ALCIBIADES AND THE ATHENIANS REDEFINE THE CITY

After the sustained artistry of the Sicilian books, most readers find what follows anticlimactic at best. This is partly because book 8 is unfinished. Further difficulties are that “the historian had to find a way of beginning again after so triumphantly concluding his work,” and that the symbolism of the Sicilian disaster, which equated the expedition with a city, means that “the destruction of the expedition is thus emotionally the destruction of Athens itself, and the virtual end of the war.” Yet Thucydides warns his reader early on that it is not defeat by any enemy (either Syracusan or Spartan) that destroyed Athens, but stasis: “they did not give in,” he tells us in the Epitaph, “until falling afoul of each other in their private disagreements they were overthrown” (2.65.12). And in his so-called second preface, Thucydides defines the end of his story as the point when “the Lacedaemonians and their allies put an end to the empire of the Athenians and occupied the Long Walls and the Piraeus” (5.26). Thus, despite the emotional high (or low) point of the Sicilian defeat, the reader knows that the Sicilian Expedition was not the end of the war or of Athens. Readers know also that eventually Athens succumbed to stasis – to violent disagreement about conflicting ideas of the city.