Review of these preli minary pro ceedings to the Sicilian expedition. and to hire bowmen and slingers elsewhere. For three months the generals were busily engaged in this proceeding, while the city was in a state of alertness and bustle-fatally interrupted however by an incident which I shall recount in the next chapter. Considering the prodigious consequences which turned on the expedition of Athens against Sicily, it is worth while to bestow a few reflections on the preliminary proceedings of the Athenian people. Those who are accustomed to impute all the misfortunes of Athens to the hurry, passion, and ignorance of democracy, will not find the charge borne out by the facts which we have been just considering. The supplications of Egestæans and Leontines, forwarded to Athens about the spring or summer of 416 B.C., undergo careful and repeated discussion in the public assembly. They at first meet with considerable opposition, but the repeated debates gradually kindle both the sympathies and the ambition of the people. Still, however, no decisive step is taken without more ample and correct information from the spot, and special commissioners are sent to Egesta for the purpose. These men bring back a decisive report, triumphantly certifying all that the Egestæans had promised. We cannot at all wonder that the people never suspected the deep-laid fraud whereby their commissioners had been duped. Upon the result of that mission from Egesta, the two parties for and against the projected expedition had evidently joined issue; and when the commissioners returned, bearing testimony so decisive in favour of the former, the party thus strengthened thought itself warranted in calling for a decision immediately, after all the previous debates. Nevertheless, the measure still had to surmount the renewed and hearty opposition of Nikias, before it became finally ratified. It was this long and frequent debate, with opposition often repeated but always outreasoned, which working gradually deeper and deeper conviction in the minds of the people, brought them all into hearty unanimity to support it, and made them cling to it with that tenacity which the coming chapters will demonstrate. In so far as the expedition was an error, it certainly was not error arising either from hurry, or want of discussion, or want of inquiry. Never in Grecian history was any measure more carefully weighed beforehand, or more deliberately and unanimously resolved. influence of The position of Nikias in reference to the mea- Advice and sure is remarkable. As a dissuasive and warning Nikias. counsellor, he took a right view of it; but in that capacity he could not carry the people along with him. Yet such was their steady esteem for him personally, and their reluctance to proceed in the enterprise without him, that they eagerly embraced any conditions which he thought proper to impose. And the conditions which he named had the effect of exaggerating the enterprise into such gigantic magnitude as no one in Athens had ever contemplated; thus casting into it so prodigious a proportion of the blood of Athens, that its discomfiture would be equivalent to the ruin of the commonwealth. This was the first mischief occasioned by Nikias, when, after being forced to relinquish his Advice and influence of direct opposition, he resorted to the indirect manœuvre of demanding more than he thought the people would be willing to grant. It will be found only the first among a sad series of other mistakes -fatal to his country as well as to himself. Giving to Nikias, however, for the present, full Alkibiadês. credit for the wisdom of his dissuasive counsel and his scepticism about the reports from Egesta, we cannot but notice the opposite quality in Alkibiadês. His speech is not merely full of overweening insolence as a manifestation of individual character, but of rash and ruinous instigations in regard to the foreign policy of his country. The arguments whereby he enforces the expedition against Syracuse are indeed more mischievous in their tendency than the expedition itself, for the failure of which Alkibiadês is not to be held responsible. It might have succeeded in its special object, had it been properly conducted; but even if it had succeeded, the remark of Nikias is not the less just, that Athens was aiming at an unmeasured breadth of empire, which it would be altogether impossible for her to preserve. When we recollect the true political wisdom with which Periklês had advised his countrymen to maintain strenuously their existing empire, but by no means to grasp at any new acquisitions while they had powerful enemies in Peloponnesus-we shall appreciate by contrast the feverish system of never-ending aggression inculcated by Alkibiadês, and the destructive principles which he lays down that Athens must for ever be engaged in new conquests, on pain of forfeiting her existing empire and tearing herself to pieces by internal discord. Even granting the necessity for Athens to employ her military and naval force (as Nikias had truly observed), Amphipolis and the revolted subjects in Thrace were still unsubdued; and the first employment of Athenian force ought to be directed against them, instead of being wasted in distant hazards and treacherous novelties, creating for Athens a position in which she could never permanently maintain herself. The parallel which Alkibiadês draws, between the enterprising spirit whereby the Athenian empire had been first acquired, and the undefined speculations which he was himself recommending is altogether fallacious. The Athenian empire took its rise from Athenian enterprise, working in concert with a serious alarm and necessity on the part of all the Grecian cities in or round the Egean Sea. Athens rendered an essential service by keeping off the Persians, and preserving that sea in a better condition than it had ever been in before: her empire had begun by being a voluntary confederacy, and had only passed by degrees into constraint; while the local situation of all her subjects was sufficiently near to be within the reach of her controling navy. Her new career of aggression in Sicily was in all these respects different. Nor is it less surprising to find Alkibiadês asserting that the multiplication of subjects in that distant island, employing a large portion of the Athenian naval force to watch them, would impart new stability to the pre-existing Athenian empire. How strange also to read the terms in which he makes light of enemies both in Peloponnesus and in Sicily; the Sicilian war being a new enterprise hardly less in Athens believed her to be the islands as well as of the sea. magnitude and hazard than the Peloponnesian'!— to notice the honour which he claims to himself for his operations in Peloponnesus and the battle of Mantineia2, which had ended in complete failure, and in restoring Sparta to the maximum of her credit as it had stood before the events of Sphakteria! There is in fact no speech in Thucydidês so replete with rash, misguiding, and fallacious counsels, as this harangue of Alkibiadês. As a man of action, Alkibiadês was always brave, self entitled vigorous, and full of resource; as a politician and mistress of adviser, he was especially mischievous to his country, because he addressed himself exactly to their weak point, and exaggerated their sanguine and enterprising temper into a temerity which overlooked all permanent calculation. The Athenians had now contracted the belief that they, as lords of the sea, were entitled to dominion and receipt of tribute from all islands-a belief which they had not only acted upon, but openly professed, in their attack upon Mêlos during the preceding autumn. As Sicily was an island, it seemed to fall naturally under this category of subjects: for we ought not to wonder, amidst the inaccurate geographical data current in that day, that they were ignorant how much larger Sicily was3 than the largest island in the Egean. Yet they seem to have been aware that it was a prodigious conquest to struggle for; as we may judge from the fact, that the object was one 1 Thucyd. vi. 1. où πоλλ♣ тiи vπodeéσtepov ñóλeμov, &c.: compare vii. 28. 2 Compare Plutarch, Præcept. Reipubl. Gerend. p. 804. |