History of the Peloponnesian War

When the report of what had happened in Euboea reached Athens, there was greater consternation than ever before. For neither the disaster in Sicily, great though it seemed at the time, nor any other event had ever yet so frightened them.

At a time when their army at Samos was in revolt, when there were no more ships to be had nor men to man them, when they were in a state of sedition at home and there was no telling when a conflict might break out among themselves, when, to crown all, a disaster had now come upon them of this magnitude, in which they had lost both their fleet and, worst of all, Euboea, from which they derived more benefit than from Attica—had they not every reason to be despondent?

But what alarmed them most and touched them most nearly was the possibility that the enemy, now victorious, might dare to make straight for Athens and attack the Peiraeus, which was now without ships to defend it; and they believed that they were all but there already.

And indeed, if they had been more bold, the enemy could readily have done this very thing, and they would either, by setting up a blockade, have caused the city to be still more torn by factions, or else, if they had remained and laid siege to it, would have compelled the fleet in Ionia, though hostile to the oligarchy, to come to the rescue of their own relatives and of the city as a whole; and thereby the Hellespont would have been theirs, and Ionia, and the islands, and everything as far as Euboea— indeed almost the whole empire of the Athenians.

But it was not on this occasion only that the Lacedaemonians proved the most convenient people in the world for the Athenians to make war upon, but on many others also. For being widely different in character—the one people being quick, the other slow; the one adventurous, the other timorous—it was especially in the case of a naval power that they were most helpful. And the Syracusans proved this; for it was because they were most similar in character to the Athenians[*](cf. 7.55.2, where the same reason for the success of the Syracusans is given.) that they made war upon them most successfully.