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Updated: May 7, 2025
On a moonlight night in August, at the hour of the first watch, the march began. Moving cautiously up the valley of the Anapus, they turned the northern end of the hill, and reached the path by which Lamachus had ascended in the spring of the previous year.
Supposing Wilkes for leading man in a country constantly plunging into war under some plumed Lamachus, with enemies periodically firing the land up to the gates of London, and a Samuel Foote, of prodigious genius, attacking him with ridicule, I think it gives a notion of the conflict engaged in by Aristophanes.
Nikias wanted merely to sail round the island, and show the power of Athens, and then go home again. Lamachus, another general, wanted to make a bold attack on Syracuse at once; and Alkibiades had a middle plan, namely, to try to gain the lesser towns by force or friendship, and to stir up the native Sicels to revolt.
Voting in full assembly, they passed a decree that sixty ships should be sent to Sicily, under the command of Nicias, Alcibiades, and Lamachus. The fleet was first to be employed in helping Egesta, and when that contest had been brought to a successful issue the Leontines were to be restored to their homes; finally, the generals were empowered to act as might seem best in the interests of Athens.
The play ends with a trading scene; a Boeotian in exchange for Copaic eels takes an Athenian informer, an article unknown in Boeotia. Lamachus returns wounded while Dicaeopolis departs in happy contrast to celebrate a feast of rustic jollity. Aristophanes' chief butts were Cleon, Socrates and Euripides; the last is treated with good nature in this play.
For Lamachus, though a brave and honest man, and one who always freely risked his life in battle, was but a plain simple man, and was so excessively poor, that whenever he was appointed general he was forced to ask the Athenians to advance him a small sum of money to provide him with clothes and shoes.
Not long after, Lamachus, who had sailed into the Pontus, lost his ships at anchor in the river Calex, in the territory of Heraclea, rain having fallen in the interior and the flood coming suddenly down upon them; and himself and his troops passed by land through the Bithynian Thracians on the Asiatic side, and arrived at Chalcedon, the Megarian colony at the mouth of the Pontus.
Nicias and Lamachus, left in joint command, drew off the Syracusan forces by a ruse, and were thus enabled to occupy unchecked a strong position before Syracuse.
However, he gained nothing by this speech, for the Athenians thought that he would be the best man to command the expedition because of his experience in war, and that his caution would serve as a salutary check upon the rashness of Alkibiades and the easy temper of Lamachus; so that, instead of dissuading them his words rather confirmed them in their intention.
Fortunately for Syracuse, Alcibiades, the most skilful of the three, was soon deposed from his command by a factious and fanatic vote of his fellow-countrymen, and the other competent one, Lamachus, fell early in a skirmish; while, more fortunately still for her, the feeble and vacillating Nicias remained unrecalled and unhurt, to assume the undivided leadership of the Athenian army and fleet, and to mar, by alternate over-caution and over-carelessness, every chance of success which the early part of the operations offered.
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