History of the Peloponnesian War

The prisoners in the stone-quarries were at first treated harshly by the Syracusans. Crowded as they were in large numbers in a deep and narrow place, at first the sun and the suffocating heat caused them distress, there being no roof; while the nights that followed were, on the contrary, autumnal and cold, so that the sudden change engendered illness.

Besides, they were so cramped for space that they had to do everything in the same place; moreover, the dead were heaped together upon one another, some having died from wounds or because of the change in temperature or like causes, so that there was a stench that was intolerable. At the same time they were oppressed by both hunger and thirst—the Syracusans having for eight months given them each only a half-pint of water and a pint of food a day[*](The scantiness of this allowance—only half the amount of food given to slaves—is best seen by a comparison with that which was allowed the Lacedaemonians taken on the island of Sphacteria, namely, “two quarts of barley-meal for each man and a pint of wine” (v. xvi. 1).); and of all the other ills which men thrown into such a place would be likely to suffer there was none that did not befall them.

Now for some seventy days they lived in this way all together; then all the rest, except the Athenians and any Siceliots and Italiots that had joined the expedition, were sold.

The total number of prisoners taken, though it is difficult to speak with accuracy, was nevertheless not fewer than seven thousand.

This event proved to be the greatest of all that had happened in the course of this war, and, as it seems to me, of all Hellenic events of which we have record —for the victors most splendid, for the vanquished most disastrous.

For the vanquished, beaten utterly at every point and having suffered no slight ill in any respect—having met, as the saying goes, with utter destruction—land-force and fleet and everything perished, and few out of many came back home.[*](According to Plutarch (Nicias, 29), many of the Athenians obtained their freedom, others who had already escaped got food and shelter by repeating verses from Euripides, who was more popular with the Sicilians than any other foreign author. The thanks of these survivors, many of whom on their return expressed their gratitude to him, were doubtless the sweetest praise the poet ever heard.) Such was the course of events in Sicily.