Thus under the appearance of a war among allies they carry out domestic motives, and, as though by agreement the contest had been transferred from Greece into Sicily, so on each side they fight with the utmost forces. And so the Athenians are defeated in the first encounter; they lose also their camp with all its money, whether public or private, and with the whole equipment of a long campaign; their resources broken and reduced to straits, Demosthenes advises that, while their affairs are not yet utterly lost, however afflicted they may seem, they should return home and depart from Sicily; but Nicias, made more despairing from the beginning by shame at affairs badly managed, contends to remain.
They renew the naval contest, and soon, through unskilfulness, being led into the narrows of the Syracusan sea, they are surrounded by the enemy's ambushes: Eurylochus the commander is first killed, eleven ships are burned. Demosthenes and Nicias dismiss the fleet, intending as it were to flee more safely by a land expedition. But Gylippus first attacks the hundred and thirty ships they had left behind, then, undertaking to pursue the fugitives themselves, captures and cuts down as many as he can. Demosthenes avoids the disgrace of slavery by a voluntary death; but Nicias heaps an unworthy and base life upon the dishonor of captivity. And so the Athenians, having struggled for two years in Sicily not without loss to the Lacedaemonians, are beset by other evils at home.
For Alcibiades, who had earlier been proclaimed commander against Syracuse, soon being detained for trial on a certain charge, betook himself into voluntary exile at Lacedaemon, and urged on the Spartans to press, with a fresh war once more, upon the troubled Athenians, and to grant them no breathing-space lest they be crushed. To which undertaking all Greece so gave assent, as though for the quenching of a common conflagration their forces were heaped together and consulted for the public good. Darius too, king of the Persians, mindful of his father's and grandfather's hatred against this city, through Tissaphernes the prefect of Lydia made a treaty with the Lacedaemonians and promised them the expenses of war and forces.
Wondrous to tell, that the resources of the Athenians at that time were so great that, although against them—that is, against a single city—an assault was made with the forces of Greece, Asia, and the whole East, by often fighting and never yielding they seemed to have been consumed rather than conquered. For in the beginning Alcibiades compelled all the allies to fall away from them to the Lacedaemonians; but, being assailed even by these through envy with treacherous designs, he fled away and withdrew to Tissaphernes in Media. To whom, by his readily accommodating disposition and the charm of fitting eloquence having quickly become more intimate, he persuades him not to aid the Lacedaemonians with such lavish resources; that he ought rather to become the arbiter and spectator of this contest, and that the unbroken forces of Lydia should be reserved against the victor.
Wherefore Tissaphernes orders a part of the fleet with a considerable band to be led down to Lacedaemon, lest, either abounding in supports, they should fight safely at another's peril, or, wholly destitute, should abandon the contest they had undertaken. But among the Athenians, when domestic discord had long been agitated, with peril impending the supreme command is transferred by the will of the people to the senate: for in leisure discords are nourished, but when necessity has pressed hard, private causes and hatreds being set aside, counsel is taken for the common good. But since this very thing was pernicious because of the innate arrogance of the nation and its tyrannical lusts, at last Alcibiades the exile is recalled from the army and appointed commander of the fleet. Which being learned, the leading men first attempted to betray the city to the Spartans;
then, when they had pondered this in vain, they went of their own accord into exile. And so Alcibiades, his fatherland set free, directs his fleet against the enemy. Battle being joined, the Athenians seize the victory. Moreover, the greater part of the Spartan army was cut down, the commanders too almost all killed, and eighty ships captured, apart from those which perished, burned and sunk, in the encounter. Again the war, transferred to land, turned out equally unhappily for the Spartans. Broken by these affairs, the Lacedaemonians sought peace, yet could not obtain it. Besides, the Syracusan garrisons were recalled into Sicily when the menace of the Carthaginian war was heard of.
Wherefore Alcibiades with his victorious fleet ranges over all Asia, by wars, fires, and slaughters he plunders and lays low everything; cities which had lately fallen away from the alliance he captures and recovers very many. Thus Alcibiades, become a man of great name, enters Athens as victor amid the admiration and joy of all. After a short interval he increases his forces, raises his army and fleet in number, and again seeks Asia. But the Lacedaemonians put Lysander in command of the fleet and the war. Cyrus too, brother of Darius, set over Ionia and Lydia in the place of Tissaphernes, strengthens them with great resources and auxiliaries.
And so Lysander overwhelms by a sudden onset the army of Alcibiades, intent on plunder and on this account everywhere scattered and roving, conquers it without any real contest, and cuts down the fleeing. This was a great disaster for the Athenians, and they suffered a wound much more atrocious than the one they had lately inflicted. Which being learned, the Athenians supposed that Alcibiades had taken care to avenge the old grief of his exile by that crime of betrayal, and therefore they appoint Conon in his place, to whom they entrust the remaining band and the supreme conduct of the war. He, wishing at least to fill up by number his exhausted forces, levied old men and boys and enrolled an army. But a band of this kind brought no delay to the war: since that is wont to be accomplished by strength, not by number.
And so at once the unwarlike band was either captured or cut down, and so great a slaughter of the slain was made in that battle that not only the kingdom but even the very name of the Athenians seemed wiped out. But they, in despair of their fortunes, resolved to give the city over to foreigners—so that those who a little before had held dominion over all Asia should now from this dregs guard at least their walls and liberty—and, although by their own judgment they were not sufficient even with walls set against the enemy for the defense of these things, nevertheless they prepare to try a naval battle once more. Fury devoid of counsel reckons grief to be valor, and as much as anger meditates, so much does audacity promise. And so, with all either captured or killed, of the very remnants too nothing was left remaining.
Conon alone, a leader who survived both the war and his own people, fearing the cruelty of his fellow citizens, withdrew to King Cyrus. Meanwhile Evagoras, the leader of the Lacedaemonians, having stripped away all their cities, left the Athenians nothing but their empty city; and not even that for long, for afterwards he encircled the city itself with a siege. Within, famine, desolation, and disease pressed upon the besieged; and when, after every abominable form of misery — things which it is a horror even to recount — no hope remained but death, they sued for peace. Then there was great deliberation among the Spartans and their allies:
Whereas very many declared that this most restless city ought to be razed to the ground and its most hostile people abolished together with its very name, the Spartans refused to permit that one of the two eyes of Greece should be plucked out; moreover they even promised peace, on condition that the fortifications of the Piraeus harbor leading into the city should be demolished and the remaining ships voluntarily surrendered, and then that the Athenians should accept thirty chosen rulers over themselves. When the Athenians had submitted and yielded to this condition, the Lacedaemonians appointed Lysander to draw up laws of obedience in the city. This year was notable both for the storming of Athens and for the death of Darius, king of the Persians, and for the exile of Dionysius, tyrant of Sicily. And so the thirty rulers set over the Athenians arose as the Thirty Tyrants:
At first they surrounded themselves with three thousand attendants, and soon also stationed seven hundred soldiers of the victorious army at their sides. They inaugurated a slaughter destined to fall upon all everywhere by killing Alcibiades, who, fleeing, was shut up in a chamber on his journey and burned alive. With him slain, as though their avenger had been removed, free from care they drained the wretched remnants of the city by murders and plunderings. Theramenes too, one of their own number, in whom they perceived that these deeds displeased him, they butchered as an example and a terror to the rest. And so all fled everywhere from the city; but, since by the prohibition of the Lacedaemonians hospitality was denied to the exiles throughout all Greece, they all betook themselves to Argos and Thebes:
There they were so warmly cherished by the kindness of hospitality that they not only soothed the grief of their lost homeland, but even began to contemplate the hope of recovering it. Among the exiles was Thrasybulus, a vigorous man and, by the nobility of his birth, distinguished among his own people: he became the author of daring on behalf of the fatherland. And so the gathered exiles seized the stronghold of Phyle on the borders of Attica, and, aided by the resources of many cities, took up arms; and to them Lysias also, the Syracusan orator, sent five hundred soldiers at his own expense, as though to the aid of the city which was the common fatherland of eloquence. That battle was fierce, but, with the one side fighting for the freedom of their fatherland and the other for an alien domination, the battle itself rendered judgment upon the very spirit and cause of each:
For the tyrants, being defeated, fled back into the city, and removed from the custody of the city all those whom they had previously chosen as their own attendants from among the Athenians, now suspected of treason. They even dared to attempt to corrupt Thrasybulus himself; but when this hope proved vain, they summoned reinforcements from Lacedaemon and rushed once more into war. There two of by far the most savage of all the tyrants were butchered. As for the rest, defeated and turned to flight, Thrasybulus, when he perceived that they were above all Athenians, pursued them with a shout, held them back with a speech, bound them with entreaties, setting before their eyes the men whom they wished to flee from or to whom they wished to flee for refuge — that war had been undertaken by him against the thirty masters, not against the wretched citizens.
Rather all who remembered that they were Athenians ought to follow the avengers of Athenian freedom. And so this exhortation prevailed so greatly with them that soon, returning into the state, they compelled the tyrants to withdraw from the citadel and to migrate to Eleusis. After these had received their own fellow citizens — until then exiles — into the fellowship of the city, the tyrants stirred them up to war through rivalry, men to whom the freedom of others seemed like their own servitude. Then, when war had been declared, since they first met as though for a conference, surrounded by an ambush they were slaughtered like victims of peace:
Thus recalled into unity, after unspeakable tears of great joys, they laid these first foundations of recovered liberty, having set forth a solemn binding of an oath, that past discords and animosities should be consigned to perpetual oblivion and immortal silence. This kind of compact, fashioning as it were a new manner of life and a new felicity for their condition, they called amnesty, that is, the abolition of evils. It was a most wise provision of the Athenians, especially after such great proofs of misery — if only in some way human affairs, with the consent of men remaining as they are ordained, might endure:
But this very resolution was so corrupted almost amid the very words of the resolution that, with scarcely two years intervening, that Socrates, most renowned of philosophers, driven by misfortunes, wrenched life from himself among them by poison; and then, with scarcely forty years intervening — to pass over other matters — these same Athenians, their liberty utterly taken from them, became slaves under Philip, king of the Macedonians. Nevertheless the Athenians, wisest of all, sufficiently taught even by their own misfortunes that by concord the smallest things grow and by discord the greatest fall, and that all things, whether good or even evil, which are carried on abroad are rooted in and issue from inner beginnings, wiped away hatreds at home and suppressed wars abroad, and left to their descendants an example of their own ruin and counsel for its repair:
if only, on account of the most feeble mutability of the human mind, what is counseled in afflicted circumstances were preserved in prosperous ones. About the same days a civil war — nay, even more than civil — scarcely terminated by parricide, was being waged among the Persians. For when King Darius had died, and his sons Artaxerxes and Cyrus contended over the kingdom, at last it was fought out on both sides with great preparations and with the ruin of provinces and peoples: in which conflict, when the two brothers, rushing against each other from opposite sides, had mutually exposed each other to chance, Artaxerxes, wounded first by his brother, escaped death by the swiftness of his horse. But Cyrus, soon overpowered by the royal cohort, put an end to the contest.
Artaxerxes therefore, having gained possession of both the spoils of his brother's expedition and his army, secured the power of the kingdom by parricide. Thus all Asia and Europe, partly each within itself, partly mutually with one another, were confounded with deaths and disgraces. Behold, on a tiny page and in very few words, how many deeds of action I have unfolded — concerning so many provinces, peoples, and cities — or rather how many tangled balls of miseries I have woven together. For who could unfold the catastrophe of that age, who could relate by speech the deaths, or match the sorrows with tears? Yet these very things, because through the great interval of ages they have faded, have become for us exercises of wit and entertainments of storytelling.
And yet, if anyone should apply his mind more intently and mingle himself with his whole affection of soul almost into the very causes and wars, and again, as though stationed in the lookout of a spectacle, should measure each age in its own qualities, I would readily say that he would judge that those events could not have been so unhappily disturbed and confounded except by a God angered and turned away, nor these present things so composed except by a God propitious and merciful. Then in these times Sicily, shaken by a most violent earthquake, and moreover laid waste by the boiling fires and hot ashes of Mount Etna, was ravaged with very great loss of fields and farmhouses. At that time too the city of Atalante, adjoining Locris and contiguous to the mainland, was torn off by a sudden rush of the sea and left desolate as an island.
A pestilence also crept upon the pitiable remnants of the Athenians and ravaged them for a long time. In the year 355 from the founding of the City, the siege of Veii, lasting ten continuous years, wore down the besiegers more than the besieged. For the Romans, often crippled by the sudden sallies of the enemy, were besides compelled to draw lots for wars in winter quarters, to winter under tents, and finally to endure hunger and cold in the sight of the enemy; at last they took the city with no testimony worthy of Roman valor, by tunnels and secret creeping. This victory, more useful than honorable, was followed first by the exile of the dictator Camillus, who had accomplished it against the Veientines, and then by the irruption of the Gauls and the burning of the City.
Let anyone dare, if he can, to compare any disturbances of this present time to that catastrophe — although the tale of a past evil does not weigh equally against the injury of a present one. Therefore the Senonian Gauls, under the leadership of Brennus, with an army exceedingly numerous and strong, while they were besieging the city of the Clusini (which is now called Tuscia), saw the envoys of the Romans — who had then come for the sake of arranging peace between the parties — fighting in the battle line against them: moved by indignation at this, the Gauls abandoned the siege of the town of Clusium and pressed on toward Rome with all their forces. The consul Fabius received them thus minded with an army; yet he did not withstand them — rather that hostile onslaught cut down, laid low, and passed through, like a dry cornfield. This disaster of Fabius the river Allia attests, just as the Cremera attests the disaster of the Fabii.
For one could not easily recount a similar ruin of the Roman soldiery, even if Rome had not also been burned besides. The Gauls penetrated the open city, butchered the senators, stiff in the manner of statues upon their seats, and buried them, consumed by the fire of their houses, beneath the collapse of their own roofs. The whole remaining youth, which it is agreed numbered then a thousand men, they shut up under siege as they lurked in the citadel of the Capitoline hill, and there ground down, subdued, and sold the unhappy remnants by famine, plague, despair, and dread: for they bargained a thousand pounds of gold as the price of departure — not because Rome was of small renown among the Gauls, but because they had already so worn it down beforehand that it could then prevail no further.
When the Gauls departed, there remained, within that former circuit of the City, an obscene heap of shapeless ruins; and on every side, through the obstructed paths of those wandering and unrecognized among their own dwellings, the echo of an offended voice answered back and kept the trembling hearers in suspense. Horror shook their minds, the very silences terrified them: since the cause of fear is the emptiness in spacious places. Hence it was deliberated, resolved, and attempted by them to change their seats, to inhabit another town, and even to be reckoned by another name. Behold the times, in comparison with which the present are weighed; behold those over which recollection sighs; behold those which inflict penitence concerning religion chosen — or rather neglected. Truly these two captivities are equal and are compared with one another: the one,
raging savagely for six months, this one passing over in three days; the Gauls, with the people extinguished and the City destroyed, pursuing even the very name of Rome in its last ashes, and the Goths, abandoning their intent of plundering, driving the unwitting throngs to the refuges of safety — that is, to the holy places; there scarcely any senator was found who escaped even by being absent, here scarcely any was sought who chanced to perish as one in hiding. I might rightly compare the number of those preserved there to be that of those destroyed here. Plainly, what is betrayed by the event must also be confessed: that in this present disaster God raged more, men less, since by Himself accomplishing what they had not fulfilled, He showed why He had sent them.
Indeed, since it was beyond human powers to set fire to bronze beams and to undermine the masses of great structures, the forum was cast down by a stroke of lightning, together with the empty images which, by a pitiable superstition, falsely represent either a god or a man: and of all these abominations, what the flame sent in through the enemy did not reach, the fire sent from heaven overthrew. And since the matter of speaking is abundant, which can by no means be enclosed within this book, let here be the end of the present volume, that in what follows we may pursue the rest. And in the previous book I have already testified, and now I necessarily repeat, according to your precept, concerning the conflicts of the bygone age:
that it is possible neither to unfold all things, nor through all their details, the things which were done and as they were done, since they are great and innumerable. They have been written most copiously and by very many authors; yet the writers, although they did not have the same aims, nevertheless had the same subjects set before them: inasmuch as they unfold wars, while we unfold the miseries of wars. Moreover, from this very abundance of which I complain, a narrowness arises for me, and a more knotted anxiety hems me in. For if, in pursuit of brevity, I omit some things, they will be thought either to have failed me now or not to have existed then in that time; but if, striving to indicate all things yet not to express them, I gird them up with compendious brevity, I shall make them obscure, and thus among most people they will be so spoken that they may not even seem to have been spoken:
especially since, on the contrary, we take care to commend the force of things, not their image; but brevity and obscurity — or rather, as brevity is always obscure — even though it presents an image of knowing, nevertheless takes away the vigor of understanding. But since I know that both are to be avoided, I shall act so that in some manner the one or the other may be tempered, if they seem neither too much passed over nor too much compressed.
In the year 364 from the founding of the City — a year which Rome perceived as most grievous on account of a captivity unknown to her, just as Greece held it magnificent on account of an unaccustomed peace — at that very time, when the Gauls held Rome captured and burned and sold it, Artaxerxes, king of the Persians, commanded all Greece through envoys to depart from arms and to be at rest in peace, declaring that any gainsayer of the peace would be assailed with war.
The Greeks could indeed have spurned him thus commanding as steadfastly as they had often bravely conquered, had they not as eagerly drunk in the opportunity, offered from every quarter, which they had so avidly desired — for they showed how reluctantly and wretchedly they had hitherto carried on those things which they so readily laid aside even on an unworthy condition: for what is so unworthy of free and brave men as, at the command of an enemy far removed, often conquered, and still threatening, to lay down their arms and serve peace? — if their intent for war, sick within the hearts of all, had not melted away at the very sound of the announced peace, and an unexpected repose had not relaxed them, yawning and stupefied after their long vigils of toil, before their settled will could compose that very repose.
But from where so great a weariness oppressed the hearts and bodies of all the peoples throughout the whole of Greece — a weariness which so easily persuaded those fierce spirits to acquiesce in an unfamiliar leisure — I shall show as briefly as possible. The Lacedaemonians, being men, and Greek men at that, desiring the more amply the more they had, after they had gained possession of the Athenians, drank in all Asia with the hope of domination. And so, threatening war upon the whole East, they chose Hercylides as leader for this campaign. When he saw that he must fight against the two most powerful prefects of Artaxerxes, king of the Persians — Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes — having provided a plan suited to the occasion, in order to elude the weight of a double encounter, he assailed one with declared war, and kept the other in suspense by a settled peace.
Pharnabazus denounced Tissaphernes before Artaxerxes, then the common king, as a traitor, especially as one who in time of war had made a compact with the enemy concerning the terms of a treaty; and he urged the king to appoint in his place Conon the Athenian — a man who then happened to be in exile in Cyprus — as leader for the naval war. Therefore, having received five hundred talents of silver, Conon was summoned through Pharnabazus and put in command of the fleet. When the Lacedaemonians learned this, they too sought auxiliaries for the naval war from Hercynion, king of Egypt, through envoys, from whom they received a hundred fully equipped triremes and six hundred thousand measures of grain; and from their allies on every side they gathered great reinforcements.
For this campaign, by the consent of all, they decreed Agesilaus as leader — a man lame of foot, but one who, in a most difficult state of affairs, preferred that their king should limp rather than their kingdom. Rarely ever did leaders so equal in every diligence come together into one war, who, wearied by most bitter battles against each other and besmeared with much blood, withdrew from one another as though unconquered. And so Conon, having again received pay in person from the Great King, returned to his fleet and invaded the hostile fields, stormed towers, forts, and the other garrisons, and, like a poured-out tempest, laid everything low wherever it fell. But the Lacedaemonians, beset by domestic evils, ceased to gape after foreign ones, and cast away the hope of domination as the peril of servitude loomed over them;
they recalled Agesilaus, whom they had sent with an army into Asia, to the aid of their homeland. Meanwhile Pisander, the leader left at Sparta by King Agesilaus, had equipped the largest and most heavily fortified fleet of that time, stirred by rivalry of the valor of Agesilaus, so that, while the other was conducting an expedition on foot, he too might range the sea-coast in a naval cruise. Conon, however, having undertaken the task, expended a twofold care, owing solicitude to his allies and faith to his fatherland, so as to display his nature to the one and to furnish his industry to the others: in this more inclined toward his fellow citizens, that he hazarded the peril of another's blood for their peace and freedom, and fought against most insolent enemies at the king's risk and for his fatherland's reward.
And so they joined a naval battle, the Persians under Conon's leadership, the Spartans under Pisander's; soldiers, rowers, and the commanders themselves alike were carried with one ardor into mutual slaughter. The magnitude and atrocity of this war is betrayed by the condition of the Lacedaemonians, ever from this point declining into the future: for from that time the hope of the Spartans seemed to flow away and to be carried backward, sliding down, until — barely rising and wretchedly sinking back — it was wholly spent and bereft both of power and of name. But for the Athenians this same battle was the beginning of recovering their power, just as for the Lacedaemonians it was the beginning of losing it.
Therefore the Thebans first, supported by the aid of the Athenians, attacked them, wounded and trembling from the earlier disaster, animated by much confidence on account of the valor and industry of their leader Epaminondas, with whom they thought they could easily obtain the empire of all Greece. And so a land battle took place, with the Thebans conquering with the slightest effort. For in this conflict too Lysander was defeated and slain; Pausanias also, the other leader of the Lacedaemonians, accused of treason, was consigned to exile;
the Thebans, however, having gained the victory, gathered the entire band of their army and pressed on toward Sparta, thinking they would enter with no trouble a city empty of defense, whose forces they had already destroyed almost entirely together with the king himself, and which they saw deserted by all its allies. The Lacedaemonians, driven by the peril of their city, by a levy of whatever untrained soldier they could muster, advanced to meet the enemy. But for men once conquered there was neither the valor nor the spirit to resist their conquerors. Therefore, when the slaughter of almost only one side was being carried on, suddenly King Agesilaus, summoned from Asia, came upon the war unexpectedly;
he attacked the Thebans, now more joyful and more sluggish from the success of a double victory, and overcame them without difficulty, especially since his forces were still kept almost intact. Yet Agesilaus himself was gravely wounded. But indeed the Athenians, when they had learned that the Lacedaemonians had been lifted up by an unhoped-for victory, alarmed by fear of their former servitude — from which they had then scarcely begun to breathe again — assembled an army and joined it as an aid to the Boeotians, entrusting it to the leader Iphicrates, who, though quite young, scarcely twenty years old, fortified the weakness of his age with the maturity of his mind. Conon also, an Athenian man indeed but leader of the Persian army, on hearing of Agesilaus's return, turned back to lay waste the fields of the Lacedaemonians.