History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides

Thucydides. The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Hobbes, Thomas. translator. London: John Bohn, 1843.

How many were taken in all it is hard to say exactly; but they were seven thousand at the fewest.

And this was the greatest action that happened in all this war, or at all, that we have heard of amongst the Grecians, being to the victors most glorious and most calamitous to the vanquished.

For being wholly overcome in every kind and receiving small loss in nothing, their army and fleet and all [that ever they had] perished (as they use to say) with an universal destruction. Few of many returned home. And thus passed the business concerning Sicily.

[*](THE PRINCIPAL CONTENTSThe revolt of the Athenian confederates and the offers made by Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus, the king's lieutenants of the lower Asia, draw the Lacedaemonians to the war in Ionia and Hellespont.First in Ionia, and the provinces of Tissaphernes, who, by the counsel of Alcibiades and connivance of Astyochus, hindereth their proceedings.Alcibiades in the meanwhile, to make way for his return into his country, giveth occasion of sedition about the government, whence ensued the authority of The Four Hundred, under the pretext of The Five Thousand; the recalling of Alcibiades by the army, and at length, by his countenance, the deposing again of The Four Hundred, and end of the sedition.But in the meantime they lose Euboea.Mindarus, the successor of Astyochus, finding himself abused by Tissaphernes, carrieth the war to Pharnabazus into Hellespont, and there presently loseth a battle to the Athenians before Abydos, being then summer and the twenty-first year of the war.)

When the news was told at Athens, they believed not a long time, though it were plainly related and by those very soldiers that escaped from the defeat itself that all was so utterly lost as it was. When they knew it, they were mightily offended with the orators that furthered the voyage, as if they themselves had never decreed it. They were angry also with those that gave out prophecies and with the soothsayers and with whosoever else had at first by any divination put them into hope that Sicily should be subdued.