departure. Nicias consulted the soothsayers, who bade him stay thrice nine days, a complete round of the Moon, and he refused to discuss the question of departure till those days should be over. Long before those twenty-seven days expired, the Athenian expedition was no more. Defeated in the harbour, they had attempted to retreat by land, their different divisions had been surrounded, and the survivors had passed into private or public captivity. Nicias and Demosthenes had been executed, and the proudest armament that had ever sailed from the Piraeus had perished utterly, leaving Athens to struggle hard for her existence against her enemies.[1]
Eclipse of Agathocles.
My next eclipse may be less familiar to an Oxford audience, since it lies outside the 'Greats' period of Greek history. In August B.C. 310 Syracuse was being blockaded by sea and was threatened with a siege by land, but this time the enemy was not Athens, but an older naval power, Carthage. Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, slipped out of the harbour with sixty ships on the 14th of August. He was pursued by the blockading fleet, who, however, abandoned the chase after nightfall. On the following morning he and his fleet saw a total eclipse of the Sun.[2] According to my computation the middle of the eclipse was about 7·37 local solar time. He proceeded on his way and landed at Latomiae near Cape Bon on the African coast after a voyage of six days and six nights. It has long been a disputed point whether Agathocles sailed north or south of Sicily. It will be seen from the map, where the parallel lines indicate the limits of totality, that there is no astronomical difficulty
- ↑ Thucydides, vii. 50. See the comments in Plutarch, Nicias 23.
- ↑ Diodorus, xx. 5.
