History of The Peloponnesian War - Book VII   

liked with him, but to stop the slaughter of the soldiers. Gylippus,
after this, immediately gave orders to make prisoners; upon which
the rest were brought together alive, except a large number secreted
by the soldiery, and a party was sent in pursuit of the three
hundred who had got through the guard during the night, and who were
now taken with the rest. The number of the enemy collected as public
property was not considerable; but that secreted was very large, and
all Sicily was filled with them, no convention having been made in
their case as for those taken with Demosthenes. Besides this, a
large portion were killed outright, the carnage being very great,
and not exceeded by any in this Sicilian war. In the numerous other
encounters upon the march, not a few also had fallen. Nevertheless
many escaped, some at the moment, others served as slaves, and then
ran away subsequently. These found refuge at Catana.
The Syracusans and their allies now mustered and took up the
spoils and as many prisoners as they could, and went back to the city.
The rest of their Athenian and allied captives were deposited in the
quarries, this seeming the safest way of keeping them; but Nicias
and Demosthenes were butchered, against the will of Gylippus, who
thought that it would be the crown of his triumph if he could take the
enemy's generals to Lacedaemon. One of them, as it happened,
Demosthenes, was one of her greatest enemies, on account of the affair
of the island and of Pylos; while the other, Nicias, was for the
same reasons one of her greatest friends, owing to his exertions to
procure the release of the prisoners by persuading the Athenians to
make peace. For these reasons the Lacedaemonians felt kindly towards
him; and it was in this that Nicias himself mainly confided when he
surrendered to Gylippus. But some of the Syracusans who had been in
correspondence with him were afraid, it was said, of his being put
to the torture and troubling their success by his revelations; others,
especially the Corinthians, of his escaping, as he was wealthy, by
means of bribes, and living to do them further mischief; and these
persuaded the allies and put him to death. This or the like was the
cause of the death of a man who, of all the Hellenes in my time, least
deserved such a fate, seeing that the whole course of his life had
been regulated with strict attention to virtue.
The prisoners in the quarries were at first hardly treated by the
Syracusans. Crowded in a narrow hole, without any roof to cover
them, the heat of the sun and the stifling closeness of the air
tormented them during the day, and then the nights, which came on
autumnal and chilly, made them ill by the violence of the change;
besides, as they had to do everything in the same place for want of
room, and the bodies of those who died of their wounds or from the
variation in the temperature, or from similar causes, were left heaped
together one upon another, intolerable stenches arose; while hunger
and thirst never ceased to afflict them, each man during eight
months having only half a pint of water and a pint of corn given him
daily. In short, no single suffering to be apprehended by men thrust
into such a place was spared them. For some seventy days they thus
lived all together, after which all, except the Athenians and any
Siceliots or Italiots who had joined in the expedition, were sold. The
total number of prisoners taken it would be difficult to state
exactly, but it could not have been less than seven thousand.
This was the greatest Hellenic achievement of any in thig war, or,
in my opinion, in Hellenic history; at once most glorious to the
victors, and most calamitous to the conquered. They were beaten at all
points and altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were
destroyed, as the saying is, with a total destruction, their fleet,
their army, everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned
home. Such were the events in Sicily.