of Meanwhile the war at home entered a new phase. The capture 120 full Spartiate warriors at Sphacteria in 425 gave Athens a chance to obtain a negotiated peace. Cleon rejected this opportunity, obviously hoping for unconditional surrender. After this Athens' position. deteriorated. The Spartan general Brasidas first occupied Megara, then made a lightning dash through Thessaly and Thrace to capture the Athenian port of Amphipolis - which gave access not only to valuable timber-supplies, but also to the gold-mines of Mount Pangaeus. In 424 the Athenians suffered a sharp defeat at Delium – almost the only true land-battle fought during the Archidamian War. However, in 422 both Cleon and Brasidas were killed during an unsuccessful attempt to recapture Amphipolis. With the two most hawkish leaders on each side thus removed, both Sparta and Athens set about working out terms for a final peace settlement. This was signed in spring 421, the chief negotiators being King Pleistoanax of Sparta and the pious Athenian mine-owner Nicias, by whose name the fifty-year treaty is still known. 182 Relief on Greek grave stone (? Attica, late fifth cen tury BC) commemorating the death of a soldier: the com batants may be an Athenian and a Spartan during the Peloponnesian War. Athens embarked on a campaign against the little island of Melos, which arguably owed her no allegiance at all. This is made by Thucydides the occasion for inserting in his History a dialogue between spokesmen for Melos and Athens, the latter expressing the might-isright physis ethic in its most naked form. No second thoughts this time; the genocide was duly carried out, and Alcibiades voted for it. Then, with dramatic aptness, the very instrument of fate, there reached Athens an embassy from a small, insignificant town in Sicily, Segesta, asking for help and alliance. The chain of circumstances which that embassy set in motion ran its course three years later, by a blood-sodden Sicilian river, with the destruction of the proudest expeditionary force ever to sail from Piraeus. Unconditional surrender By 416 Athens had largely recovered from the effects of plague, if not of war. Population, trade and actual wealth were booming: the number of slaves, too, had risen. On the other hand, since no sure source of grain or timber had been established within the empire, the economic situation as a whole still remained precarious. Thus the prospect of rich pickings in the west now looked vastly attractive. Sicily in particular had acquired quasi-mythical features for the average Athenian, who saw it as a kind of Cockaigne or Eldorado, where fabulous loot was not only to be had, but had for the asking. This scheme of profitable treasure-hunting was associated with the radical front, now split into two mutually hostile groups. One was led by Cleon's successors Hyperbolus, a lamp-maker, and Androcles: urban entrepreneurs or artisans who specialized in sharp litigation and populist demagoguery. The other was associated with smart young aristocrats such as Phaeax or Alcibiades, the 'New Progressives' attacked by Aristophanes in his earliest play, The Banqueters. If Alcibiades was, as Plutarch says, dreaming of vast western conquests, so, undoubtedly, were Hyperbolus and his business associates: the vast swarm of traders and speculators which accom panied Athens' expeditionary force to Sicily makes that clear enough. When Segesta's ambassadors gave Athens the diplomatic opening she needed to interfere in Sicily, Hyperbolus made up his mind to get rid of so dangerous a rival. He therefore proposed an ostracism (2415). Never did a political scheme backfire more disastrously. Deep called to gentlemanly deep: Alcibiades, Phaeax and Nicias reached a private agreement behind the scenes, and so organized matters that when the ostracism was held, all their followers voted against Hyperbolus himself, who was thus (in George Forrest's immortal phrase) hoist with his own potsherd. The affair made a nine days' joke in Athens, but afterwards people came to feel that the whole institution |