Forty thousand men, of whom a large proportion were veteran soldiers of the second military power in Greece, ought to have made a better defence. But they were dispirited, and commanded by a general unequal to the emergency. Nicias possessed many admirable qualities; respect for the gods, honesty, personal courage, and dignity of character when not confronted with an Athenian assembly; and they shone perhaps more brightly in the concluding than in any other scene of his life; but his courage was of the passive rather than the active sort, and he did not possess the power of rapid observation and decision which mark the accomplished general, and are most especially required to extricate an army from a false position. So far from pursuing the plan laid down in his speech, the first day’s retreat did not exceed five miles, the next was less than three; and when, after eight days of marching and fighting, the Athenian army surrendered, it was not twenty miles distant from Syracuse. Want of promptitude in the first instance suffered the Syracusans to pre–occupy the passes. How far the obstacles which Nicias had then to surmount may justify his tardiness it is difficult to say. Superior numbers and discipline in the hands of an able general might have done much to counterbalance the advantage of position. The Athenians were placed in difficult circumstances; yet not so difficult as the 10,000 in Persia, or many others who have yet lived to laugh at their enemy. It is not fair to estimate the character of this expedition by its results, for no foresight could have anticipated that Athens, the mistress of the sea, would be so completely foiled on her own element, as that even the power of return should be denied to her defeated army. But without judging things by their events, a method which renders criticism of the past comparatively easy, there are ample grounds to prove the impolicy of entering upon such a scheme of conquest at such a time. The Athenians were already engaged in a war fully commensurate with their strength, and which their utmost exertions had been unable to bring to a happy close. Their wealth and power were derived chiefly from colonies and subject cities, of which several were in open revolt, and all more or less disaffected. Eubœa itself, the most important, and from its situation the most easily controlled, of these dependencies, was so discontented, that to prevent its defection was the first care of the administration, as soon as news arrived of the Sicilian defeat. It was under these circumstances that they undertook a war, characterized by Thucydides as not much less than that against the Peloponnesians,[159] and having for its object the conquest[160] of an island about nine times as large as Attica, and inhabited not by a rude or effeminate population, but by rich and powerful cities of their own countrymen. The enterprise, hazardous in itself, was rendered more so by the length of the voyage, according to the methods