yracusans and their allies now mustered and took up the spoils and
as many prisoners as they could, and went back to the city. The rest of
their Athenian and allied captives were deposited in the quarries, this
seeming the safest way of keeping them; but Nicias and Demosthenes were
butchered, against the will of Gylippus, who thought that it would
be the crown of his triumph if he could take the enemy's generals to
Lacedaemon. One of them, as it happened, Demosthenes, was one of her
greatest enemies, on account of the affair of the island and of Pylos;
while the other, Nicias, was for the same reasons one of her greatest
friends, owing to his exertions to procure the release of the prisoners
by persuading the Athenians to make peace. For these reasons the
Lacedaemonians felt kindly towards him; and it was in this that Nicias
himself mainly confided when he surrendered to Gylippus. But some of the
Syracusans who had been in correspondence with him were afraid, it was
said, of his being put to the torture and troubling their success by his
revelations; others, especially the Corinthians, of his escaping, as he
was wealthy, by means of bribes, and living to do them further mischief;
and these persuaded the allies and put him to death. This or the like
was the cause of the death of a man who, of all the Hellenes in my time,
least deserved such a fate, seeing that the whole course of his life had
been regulated with strict attention to virtue.

The prisoners in the quarries were at first hardly treated by the
Syracusans. Crowded in a narrow hole, without any roof to cover them,
the heat of the sun and the stifling closeness of the air tormented them
during the day, and then the nights, which came on autumnal and chilly,
made them ill by the violence of the change; besides, as they had to do
everything in the same place for want of room, and the bodies of those
who died of their wounds or from the variation in the temperature,
or from similar causes, were left heaped together one upon another,
intolerable stenches arose; while hunger and thirst never ceased to
afflict them, each man during eight months having only half a pint of
water and a pint of corn given him daily. In short, no single suffering
to be apprehended by men thrust into such a place was spared them. For
some seventy days they thus lived all together, after which all, except
the Athenians and any Siceliots or Italiots who had joined in the
expedition, were sold.