victory, and to get together magazines of every kind for beginning the siege of Syracuse in the spring. Despatching a trireme to Athens with these requisitions, he sailed with his forces to Messênê, within which there was a favorable party who gave hopes of opening the gates to him. Such a correspondence had already been commenced before the departure of Alkibiadês: but it was the first act of revenge which the departing general took on his country, to betray the proceedings to the philo-Syracusan party in Messênê. Accordingly, these latter, watching their opportunity, rose in arms before the arrival of Nikias, put to death their chief antagonists, and held the town by force against the Athenians; who after a fruitless delay of thirteen days, with scanty supplies and under stormy weather, were forced to return to Naxos, where they established a palisaded camp and station, and went into winter quarters.[334]
The recent stratagem of Nikias, followed by the movement into the harbor of Syracuse, and the battle, had been ably planned and executed. It served to show the courage and discipline of the army, as well as to keep up the spirits of the soldiers themselves, and to obviate those feelings of disappointment which the previous inefficiency of the armament tended to arouse. But as to other results, the victory was barren; we may even say, positively mischievous, since it imparted a momentary stimulus which served as an excuse to Nikias for the three months of total inaction which followed, and since it neither weakened nor humiliated the Syracusans, but gave them a salutary lesson which they turned to account while Nikias was in his winter quarters. His apathy during these first eight months after the arrival of the expedition at Rhegium (from July 415 B.C. to March 414 B.C.), was the most deplorable of all calamities to his army, his country, and himself. Abundant proofs of this will be seen in the coming events: at present, we have only to turn back to his own predictions and recommendations. All the difficulties and dangers to be surmounted in Sicily had been foreseen by himself and impressed upon the Athenians: in the first instance, as grounds against undertaking the expedition; but the Athenians, though unfortunately not allowing them to avail in that capacity, fully admitted their reality, and authorized him to demand whatever force was necessary to overcome them.[335] He had thus been allowed to bring with him a force calculated upon his own ideas, together with supplies and implements for besieging; yet when arrived, he seems only anxious to avoid exposing that force in any serious enterprise, and to find an excuse for conducting it back to Athens. That Syracuse was the grand enemy, and that the capital point of the enterprise was the siege of that city, was a truth familiar to himself as well as every man at Athens:[336] upon the formidable cavalry of the Syracusans, Nikias had himself insisted, in the preliminary debates. Yet, after four months of mere trifling, and pretence of action so as to evade dealing with the real difficulty, the existence of this cavalry is made an excuse for a farther postponement of four months until reinforcements can be obtained from Athens. To all the intrinsic dangers of the case, predicted by Nikias himself with proper discernment, was thus superadded the aggravated danger of his own factitious delay; frittering away the first impression of his armament, giving the Syracusans leisure to enlarge their fortifications, and allowing the Peloponnesians time to interfere against Attica as well as to succor Sicily. It was the unhappy weakness of this commander to shrink from decisive resolutions of every kind, and at any rate to postpone them until the necessity became imminent: the consequence of which was,—to use an expression of the Corinthian envoy before the Peloponnesian war in censuring the dilatory policy of Sparta,—that never acting, yet always seeming about to act, he found his enemy in double force instead of single, at the moment of actual conflict.[337]
Great, indeed, must have been the disappointment of the Athenians, when, after having sent forth in the month of June, an expedition of unparalleled efficiency, they receive in the month of November a despatch to acquaint them that the general has accomplished little except one indecisive victory; and that he has not even attempted anything serious, nor can do so unless they send him farther cavalry and money. Yet the only answer which they made was, to grant and provide for this demand without any public expression of discontent or disappointment against him.[338] And this is the more to be noted, since the removal of Alkibiadês afforded an inviting and even valuable opportunity for proposing to send out a fresh colleague in his room. If there were no complaints raised against Nikias at Athens, so neither are we informed of any such, even among his own soldiers in Sicily, though their disappointment must have been yet greater than that of their countrymen at home, considering the expectations with which they had come out. We may remember that the delay of a few days at Eion, under perfectly justifiable circumstances, and while awaiting the arrival of reinforcements actually sent for, raised the loudest murmurs against Kleon in his expedition against Amphipolis, from the hoplites in his own army.[339] The contrast is instructive, and will appear yet more instructive as we advance forward.
Meanwhile the Syracusans were profiting by the lesson of their recent defeat. In the next public assembly which ensued, Hermokratês addressed them in the mingled tone of encouragement and admonition. He praised their bravery, while he deprecated their want of tactics and discipline. Considering the great superiority of the enemy in this last respect, he regarded the recent battle as giving good promise for the future; and he appealed with satisfaction to the precautions taken by Nikias in fortifying his camp, as well as to his speedy retreat after the battle. He pressed them to diminish the excessive number of fifteen generals, whom they had hitherto been accustomed to nominate to the command; to reduce the number to three, conferring upon them at the same time fuller powers than had been before enjoyed, and swearing a solemn oath to leave them unfettered in the exercise of such powers; lastly, to enjoin upon these generals the most strenuous efforts, during the coming winter, for training and arming the whole population. Accordingly Hermokratês himself, with Herakleidês and Sikanus, were named to the command. Ambassadors were sent both to Sparta and to Corinth, for the purpose of entreating assistance in Sicily, as well as of prevailing on the Peloponnesians to recommence a direct attack against Attica;[340] so as at least to prevent the Athenians from sending farther reinforcements to Nikias, and perhaps even to bring about the recall of his army.
But by far the most important measure which marked the nomination of the new generals, was, the enlargement of the line of fortifications at Syracuse. They constructed a new wall, inclosing an additional space and covering both their inner and their outer city to the westward, reaching from the outer sea to the Great Harbor, across the whole space fronting the rising slope of the hill of Epipolæ, and stretching far enough westward to inclose the sacred precinct of Apollo Temenites. This was intended as a precaution, in order that if Nikias, resuming operations in the spring, should beat them in the field and confine them to their walls, he might, nevertheless, be prevented from carrying a wall of circumvallation from sea to sea without covering a great additional extent of ground.[341] Besides this, the Syracusans fitted up and garrisoned the deserted town of Megara, on the coast to the north of Syracuse; they established a regular fortification and garrison in the Olympieion or temple of Zeus Olympius, which they had already garrisoned after the recent battle with Nikias; and they planted stakes in the sea to obstruct the convenient landing-places. All these precautions were useful to them; and we may even say that the new outlying fortification, inclosing the Temenites, proved their salvation in the coming siege, by so lengthening the circumvallation necessary for the Athenians to construct, that Gylippus had time to arrive before it was finished. But there was one farther precaution which the Syracusans omitted at this moment, when it was open to them without any hindrance, to occupy and fortify the Euryâlus, or the summit of the hill of Epipolæ. Had they done this now, probably the Athenians could never have made progress with their lines of circumvallation: but they did not think of it until too late, as we shall presently see.