fight, and the confusion inseparable upon a night engagement, especially
one where many thousand combatants were pent and whirled together in a
narrow and uneven area, the necessary manoeuvres were impracticable; and
though many companies still fought on desperately, wherever the
moonlight showed them the semblance of a foe, they fought without
concert or subordination; and not infrequently, amid the deadly chaos,
Athenian troops assailed each other. Keeping their ranks close, the
Syracusans and their allies pressed on against the disorganized masses
of the besiegers, and at length drove them, with heavy slaughter, over
the cliffs, which an hour or two before they had scaled full of hope and
apparently certain of success.

This defeat was decisive of the event of the siege. The Athenians
afterward struggled only to protect themselves from the vengeance which
the Syracusans sought to wreak in the complete destruction of their
invaders. Never, however, was vengeance more complete and terrible. A
series of sea-fights followed, in which the Athenian galleys were
utterly destroyed or captured. The mariners and soldiers who escaped
death in disastrous engagements, and a vain attempt to force a retreat
into the interior of the island, became prisoners of war. Nicias and
Demosthenes were put to death in cold blood, and their men either
perished miserably in the Syracusan dungeons or were sold into slavery
to the very persons whom, in their pride of power, they had crossed the
seas to enslave.

All danger from Athens to the independent nations of the West was now
forever at an end. She, indeed, continued to struggle against her
combined enemies and revolted allies with unparalleled gallantry, and
many more years of varying warfare passed away before she surrendered to
their arms. But no success in subsequent contests could ever have