Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 2.djvu/360

308 as soon as he was got to Sicily, they sent for him back, designing to take the advantage, and prosecute him in the absence of his friends, and of the army, where he was very powerful. It seems he understood the resentments of a popular assembly too well to trust them; and therefore, instead of returning, escaped to Sparta; where his desires of revenge prevailing over his love to his country, he became its greatest enemy. Mean while the Athenians before Sicily, by the death of one commander, and the superstition, weakness, and perfect ill conduct of the other, were utterly destroyed, the whole fleet taken, and a miserable slaughter made of the army, whereof hardly one ever returned. Some time after this Alcibiades was recalled upon his own conditions by the necessities of the people, and made chief commander at sea and land; but his lieutenant engaging against his positive orders, and being beaten by Lysander, Alcibiades was again, disgraced, and banished. However, the Athenians having lost all strength and heart since their misfortune at Sicily, and now deprived of the only person that was able to recover their losses, repent of their rashness, and endeavour in vain for his restoration; the Persian lieutenant, to whose protection he fled, making him a sacrifice to the resentments of Lysander the general of the Lacedemonians, who now reduces all the dominions of the Athenians, takes the city, razes their walls, ruins their works, and changes the form of their government; which though again restored for sometime by Thrasybulus (as their walls were rebuilt by Conon) yet here we must date the full of the Athenian greatness; the dominion and chief power in Greece from that period to the time of