Thucydides, an Athenian who lived through the fighting, wrote this history of the war between Athens and Sparta (431–404 BCE). This is Book 7. In Book 6 Athens had already gambled a huge fleet on Sicily, trying to take Syracuse — a Greek city as large as itself — while still at war with Sparta; Nicias, the cautious commander, had written home for a second army rather than admit the thing was lost.

Demosthenes arrives with that fleet and wants to leave. Nicias will not, waiting on a lunar eclipse and on friends inside the walls. A night attack on Epipolae, the heights above Syracuse, becomes a slaughter of mixed passwords: men kill their own in the dark. In the Great Harbor the ships jam and are taken. The army reaches the Assinarus river, drinks, and is killed in the water. Nicias and Demosthenes surrender and are executed. Seven thousand rot in the stone quarries. Sicily does not send grain. It sends the news.