In 413 BC, the greatest navy Greece had ever built found itself trapped in a harbor in Sicily the exit sealed by a wall of enemy ships, the camp starving, the sea that built Athens' empire turned into a cage. This episode traces how the Sicilian Expedition collapsed step by step Alcibiades' defection, the Spartan officer who flipped a losing siege, a lunar eclipse that cost Athens its one chance to escape and arrives at the speech a reluctant, dying general gave to send forty thousand men into the fight that would end Athens' golden age. Nicias' address before the last sea-battle (Thucydides 7.61–64) is one of the most studied passages in the History: a moment when both the man and his city run out of anything to count on but hope.