Strategie militari e strategie narrative in Tucidide: la Grecia occidentale nella guerra archidamica

Starting from the consideration that the Peloponnesian War was a very complex event from both the military-strategic point of view (planning of expeditions in several and often distant theatres of war) and the narrative one (the grafting of local and regional conflicts on the principal axis of the Spartan-Athenian war), the article explores the interplay between these two aspects applied to North-Western Greece and Sicily in the Archidamian War. Especially the investigation of the latter case shows that Thucydides, dealing with the first intervention in Sicily (427-424 BC), devotes an increasing attention to this undertaking, initially treated in a somewhat incidental way, as the Sicilian events, from the very beginning of 425 on, became more and more intertwined with the events (chiefly the Pylos episode) in Greece proper and in parallel to the growing Athenian ambitions. The culminating point of this factual and narrative progression is the emphasis conferred on the first intervention of Hermocrates of Syracuse in the peace conference at Gela in summer 424 which closed that war. His discourse marks a turning point in the whole narrative, placed as it is at the moment when the Athenians, after the successes of the last eighteen months, were most confident of the final victory, and immediately before the events which announced the reversal of their fortunes. Moreover, Hermocrates' discourse hints for the first time at the possibility of the coalition of all Siceliots to cope with external threats, a theme that will persistently recur in the ‘Sicilian Books’ and that in Thucydides' view is perhaps the historical keystone for the explanation of the Athenian disaster of 413. Finally, the outcomes of this analysis offer the opportunity to dress a balance of the scientific debate of the last decades about the alleged Thucydidean silences and omissions on the previous stages of the Athenian relations with Western Greeks. The available evidence allows us to fix the beginnings of a real strategic Athenian interest in Sicily and South Italy about, or not long before, the stipulation of the defensive alliance with Corcyra in 433 BC.