History of the Peloponnesian War

For this reason, then, or for a reason very near to this, Nicias was put to death—a man who, of all the Hellenes of my time, least deserved to meet with such a calamity, because of his course of life that had been wholly regulated in accordance with virtue.

The prisoners in the stone-quarries were at first treated harshly by the Syracusans. Crowded as they were in large numbers in a deep and narrow place, at first the sun and the suffocating heat caused them distress, there being no roof; while the nights that followed were, on the contrary, autumnal and cold, so that the sudden change engendered illness.

Besides, they were so cramped for space that they had to do everything in the same place; moreover, the dead were heaped together upon one another, some having died from wounds or because of the change in temperature or like causes, so that there was a stench that was intolerable. At the same time they were oppressed by both hunger and thirst—the Syracusans having for eight months given them each only a half-pint of water and a pint of food a day[*](The scantiness of this allowance—only half the amount of food given to slaves—is best seen by a comparison with that which was allowed the Lacedaemonians taken on the island of Sphacteria, namely, “two quarts of barley-meal for each man and a pint of wine” (v. xvi. 1).); and of all the other ills which men thrown into such a place would be likely to suffer there was none that did not befall them.

Now for some seventy days they lived in this way all together; then all the rest, except the Athenians and any Siceliots and Italiots that had joined the expedition, were sold.