In the harbour at Syracuse, Nicias tries to save an army that is already lost.

It is 413 BC. The Sicilian Expedition, once the proudest undertaking of the Athenian empire, lies in ruins before the walls of Syracuse. The fleet is trapped. The men are starving, diseased, surrounded. And it falls to Nicias, a general who never wanted this war, to find the words that might carry his soldiers out alive.

He fails. But the speech survives preserved by Thucydides (Book 7) as one of the most harrowing moments in the History of the Peloponnesian War — and in it we hear something rarer than triumph: a man asking doomed men to hope anyway, because the alternative is to stop being men at all.

This episode traces Nicias' final address on the shore at Syracuse, the retreat and slaughter that followed, and why historians still mark thi ...