We now come to the Sicilian expedition, and request the reader’s patience if we dwell longer than usual on the closing scene of an undertaking, described by its historian as “the greatest that happened in this war, or at all, that we have heard of, among the Grecians, being to the victors most glorious, and most calamitous to the vanquished.”[140] The total destruction of the army of Athens struck a deadly blow at her greatness, though she struggled most energetically to retrieve her loss, and, through the want of able leaders at Sparta, nearly succeeded. But the scale was turned against her, and from this time forwards she fought an uphill battle. In the seventeenth year of the war, B.C. 415, the Athenians, at the suggestion of Alcibiades, resolved to send a very powerful armament to Sicily, nominally to protect the little republic of Egesta against Selinus and Syracuse, but really to re–establish the Ionian interest in the island. We may observe that Sicily was colonized partly by Ionian, partly by Dorian Greeks, and that the former naturally favoured the Athenians, the latter the Lacedæmonians, as the heads of their respective races. At present the Dorian race, at the head of which stood Syracuse, was by far the more powerful: and alarm was felt, or at least pretended, that unless checked by a powerful diversion at home, they might get all Sicily into their hands, and then unite with their Peloponnesian kinsmen to pull down that object of universal jealousy, the Athenian empire. Moved therefore by the entreaties of the Egestans, by these political arguments, and most of all by the desire of conquest, the Athenians “resolved to go again to Sicily, and if they could, wholly to subdue it, being for the most part ignorant both of the greatness of the island and of the multitude of people, as well Greeks as Barbarians, that inhabited the same, and that they undertook a war, not much less than the war against the Peloponnesians.”[141] Nicias, of whose cautious and unenterprising temper we have before spoken, saw and remonstrated against the impolicy of hazarding the flower of the state in a distant and dangerous warfare, while many of its revolted subjects remained unsubdued: but his warning was unheeded, and he was required, in conjunction with Alcibiades and Lamachus, to assume the command of this expedition, which he so entirely disapproved. Nicias, a man of courage in the field, was too timid to struggle against the popular will: he submitted, but still endeavoured to damp the eagerness of his countrymen, by exaggerating the force requisite to ensure success. A hundred triremes, he said, with 5000 heavy armed infantry, and archers and slingers in proportion, were the least they could send. Here he rather overshot himself; the force demanded was immediately voted, and no further pretext for dissuasion or denial remained. The armament, including the crews of the triremes, is estimated by Mitford to have contained at least 30,000 men.