So unaccountable did such obstinacy appear, that many persons gave Nikias credit for knowing more than he chose to reveal. Even Thucydidês thinks that he was misled by that party in Syracuse with whom he had always kept up a secret correspondence, seemingly apart from his colleagues, and who still urged him, by special messages, not to go away; assuring him that Syracuse could not possibly go on longer. Without fully trusting these intimations, he could not bring himself to act against them; and he therefore hung back from day to day, and refused to pronounce the decisive word.[460]
Nothing throughout the whole career of Nikias is so inexplicable as his guilty fatuity—for we can call it by no lighter name, seeing that it involved all the brave men around him in one common ruin with himself—at the present critical juncture. How can we suppose him to have really believed that the Syracusans, now in the flood-tide of success, and when Gylippus was gone forth to procure additional forces, would break down and be unable to carry on the war? Childish as such credulity seems, we are nevertheless compelled to admit it as real, to such an extent as to counterbalance all the pressing motives for departure, motives enforced by discerning colleagues as well as by the complaints of the army, and brought home to his own observation by the experience of the late naval defeat. At any rate, it served as an excuse for that fatal weakness of his character which made him incapable of taking resolutions founded on prospective calculations, and chained him to his actual position until he was driven to act by imminent necessity.
But we discern on the present occasion another motive, which counts for much in dictating his hesitation. The other generals think with satisfaction of going back to their country and rescuing the force which yet remained, even under circumstances of disappointment and failure. Not so Nikias: he knows too well the reception which he had deserved, and which might possibly be in store for him. Avowedly, indeed, he anticipates reproach from the Athenians against the generals, but only unmerited reproach, on the special ground of bringing away the army without orders from home; adding some harsh criticisms upon the injustice of the popular judgment and the perfidy of his own soldiers. But in the first place, we may remark, that Demosthenês and Eurymedon, though as much responsible as he was for this decision, had no such fear of popular injustice; or, if they had, saw clearly that the obligation of braving it was here imperative. And in the next place, no man ever had so little reason to complain of the popular judgment as Nikias. The mistakes of the people in regard to him had always been those of indulgence, over-esteem, and over-constancy. But Nikias foresaw too well that he would have more to answer for at Athens than the simple fact of sanctioning retreat under existing circumstances. He could not but remember the pride and sanguine hopes under which he had originally conducted the expedition out of Peiræus, contrasted with the miserable sequel and ignominious close, even if the account had been now closed, without worse. He could not but be conscious, more or less, how much of all this was owing to his own misjudgment; and under such impressions, the idea of meeting the free criticisms and scrutiny of his fellow-citizens—even putting aside the chance of judicial trial—must have been insupportably humiliating. To Nikias,—a perfectly brave man, and suffering withal under an incurable disease,—life at Athens had neither charm nor honor left. Hence, as much as from any other reason, he was induced to withhold the order for departure; clinging to the hope that some unforeseen boon of fortune might yet turn up, and yielding to the idlest delusions from correspondents in the interior of Syracuse.[461]
Nearly a month after the night-battle on Epipolæ,[462] Gylippus and Sikanus both returned to Syracuse. The latter had been unsuccessful at Agrigentum, where the philo-Syracusan party had been sent into banishment before his arrival; but Gylippus brought with him a considerable force of Sicilian Greeks, together with those Peloponnesian hoplites who had started from Cape Tænarus in the early spring, and who had made their way from Kyrênê first along the coast of Africa, and then across to Selinus. Such increase of strength immediately determined the Syracusans to resume the aggressive both by land and by sea. In the Athenians, as they saw the new allies marching in over Epipolæ, it produced a deeper despondency, combined with bitter regret that they had not adopted the proposition of departing immediately after the battle of Epipolæ, when Demosthenês first proposed it. The late interval of lingering hopeless inaction with continued sickness, had farther weakened their strength, and Demosthenês now again pressed the resolution for immediate departure. Whatever fancies Nikias may have indulged about Syracusan embarrassments, were dissipated by the arrival of Gylippus; nor did he venture to persist in his former peremptory opposition, though even now he seems to have assented against his own conviction.[463] He however insisted, with good reason, that no formal or public vote should be taken on the occasion, but that the order should be circulated through the camp, as privately as possible, to be ready for departure at a given signal. Intimation was sent to Katana that the armament was on the point of coming away, with orders to forward no farther supplies.[464]
This plan was proceeding successfully: the ships were made ready, much of the property of the army had already been conveyed aboard without awakening the suspicion of the enemy, the signal would have been hoisted on the ensuing morning, and within a few hours this fated armament would have found itself clear of the harbor, with comparatively small loss,[465] when the gods themselves—I speak in the language and feelings of the Athenian camp—interfered to forbid its departure. On the very night before, the 27th August, 413 B.C., which was full moon, the moon was eclipsed. Such a portent, impressive to the Athenians at all times, was doubly so under their present despondency, and many of them construed it as a divine prohibition against departure until a certain time should have elapsed, with expiatory ceremonies to take off the effect. They made known their wish for postponement to Nikias and his colleagues; but their interference was superfluous, for Nikias himself was more deeply affected than any one else. He consulted the prophets, who declared that the army ought not to decamp until thrice nine days, a full circle of the moon, should have passed over.[466] And Nikias took upon himself to announce, that until after the interval indicated by them, he would not permit even any discussion or proposition on the subject.
The decision of the prophets, which Nikias thus made his own, was a sentence of death to the Athenian army, yet it went along with the general feeling, and was obeyed without hesitation. Even Demosthenês, though if he had commanded alone, he might have tried to overrule it, found himself compelled to yield. Yet according to Philochorus, himself a professional diviner, skilful in construing the religious meaning of events, it was a decision decidedly wrong; that is, wrong according to the canonical principles of divination. To men planning escape, or any other operation requiring silence and secrecy, an eclipse of the moon, as hiding light and producing darkness, was, he affirmed, an encouraging sign, and ought to have made the Athenians even more willing and forward in quitting the harbor. We are told, too, that Nikias had recently lost by death Stilbidês, the ablest prophet in his service, and that he was thus forced to have recourse to prophets of inferior ability.[467] His piety left no means untried of appeasing the gods, by prayer, sacrifice, and expiatory ceremonies, continued until the necessity of actual conflict arrived.[468]
The impediment thus finally and irreparably intercepting the Athenian departure, was the direct, though unintended, consequence of the delay previously caused by Nikias. We cannot doubt, however, that, when the eclipse first happened, he regarded it as a sign confirmatory of the opinion which he had himself before delivered, and that he congratulated himself upon having so long resisted the proposition for going away. Let us add, that all those Athenians who were predisposed to look upon eclipses as signs from heaven of calamity about to come, would find themselves strengthened in that belief by the unparalleled woes even now impending over this unhappy army.
What interpretation the Syracusans, confident and victorious, put on the eclipse, we are not told. But they knew well how to interpret the fact, which speedily came to their knowledge, that the Athenians had fully resolved to make a furtive escape, and had only been prevented by the eclipse. Such a resolution, amounting to an unequivocal confession of helplessness, emboldened the Syracusans yet farther, to crush them as they were in the harbor, and never to permit them to occupy even any other post in Sicily. Accordingly, Gylippus caused his triremes to be manned and practised for several days: he then drew out his land-force, and made a demonstration of no great significance against the Athenian lines. On the morrow, he brought out all his forces, both land and naval; with the former of which he beset the Athenian lines, while the fleet, seventy-six triremes in number, was directed to sail up to the Athenian naval station. The Athenian fleet, eighty-six triremes strong, sailed out to meet it, and a close, general, and desperate action took place. The fortune of Athens had fled. The Syracusans first beat the centre division of the Athenians; next, the right division under Eurymedon, who in attempting an evolution to outflank the enemy’s left, forgot those narrow limits of the harbor which were at every turn the ruin of the Athenian mariner, neared the land too much, and was pinned up against it, in the recess of Daskon, by the vigorous attack of the Syracusans. He was here slain, and his division destroyed: successively, the entire Athenian fleet was beaten and driven ashore.
Few of the defeated ships could get into their own station. Most of them were forced ashore or grounded on points without those limits; upon which Gylippus marched down his land-force to the water’s edge, in order to prevent the retreat of the crews as well as to assist the Syracusan seamen in hauling off the ships as prizes. His march, however, was so hurried and disorderly, that the Tyrrhenian troops, on guard at the flank of the Athenian station, sallied out against them as they approached, beat the foremost of them, and drove them away from the shore into the marsh called Lysimeleia. More Syracusan troops came to their aid; but the Athenians also, anxious above all things for the protection of their ships, came forth in greater numbers; and a general battle ensued in which the latter were victorious. Though they did not inflict much loss upon the enemy, yet they saved most of their own triremes which had been driven ashore, together with the crews, and carried them into the naval station. Except for this success on land, the entire Athenian fleet would have been destroyed: as it was, the defeat was still complete, and eighteen triremes were lost, all their crews being slain. This was probably the division of Eurymedon, which having been driven ashore in the recess of Daskon, was too far off from the Athenian station to receive any land assistance. As the Athenians were hauling in their disabled triremes, the Syracusans made a last effort to destroy them by means of a fireship, for which the wind happened to be favorable. But the Athenians found means to prevent her approach, and to extinguish the flames.[469]
Here was a complete victory gained over Athens on her own element, gained with inferior numbers, gained even over the fresh and yet formidable fleet recently brought by Demosthenês. It told but too plainly on which side the superiority now lay, how well the Syracusans had organized their naval strength for the specialties of their own harbor, how ruinous had been the folly of Nikias in retaining his excellent seamen imprisoned within that petty and unwholesome lake, where land and water alike did the work of their enemies. It not only disheartened the Athenians, but belied all their past experience, and utterly confounded them. Sickness of the whole enterprise, and repentance for having undertaken it, now became uppermost in their minds: yet it is remarkable that we hear of no complaints against Nikias separately.[470] But repentance came too late. The Syracusans, fully alive to the importance of their victory, sailed round the harbor in triumph as again their own,[471] and already looked on the enemy within it as their prisoners. They determined to close up and guard the mouth of it, from Plemmyrium to Ortygia, so as to leave no farther liberty of exit.