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Today, I am delighted to welcome two guests who are going to be discussing with this interpretation.

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Question three The reasons for the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War.

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So let's meet them. We have from Cardiff University Dr. Maria Fragoulaki, who is the senior lecturer in ancient Greek history,

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and from Cambridge University Professor Paul Cartledge, who is the Emeritus A G Leventis Professor of Greek culture.

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So let's think about this interpretation.

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QUESTION And the key point perhaps to make is we're looking for the reasons for the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War.

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So there's not just going to be one reason I suspect we're looking at a range of the.

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Okay. Well, let's think, first of all, about the sources for this period.

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So, Maria, if I can turn to you, first of all, what are we relying on and what problems do we encounter?

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Well, for most of the Peloponnesian War, our main source is Thucydides' history.

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But this text breaks off at 411. And then Xenophon, another Athenian historian, takes over in his Ηελεννιka in the first part of the Hellenica

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deals with the end of the war from 411 to fall for the final demise of Athens.

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In general, the situation becomes a bit messier after 411 also because you see this is a very dominant voice and after 411 we have Xenophon,

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we have the later Diodorus in the Augustan period.

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We have Plutarch in the Roman period and his Lives, which are very valuable, but also in the earlier sources covering Thucydides' period as well.

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We have, for example, Aristotle's Athenian Constitution, which is so valuable for the events around the 411, 410, 400,

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the Oligarchy Coup and the Constitution of the 5000 which followed, and then for Persians, personalities such as Cyrus.

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We have Ctesias a different sort of author.

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A physician in the Court of Xerxes the second who has a different portrait to sketch for for Cyrus Xenophon and his expedition.

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So we have multiple sources on this. And perhaps one last point has to be made about comedy.

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It is drama, it is fiction, but it is so valuable in relation to some personalities, such as the the warmonger, the cleon.

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He has some valuable insights to offer us, especially in relation to initiatives for peace.

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Thank you, Maria. That's very helpful indeed. Well, Paul, if I can come across and welcome you and just one other specific point about these sources.

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Is it worth remembering that Thucydides himself, although his narrative cuts off in 411, he survived the war.

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So he's writing his history and intending to account for the whole war.

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But he knows how it ends. And so we have to consider that in terms of how he frames his history completely.

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Right, James

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The composition question, as it's called, has sometimes dominated interpretation of Thucydides precisely because of this seeming contradiction.

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On the one hand, he writes it up seemingly as the war is unfolding, he tells us that he was of an age,

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to understand things when the war broke out 432-1, and that you get the feeling that he's kind of an embedded reporter.

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But when suddenly he interjects, as we're going to come on to later,

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an obituary notice of one of the leading actors in the war, which actually refers to the end of the whole war.

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And perhaps we should say there's a little bit of an issue. Is it one war or is it two wars?

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At any rate, it's a great long series of fighting interrupted quite substantially, extending over 27 years.

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So on the one hand, he is seemingly he wants us to think that he's, as it were, a journalist on the field and he's reporting back.

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He's feeling cocky. On the other hand, he's reflecting on the war and its ultimate meaning.

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I mean, he's sometimes thought to be more of a political philosopher than he is what you and I would call a historian or,

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if you like, an embedded journalistic historian.

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So he's a deeply complex figure, and one has to be careful because he wasn't Athenian, a brilliant intellectual Athenian.

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But should we be so reliant, as we say? Thirdly, in a way, on just this one dominance, as Maria puts it, figure.

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Thank you. That's excellent. Well, I think that leads us very nicely to our chronological survey.

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And let's come back to the year 432, just before the war is going to break out.

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And we have these series of meetings and speeches going on in Sparta and the Spartan King Archedamus

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is very sceptical about going to war and he seems to say that we need three things to be in place for the war to be won,

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the Athenian allies need to be in revolt.

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The Spartans need to have funds and with those funds they need to be able to build a navy to match the Athenians.

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So do we think that Archedamus may have actually said something like that?

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And as a second part to that question, Paul,

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could you tell us a little bit about what Spartan-Persian relations had been like for the previous decades?

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Let me start with the first point about the nature of Thucydides' History, which is a combination of speech and narrative.

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And Thucydides is very self-conscious, which is partly because I think of the time in which he lived at a time of great questioning in Athens in particular,

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but also because he is writing very consciously in succession to a really great historian, Herodotus, the father of history, as it's called.

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And Thucydides narrative picks up just about exactly where Herodotus' narrative ends in 479 or so.

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So Thucydides certainly is conscious that of the speech is the evidence for those ones that he himself could not possibly have heard.

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There is no, as it were, archive. There's no recording.

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But he can go and check what Archedamus actually said to the Spartans.

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So what he does is he writes what he thinks Archedamus ought to have said, given the circumstances in which he were speaking.

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Now, Archedmaus had been king for a very long time, so very experienced.

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It played a key role as one crucial moment in earlier Spartan history,

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when the great revolt of the subject population, the Helots, had actually endangered the whole Spartan state.

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This is back in the 460s. Archedamus was the key figure in putting that revolt down.

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His memory, therefore, stretches back to not long after the previous great conflict, the great war involving lots and lots of Greeks.

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In this case, it was when the Persians invaded Greece under Xerxes and fought him.

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The Spartans led the resistance on the Greek side, together with the Athenians, and so therefore Sparta, Persia, hostile from the word go.

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But this is spoiler alert in the Peloponnesian War.

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Those relations are going to be significant in reverse.

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So one of the causes I'm anticipating here, one of the causes why the Athenians lost, involves the Persians and the Spartans combining against them.

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How could Thucydides possibly know what Arcehdamus wanted to say?

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Well, he would have known a little bit because of what Archedamus then did after the war was declared.

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Archedamas, being the senior Spartans of the two Kings, was bound to lead the spartan army plus allies of the Army, as indeed he did.

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So we're in the spring, summer, four, three one, the year after the speech that we talking about was notionally delivered.

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Archedamus was very hesitant. He didn't sort of rush to the walls of Athens, but dilly dallied to such an extent that his people,

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people on his side thought he was less than totally committed to actually attacking Athens and bringing it to its knees.

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The Spartans generally, it seems being of the view that that was the way to bring the Athenians to their knees.

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You attack them in the traditional way, you threaten their crops.

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Athenians are going to be starving and then they're going to have to sue for peace.

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Well Archedmaus was, as Thucydides says, had a broader vision of the war,

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and as James, you correctly said, in a way Thucydides uses as a warning figure,

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so the reader Thucydides who of course lived through the war, remember, Thucydides is writing the whole thing after the war has ended.

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You know, he's writing at least some of it after the whole war has ended.

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They therefore know how the war actually evolved.

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And so I think, you know, it does seem to be used by Thucydides as a sort of predictor, if I can put it that way.

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Thank you. And then just on the issue of whether there have been longer term relations between the Spartans and the Persians,

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so far as we know, no direct contact.

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There is a talk in the middle of the fifth century when the Spartans were involved in what's called sometimes the first Peloponnesian War,

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a series of conflicts and encounters between Athens and Sparta, but mainly between their respective allies.

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And there is mention of a Persian ambassador coming to, as it were, explore the field.

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But the point is this, that Athens was at war with Persia from the 470 into at least the forties.

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There's thought that Athens made a peace with Persia in the early 440s,

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in which case both Sparta and things are technically not at war with Persians after the 440s.

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But there's no reason to think the Spartans had any contact direct until now.

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This is very interesting. Both Athens and Sparta put out feelers just about the time they're debating whether

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or not the Athenians have broken the peace that they'd made with the Spartans.

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In other words, whether the Spartans had a casus belli cause for going to war of both Athens and Sparta,

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sending ambassadors into the Persian Empire. Well, what they want is money.

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And fighting a war, especially at sea, costs a great deal of money.

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They also want to know, of course, which side if the Persians are wanting to get involved at all, are they going to give them money too?

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So again, that predicts what actually happens in the 410s and in the final phase of the Peloponnesian War.

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Well, thank you. Let's loop round to the middle twenties.

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We're going to come back to this, I think, in a moment and think about these sources.

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So as Paul says, Thucydides 50, which is a prescribed source,

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talks about both the Athenians and the Spartans sending ambassadors to Persia to to test the water, as it were.

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And we've also got on the syllabus some lines early on in the play, Arcanians by Aristophanes where a Persian embassy arrives back in Athens.

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That's lines 6211, 71. And we've got a passage by an Athenian orator called  Andocides

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In the early fourth century. He refers to a piece of Epilecus. That's Andocides

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329 Maria. All of these suggest that there are tunnels going on in the early on in the war.

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Both Athens and Sparta want to at least keep the Persians quiet.

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Is that right? Yes, indeed. As Paul said, as soon as the war broke out, both sides, Athens and Sparta, sent embassies to the Persians.

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So we need to keep in mind that basically these contacts continue throughout the war.

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It's just that they they don't always surface in Thucydides history, we get this letter that was intercepted in 450.

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in Thucydides it is intercepted by the Athenians.

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A letter coming from the king carried by an embassy from the Persian king to the Spartans,

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complaining that the king doesn't really understand what it is that the Spartans want from him.

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Do they want money? Do they want perhaps territory in Asia?

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Minor. What exactly they want? They need to clarify.

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And this tells us something about this spartan, wobbly ness.

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A Spartan wobble in their policies which would follow them until the end of the war.

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We need to be aware that the Spartans are uncertain about what their policy is throughout the Peloponnesian War.

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Thank you. Well, look, let's pull it back to the beginning of the war.

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And Paul, if I can come across to you. We have Pericles' policy of essentially winning through.

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That's the translation of the phrase.

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The idea that you sit behind the walls of Athens, you don't engage the Spartans in battle because the Spartans are better on land,

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the Athenians are stronger at sea, and you just wear down the Spartans' patience.

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So is the first reason that they lost the war that they gave up on that policy and more expansive.

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Could they have just won the war by sticking to Pericles?

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Let's just be a little clear that there is a debate among the scholars about Thucydides

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representations of Pericles in general and Pericles' policy for the war,

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his strategy in particular. As you said, Thucydides represents it.

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It is a primarily overwhelmingly defence strategy, as you've described it James.

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And this is the thing that's not often specified or stressed, perhaps enough important offensive elements, e.g. twice yearly invading by land,

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the territory of one of sparta's more important Peloponnesian League allies megara

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e.g. sending fleets around the Peloponnese which are big hundreds of ships,

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which means thousands of men, which means lots of money.

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And one type of source which we have nothing like enough, but we do occasionally get public accounts.

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So in other words, how much the Athenians are having to spend on the war?

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And one of the things that it's pretty clear to us that Pericles got wildly wrong,

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as represented by Thucydides and as we probably think Pericles really wanted to do,

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which is how much it was going to cost,

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because about six years into the war the Spartans have successfully up to that point and they've been invading and they've been resisting.

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and what have you but the Athenians suddenly find they have to treble the amount that they're demanding by way of tribute from their naval allies.

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So this is a major internal it must have been a debate and dispute.

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And therefore, it's very important that we remember that.

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And if I can come in there for students, students will know that is the Thoudippos decree, which is a prescribed source.

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Oh, well, that's excellent. So, as you said, this represents one of the major mistakes.

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There are several, but as James says, this is one of them.

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And you could say this is one of the more important of the several possible reasons that said, it is gives for Athens.

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Ultimate failure is to abandon his version of Pericles strategy, namely to get much too aggressive.

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And that's just one I'm going to mention, no thing, which is a little bit puzzling in itself,

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but fits in with this picture of Athenian politicians after Pericles' death.

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Not entirely sticking to the Periclean narrative, and it's an expedition sent to Sicily.

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What on earth were the Athenians thinking of? And it's about 426

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425. Why were they interested in the West?

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We'll come back to that.

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But it's just an indication of how they were much more aggressive by sea than you would have predicted from what Pericles says Athens was going to do.

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Okay. So I guess the question they are going to try and nail this down, if they had just stuck to Pericles' policy, could they have won the war?

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So word Thucydides uses through this is perigignomai

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the means to survive, which is very negative, you know, not be killed to still be there.

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But a translation has been suggested win through, which captures this ambivalence.

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There was a problem because very soon after the war broke out, plague struck Athens.

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Very soon after the war broke out by the invasion of Athenian farmland.

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Athenian farmers, middle class, as it were, Athenians, hoplites, not poor sailors, got very upset at the thought of just watching their livelihood,

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not not just the crop of this year, but their entirety of their life going up in smoke almost under their eyes.

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Pericles suddenly became extremely unpopular, therefore there was much more, I think,

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risk in Pericles' purely defensive strategy than Thucydides will allow.

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Now, on the other hand, the Athenians survived the plague.

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They survived the invasions, which did relatively less damage to Athens overall.

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They damaged individual Athenians terribly.

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And the Athenians, therefore. Well, are we moving on already to the mid four twenties?

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They had one particular gain by invading the Spartans own home territory and setting up a camp, a base actually within Sparta's home territory,

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and therefore encouraging the defection of Helots, the same Helots whose fathers had revolted the generation before.

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They really put the Spartans under the cosh round about 425-424

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And that suggests that those Athenians who believed in an aggressive policy were thinking, this is going well.

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You know, we're making the Spartans on the back foot, too, for peace.

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And then of course, it all went belly up in the north when the Spartans did exactly the same to the Athenians

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by hitting the Athenians where their timber came from and to some extent their wheat.

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So it was a dingdong. And your question, would they have done better to accept a peace offer in the midst of it?

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I think yes, on the one hand, but on the other hand,

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it wouldn't have washed with Sparta's allies or with Sparta because the Athenians weren't sufficiently smart and they must the Spartans.

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It was still always the chance of doing that. Okay.

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Thank you. Well, that's answered that question.

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And I was going to ask about the the Spartans see for peace after pillows and the Athenians reject those terms.

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And that is potentially another moment that Athens could have taken a winning draw, if you like,

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but you feel Paul that the Spartans wouldn't have accepted that or their allies wouldn't have accepted that,

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that it leaves things too uncertain politically.

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We know what happens and we have the benefit of hindsight.

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421, when there was a kind of ding dong on both sides as to what sort of peace and indeed whether peace of any kind

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was going to work internationally as opposed to making an alliance specifically between just Sparta and just Athens.

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So I think the international situation was much too complicated, even in 4 to 5 to four.

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Okay. Well, thank you. Well, that brings us across to Maria.

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And let's talk about this peace of Nicias like, yes, however you want to pronounce his name.

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And this was signed in 421. And the context here is that in the previous year, in 422,

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both Cleon and Brasidas were perhaps the leading antagonists on both sides were killed up in the northern Aegean region in a battle.

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And we get more figures in both sides who are looking to create a peace.

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So we get this piece of Nicias. Yes, Maria. Why does it fail?

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And it couldn't have been a long lasting peace, do you think?

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Well, it is dubbed by Thucydides as an insecure truce.

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perhaps before going to the specific problems.

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We must think of a factor which is a bit overarching of Thucydides' interpretation, which is that of national character.

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The Athenians wouldn't be the sort of people who would make truce even when they were defeated, let alone when they were victors.

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Now, on the specifics of the truce, there were problems with their allies.

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They wouldn't accept the terms the allies of the of the Spartans.

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And there was an additional problem that the Spartans had a problem with the Argives within the Peloponnese.

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In their 30 year truce with the Argives had expired and they now the Argives did not wish to renew the peace treaty and

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which is exactly one of the problems that led to the Spartans taking a kind of unilateral step of ignoring their not ignoring,

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but not having their allies on their side. They approached the Athenians for a 50 year alliance, which is apparently a step after the truce.

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But certainly the general message is that both sides affected by the impact of their own disasters the Athenians in Amphipolis,

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the Spartans in Pylos, they somehow sought opportunities for some luck.

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Even the Athenians, who are generally represented throughout, is reluctant to strike a peace.

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So they sought some kind of settlement. And we have a preliminary stage a year before where there is a preliminary stage

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of a sort of a truce between that both sides explore that we find that in Book 4

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Which however, didn't stop the Athenian allies in the north going over to the Spartans,

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for example, which is something that led to the Battle of Amphipolis.

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So all things considered, it was a very problematic truce.

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And for this reason, it didn't last. It meant to last for 50 years, the alliance at least,

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and it lasted only for six plus something from 421 until 415 or something like more than six years.

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Okay. Thank you. Yeah, we've got two peaces really going on. We've got the peace of Nicias which is supposed to involve the allies of both sides.

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And then we've got this independent 50 year peace signed between Athens and Sparta.

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Can you just tell us a little bit more about these Peloponnesian allies?

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I think there's about three or four of them who specifically say we want nothing to do with the peace in Athens.

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So I think Corinth is one. Why don't they like this peace?

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Yeah. The period between the signing of peace and the swearing of peace,

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and then the alliance and the battle of Mantinaea in 418 B.C. is one of the most

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confused and confusing in diplomatic terms of all ancient Greek classical history.

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And Thucydides doesn't help us. He does his best.

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But the shifting alliances within each side, the shifting of ground between as well as within the two sides, is exceptionally complex.

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On the spot inside, two particular allies, Mantinaea and Elis,

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have grouses with the Spartans added to Corinth and Corinth historically within the what we call the Peloponnesian League.

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It's a modern term. It had been in existence in some form since the end of the sixth century.

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Corinth had always been number two to Sparta because of its geopolitical position on the

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Isthmus and because it had the biggest fleet of any of Sparta's Peloponnesian League allies.

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And so in a war that's amphibious, in a war that involves conflict between the Peloponnese and central Greece, Corinth is literally pivotal.

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And so they actually at one point secede during this period and they get a kind of mini anti Spartan alliance going.

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And if I may move to the other side, the Athenians very cleverly, in a way, exploit this.

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Thucydides

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whom the Athenians couldn't quite make their mind up about collectively, individually,

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namely, Alcibiades comes to the fore and his family and his name, indeed a spot.

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He's originally Spartan origin,

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and he has a certain sense that he wishes to historically play a key role in relations between Sparta and Athens at this point, between 421-418.

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He senses that Argos, which as Maria says, has just come out of a treaty relationship with Sparta,

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which ever since the seventh century had hated Sparta because it wanted to be number one in the Peloponnese, not Sparta.

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And which now this is a fact we've not yet mentioned shifted between oligarchy and democracy.

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Thucydides is very aware that the internal struggle between Democrats and oligarchs quite often

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played out on the international stage as between the Spartan Alliance and the Athenian alliance.

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So one view is that the Athenians were under Alcibiades' leadership, intervening directly in the politics of the northeastern Peloponnese stirring.

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And actually that worked quite well.

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The only problem was, of course, that it broke formally the Treaty of Alliance, not so much the peace of Nicias, but the one between Spartan and Athens.

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So that we have to leave it, I think, until, if I may go on, just to mention the conclusion of this phase is the battle of Mantinaea.

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So was there a possibility there for for the Athenians to really get in behind

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Alcibiades' plan and create some sorts of Argive and anti Spartan

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Alliance in the Peloponnese and have crushed Sparans like that did they if

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they'd gone very offensive there could they have completely won the war that way,

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do you think? No. Again, I don't think there was any way short of a Helot revolt, sort of.

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Absolutely. As the Thebans did in 370-369

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I'm looking well ahead here. Invading Sparta's home territory.

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You don't beat the Spartans just by playing around in the northern Peloponnese or indeed at sea,

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because the Spartans at this time, remember, have no fleet of any significance apart from Corinth.

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So again, you know, this is going to come later, but there's no possibilities.

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So I think the Athenians were doing all that they could, which is to weaken Sparta,

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to raise up all sorts of enemies against them, strengthen the existing enemies within the Peloponnesian.

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The ideal, of course, breaking up the Peloponnesian League as a whole would have been very damaging.

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And that is, again, what happens in the 3/16 B.C. when Sparta is finished finally.

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So I think the thing is, did all they could.

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The problem they had with Argos was that, as I mentioned, within Argos there are Democrats who tend to look to Athens oligarchs whose sympathies,

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whose as it were, political, ideological centres are more with Sparta than they are with that.

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If there's a choice, you know, they're not going to go with a democracy.

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So you got a change of regime in the in a couple of times in the first half of the fall terms.

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Yes. And I think after that battle of Mantinaea in 418, there is then another peace signed between Sparta and Argos, isn't there.

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Is it 50? Is that. Yes. and Sparta and Mantinaea

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Because the victory at M, as you said, is brilliantly puts it restored Sparta's reputation.

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They thought the Spartans now again were what they once were.

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And the point there is since Pylos, which had really hamstrung them and made them look stupid because they had a

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bunch of Spartans surrendering and then they were kept as prisoners in Athens.

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I mean, really bad for morale and for all the alliance support for Sparta.

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So Battle of Matinaea and a standard Hoplite, one of the relatively few traditional Hoplite encounters and the Spartans under King Aegis,

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we should say that Archedamus is by now dead and his son, I guess the second, has taken over a terrific victory.

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A trouncing of the Athenians. Only in fall when they.

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Okay. So we get to 418 and so and we get to some 

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Sparta has reasserted itself and then of course we come to the Sicilian expedition

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and we could spend the whole podcast series talking about the Sicilian expedition,

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but we're not going to do that.

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I want to look at this expedition in some very targeted and focussed ways, because I'm sure the students will be familiar with it.

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So Paul will carry on with you. Very simple question Could the Athenians have conquered Sicily if they'd used a different strategy?

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So was it ever a realistic target or was this simply imperialism gone mad?

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I mentioned earlier that the Athenians had shown interest.

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We're not sure quite what in Sicily as early as the mid four twenties,

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the ostensible reason for getting involved again was to support a non-Greek people very interestingly in the

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far west of Sicily who had a grouse against people who were allied with people who were allied with Sparta.

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And so there's a sort of indirect connection with the main Peloponnesian War, which is Athens versus Sparta, but not a very direct one.

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We hear of partly from comedy, actually absurd notions of Athenians expanding their empire.

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This is, of course, very much against Pericles' strategy as described by three cities as far as North Africa.

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We're going to take on the Carthaginians, who, of course, had their stake in western Sicily already.

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So things actually do build up involving the Carthaginians, partly because the Athenians get involved in Sicily.

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But the ostensible reason is to help a particular people against another Sicilian entity, and that seems relatively modest.

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The war, as it evolves, turns out to be Athens versus

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Syracuse, being an ally of Sparta and Syracuse being the biggest city oligarch,

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governed until relatively recently before the Peloponnesian War, actually then becomes a kind of democracy.

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And so that's actually one of Thucydides' points. You got two enemies who are very similar, normally Sparta's pro oligarchy,

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and Athens is a democracy and pro-democracy, so very different types of polity fighting each other.

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And so what the Athenians seem to have got wrong, this is you can infer this from Thucydides' accounts.

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He doesn't spell it out. Why did they not go straight in against Syracuse?

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Why did they waste time seeking allies going round north Sicily, northwest Sicily, building up support and then taking on Syracuse?

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Well, if we believe this and it is one of the three commanders and of course, that's part of Athens is problem.

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They had three commanders who had different views on what the best strategy was.

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One of them, Lamica, says, go for it straight with Syracuse.

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Alcibiades says we'll get lots of allowances to go.

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And then Nicias as says often is indecisive and shilly shallies between the two.

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So the strategy was proven completely wrong of not taking on Syracuse when it would have been relatively unprepared, when Athens had a huge armada.

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And of course we must add in the complications, namely the Alcibiades had been summoned back in 41524 to face the charge of impiety.

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Well, I want to talk about Alcibiades at this point, because I think from about 419 onwards, everything's about him.

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So what I always say to my students.

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So in terms of Athenian mistakes, Maria, we have the whole situation with the recall of Alcibiades to face trial and his defection to Sparta.

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So two parts to this question. First of all, why is he recalled?

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What's going on? And secondly, how does his defection to Sparta as a consequence affect the course of the war?

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Well, as the preparation of the Sicilian expedition is ongoing in Athens, we have the outbreak of a huge scandal,

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the mutilation of those slabs, the herms, which stood at door posts at a crossroads and brought good luck.

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And Hermes was the God of of travel, after all. So these were mutilated at a night of of revelry.

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And at the same time, the accusations of the profanation of the mysteries.

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Mysteries means eleusinian mysteries. And it was a huge religious scandal.

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It caused fear to the Athenians and Alciabiades' political enemies who saw in his general lawlessness.

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As as you see this, tell us about the way he conducted himself.

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His extravagant lifestyle, his political enemies found a chance

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and opportunity to to cause trouble to him and accuse him of tyrannical ambitions.

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That was a constant fear for the Athenian democracy. So to make the long story short,

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Alcibiades insists to stand trial before the sailing out of the Sicilian expedition because he was the main advocate of it.

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Nikias didn't want to go, really. So he was the heart and soul of the expedition.

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The Athenians really relied on him and they loved him.

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There was a love affair relationship almost represented both in thucydides and comedy with Alcibiades and the Athenian demos, Athenian people.

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So he was crucial to the expedition. And we really don't know what would have happened if he had sailed out and stayed on.

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So Alcibiades insists that he stands trial, but he's not listened to.

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He lives and Then he has been recalled.

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He never makes it back to Athens because he defects to the Spartans, as we said.

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So Alcibiades' loss from the expedition was fatal.

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But it was not only that he was lost to the Athenians,

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it was a gain for the Spartans because going over to the Spartans, this enabled him to give crucial advice to them.

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Two pieces of crucial advice. At least two pieces. One is appoint a general of yours and send army of yours there to organise things.

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And second, fortify the position of Dekalaea within Attica and bring the war next close to Athens for the Athenians.

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And we see that being a huge a huge barometer of the final outcome.

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It is not only the Ionian War. I mean, we shouldn't really be calling that war, Ionian War.

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We should be calling it Ionian. As regards this part of the world, Asia minor, of course, but also the Decalion war,

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because at the end of the day, we may remember that after Aegispotomoi

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the Athenians find themselves besieged by land, King argues, was installed in Dekalia in from Piraeus by those ships.

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So it was one of those mistakes that Thucydides has in this very important chapter early on in his history,

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which looks at the final outcome of the war.

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In there he unpacks those mistakes and he says they took decisions.

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It was not so much a mistake of judgement, the Sicilian expedition,

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but it was that they didn't take the correct decisions in relation to those that sailed out.

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And one of the mistaken decisions. One such decision was the recall of Alciabiades. 

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Thank you. That's very, very helpful. And yes, we get a very clear picture here, don't we, both from Paul and Maria of Athenian indecisiveness.

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They don't know what they want. So you've got the three commanders in Sicily disagreeing about strategy.

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And then back in Athens, you've got lots of politicking going on.

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And people who are opposed to Alcibiades don't seem to recall him.

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So it's not a united front in Athens and that seems to cause these mistakes.

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Well, we know from thucydides that this defeats in Sicily is in four one.

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Three is a total disaster. He describes it in very graphic terms.

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So I guess the next question, Maria, is,

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was Athens' defeat in the Peloponnesian War inevitable after that Sicilian disaster, or could they have recovered?

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Certainly not is the short answer. They could have recovered and they they did recover.

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They did pretty well. We have to think a little bit before going to the specifics and some battles that followed after 415.

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I would like us to think a little bit again. We could think in terms of national character.

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The Athenians were not the sort of people who would give up easy.

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And we get the sense immediately after this description of the very pathetic description of disaster in Sicily,

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we find them back home being organised quickly.

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Building ships. Appointing ten wise men.

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Probouloi, some overtones of some kind of oligarchy coming up.

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Not yet there, but something conservative sounding there.

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The appointing those ten men who would slow things up and put the city on a more secure footing.

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And then in terms of of the war, we have some very good victories in, you know, Cynisimia, Abydos.

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Arginusae, you say, although it's this disgrace and the loss of the generals because they didn't collect the wreckage,

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there were very important victories.

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So just to be really clear then, and I think that's a very interesting point, that the Athenian defeat wasn't inevitable.

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And what that means, of course,

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is that as we carry on with our conversation is we're looking for further mistakes as to why they then lost the war after 413.