In 415 B.C., the Peloponnesian War had been going off and on for 16 years. Neither Athens nor Sparta was winning. Athens decided to overturn the playing board by sending a fleet and army to attack the Spartan ally of Syracuse on the island of Sicily. The Sicilian Expedition was to be led by the dynamic Alcibiades but after leaving, he found out that he was going to be arrested and put on trial for desecration of statues in Athens. (Supposedly he and his posse had drunkenly knocked the penises off of Hermes’ statues outside homes. It was probably a frame job.) He escaped to… wait for it – Sparta. What happened there is another story. His departure left the command to stick-in-the-mud Nicias. He had 100 ships and 5,000 hoplites. The assault on Syracuse came close to success, but the Athenians were forced to settle for a siege. This did not go well and then the Athenians made the mistake of feeding failure by sending 73 more triremes with 5,000 more precious soldiers. Unfortunately, the Spartans had also sent reinforcements under a competent general named Gylippus. Things continued to go downhill for the Athenians, partly because their camp was near a malarial marsh. They got progressively weaker and when their fleet was defeated in the harbor, it was time to cut their losses and go home. Preparations were made to sneak away, but a lunar eclipse occurred. Nicias, who was a superstitious kind of guy, consulted the priests, who told him what he wanted to hear. It would be bad luck to take any action for 27 days. Within those 27 days, the Syracusans defeated what was left of the fleet and blocked the harbor. Nicias and the army fled westward (leaving the wounded and ill behind), but it was a death march and only 7,000 of the 40,000 men survived. The survivors envied the dead as they were put to work in the infamous stone quarries. The Sicilian Expedition was a disaster that Athens never fully recovered from. It went on to lose the war. All because a superstitious general allowed an act of nature to effect his decision-making.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Expedition
Nicias’ survivors slaughtered on a river bank
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