The Herms Are Mutilated, Alcibiades Flees to Sparta, and the Sicilian Expedition Ends in Slaughter
What happened
In 415 BCE Athens voted to send a massive fleet to conquer Syracuse in Sicily, a plan pushed by the young politician Alcibiades over the objections of the more cautious general Nicias. On the eve of the fleet's departure, sacred statues of Hermes placed throughout Athens were found vandalized overnight, a sacrilege that triggered a political panic. Alcibiades, already accused of mocking Athens's Eleusinian Mysteries, was named a suspect and recalled from Sicily to stand trial, but escaped at Thurii in southern Italy and fled to Sparta instead, where he advised the Spartans to fortify Decelea in Attica and send help to Syracuse. Command in Sicily fell to the hesitant Nicias, whose delays let Syracuse's position recover. After the Athenian fleet lost the decisive battle inside Syracuse's harbor, the retreating army was run down at the Assinarus river, and surviving prisoners were crowded into Syracuse's open stone quarries with almost no food or water, most eventually sold into slavery.
Why it matters
Thucydides closed his account of the campaign by calling it the greatest action of the whole war, most glorious to the victors and most calamitous to the vanquished, noting that of the tens of thousands who went, only a few made it home. Alcibiades's advice led directly to Sparta permanently occupying Decelea, which cut Athens off from its farmland and silver mines and forced it to depend entirely on imported grain by sea, the exact vulnerability that would sink Athens at Aegospotami eight years later.
How we know
Thucydides fought in the war himself and devoted two full books of his History of the Peloponnesian War to the expedition in detail, including the debate between Alcibiades and Nicias, the final harbor battle, and the fate of the prisoners in the quarries. His account survives complete and is the primary source nearly all later historians drew on.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Nicias · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Thucydides, Perseus Digital Library (Tufts University). History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 7 · Primary source (author-declared)perseus.tufts.edu · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
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