CHAPTER XIII: Seventh and Eighth Years of the War—End of Corcyraean Revolution— Peace of Gela—Capture of Nisaea

The character of military operations began to echo migrations of their antiquity and also predict colonial warfare and industrial warfare operations in which battle groups would be organized and moved as living combat communities, hives of death such as aircraft carrier battle groups and the nuclear carrier itself, a single vessel carrying more destructive power than most nations.

The following passage, related after a description of battle much more heroic and interesting than the Homeric type, presents a consistent image of the aftermath of battle in this war, revisited often and with a solemn regularity by the author.

“After holding on for a long while without either giving way, the Athenians aided by their horse, of which the enemy had none, at length routed the Corinthians, who retired to the hill and, halting, remained quiet there, without coming down again. It was in this rout of the right wing that they had the most killed, Lycophron their general being among the number. The rest of the army, broken and put to flight in this way without being seriously pursued or hurried, retired to the high ground and there took up its position. The Athenians, finding that the enemy no longer offered to engage them, stripped his dead and took up their own and immediately set up a trophy.”

In terms of pure human cruelty of what would be considered same-race behavior today, I would like to quote the author concerning a very normal aspect of ancient war, which Christian apologists and liberal race-extollers say has only been enacted by Europeans against Africans and Hebrews in modern times and never by any race upon another or upon its own in the past. Note that in such books as The Reason for God, it is common for modern authors to describe ancient slavery under Rome [Rome being even more cruel than Hellas in this regard] saying that bondage was so humane it could not be compared to that of African Americans who took the names of their masters upon emancipation, that ancient slavery was so kind and humane that there was no need for emancipation by the Christ!] :

“The prisoners thus handed over were shut up by the Corcyraeans in a large building, and afterwards taken out by twenties and led past two lines of heavy infantry, one on each side, being bound together, and beaten and stabbed by the men in the lines whenever any saw pass a personal enemy; while men carrying whips went by their side and hastened on the road those that walked too slowly.

“As many as sixty men were taken out and killed in this way without the knowledge of their friends in the building, who fancied they were merely being moved from one prison to another. At last, however, someone opened their eyes to the truth, upon which they called upon the Athenians to kill them themselves, if such was their pleasure, and refused any longer to go out of the building, and said they would do all they could to prevent any one coming in. The Corcyraeans, not liking themselves to force a passage by the doors, got up on the top of the building, and breaking through the roof, threw down the tiles and let fly arrows at them, from which the prisoners sheltered themselves as well as they could. Most of their number, meanwhile, were engaged in dispatching themselves by thrusting into their throats the arrows shot by the enemy, and hanging themselves with the cords taken from some beds that happened to be there, and with strips made from their clothing; adopting, in short, every possible means of self-destruction, and also falling victims to the missiles of their enemies on the roof. Night came on while these horrors were enacting, and most of it had passed before they were concluded. When it was day the Corcyraeans threw them in layers upon wagons and carried them out of the city. All the women taken in the stronghold were sold as slaves.”

In the next year of war more natural events are noted:

“In first days of the next summer there was an eclipse of the sun at the time of new moon, and in the early part of the same month an earthquake.”

The low portion of Spartan fortunes and their bravery turned to fear echoes down through the ages to this reader in the mass fear of the formerly liberty-minded American to utter any word of truth in the face of the overarching lie we live under, with most Americans afraid to even use a recently tabooed and corrupted word in its true form.

“…and the apparition on every side of a war whose rapidity defied precaution, they lived in constant fear of internal revolution…and became more timid than ever in military matters, finding themselves involved in a maritime struggle, which their organization had never contemplated, and that against Athenians, with whom an enterprise unattempted was always looked upon as a success sacrificed. Besides this, their late numerous reverses of fortune, coming close one upon another without any reason, had thoroughly unnerved them, and they were always afraid of a second disaster like that on the island, and thus scarcely dared to take the field, but fancied that they could not stir without a blunder, for being new to the experience of adversity they had lost all confidence in themselves.”

So while ancient Athens suffered the physical ravages of plague of which Sparta was free, the mind of Sparta was paralyzed with a fear very similar to the abject terror of pandemic gripping 2020 America, a pandemic which has never materialized in physical form yet remains stalking the land with palpable fear like some risen god, all of America terrorized for months into skulking un-hunted behind gossamer masks and huddling behind un-assailed doors. Where once the bravest nation of Antiquity shuddered before fate, now the self-proclaimed “freest” nation of Modernity fears nothing more than fresh air and the wind in her hair.

The final extermination of another race was visited this year upon their survivors, an act which modern historians decline to label genocide by conducting a one-sided argument with the ghosts of antiquity that their definition of race was not significantly broad to permit the death of a race to be acknowledged:

“The town they burnt, pillaging what was in it; the Aeginetans who were not slain in action they took with them to Athens, with Tantalus, son of Patrocles, their Lacedaemonian commander, who had been wounded and taken prisoner. They also took with them a few men from Cythera whom they thought it safest to remove. These the Athenians determined to lodge in the islands: the rest of the Cytherians were to retain their lands and pay four talents tribute; the Aeginetans captured to be all put to death, on account of the old inveterate feud…”