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Updated: May 21, 2025
Let him rest in peace with his merits and faults, for the enemy is in Sphacteria, and we must have a commander; Pericles' shadow will not serve for that. Here below sit two adventurers, fine gentlemen both; one is called Nicias, because he never has conquered; the other Alcibiades, and we know his conquests goblets and girls.
The locality now became the scene of a desperate struggle, which finally resulted in the Spartans on Sphacteria being completely isolated.
He took Thyrea, occupied by the Aeginetans, and carried the prisoners to Athens. When Demosthenes had fortified Pylos, and the Peloponnesians brought together both their sea and land forces before it, after the fight, about the number of four hundred native Spartans were left ashore in the isle Sphacteria. The Athenians thought it a great prize, as indeed it was, to take these men prisoners.
When the commander Demosthenes won the battle of Sphacteria, Cleon claimed the honour of the victory and received a triumph. Then, since he regarded himself as a great warrior, he marched against Brasidas. The pitcher goes so often to the well...." "Till it is broken," interrupted a new arrival. It was Alcibiades. "Papaia!" he exclaimed, "Cleon is beaten! Cleon has fled! Now it is my turn!
Encouraged by the shouts of the multitude, who were crying to Cleon, "Why don't you go and do it?" he rose from his place, and proposed that the tanner should be sent in charge of an expedition to take the men at Sphacteria. At first Cleon agreed to go, thinking that Nicias was jesting; but when he saw that the proposal was made seriously, he began to draw back.
But the lapse of time had softened the stern fibre of the Spartan character; and the broken remnant now brought to bay in Sphacteria interpreted the ambiguous mandate in their own favour, and surrendered themselves and their arms.
I do not swallow all that Thucydides chooses to tell us in his one-sided caricature about Cleon's appointment to the command at Sphacteria, or about the affair of Mitylene; and even if I did, I think it has nothing to do with the question. But on such utterly exploded old-world ideas is the whole modern argument of the Second Chamber founded.
Having obtained the necessary commission from Sparta, he collected a force of seventeen hundred heavy-armed infantry, and in the summer following the disaster at Sphacteria, turned his steps northward, and arrived without mishap at the borders of Thessaly.
The Spartans, under Brasidas, were on the island of Sphacteria opposite; and their retreat was cut off by the fleet under Nicias, who was the leader of the more aristocratic faction at Athens. Cleon, made strategus in the room of Nicias, took Sphacteria by storm, contrary to general expectation, and brought home nearly three hundred Spartan prisoners.
The surrender of the Spartans on the island of Sphacteria was a surprise to friend and foe alike; and the severe historian of the Peloponnesian war pauses to record the answer of a Spartan to the jeering question of one of the allies of the Athenians, a question which implied that the only brave Spartans were those who had been slain.
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