ABSTRACT

A country that sustains a major defeat, especially if it had started from a position of seemingly unassailable strength, tends to ask “why?” and “who?” and “how?” Athens in 413 was such a nation. The Sicilian Expedition had ended in disaster: it drained the treasury, wrecked the fleet, tipped the balance of power in the Aegean far enough for Persia to enter the war on Sparta’s side and for many Athenian allies to revolt. Above all, the enormous loss of life might have seemed like a blood sacrifice of Athens’s young men. A reasonable estimate is that close to 10,000 if not more Athenian citizens, out of a total citizen population of some 30,000 to 40,000, died in Sicily. If Pericles could have said of the heavy casualties after the reduction of Samos in 439 that it was as if the spring had been taken out of the year, what mot could his successors have possibly found to do justice to the losses in Sicily?1