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Brasidas lived just long enough to hear that he was victorious.
This, for the Greeks, is the perfect way to die: expiring at the very height of one’s glory.
Some say that there was something in Brasidas that sought death;
that yearned for it.
Not for him, a quiet senescence tending his vines;
he would die with Ares watching.
The Greeks are always at war with each other, but they usually resolve things quickly:
they find a suitable plain, line up opposite each other,
and settle their disagreement in a single, brutal clash.
But this new, interminable kind of war was exhausting,
and with the deaths of Brasidas and Cleon,
both Sparta and Athens had lost their most energetic leaders.
So they took to diplomacy, and signed a peace treaty that was to last for fifty years.
They were fighting again within a decade.
And the Athenians, always quick to make terrible decisions,
resolved that the surest path to victory was
to open up an entirely unnecessary new front, in Sicily of all places!
The Athenians tried to enclose the Sicilian capital of Syracuse within a vast stone wall.
To stop this,
the Syracusans tried to intercept them with a counter-wall of their own.
This is about the height of Greek siegecraft, I’m afraid.
After months of this walling and counter-walling, the Syracusans’ resolve began to waver —
but just in time, reinforcements arrived from Sparta…