Page:History of Greece Vol VII.djvu/147

129 .SPARTA EXPECTS AID FROM S.CILY. 129 to the breaking out of the war, it will be found that the connec- tion of the Sicilian cities on both sides with Central Greece was rather one of sympathy and tendency than of pronounced obligation and action. The Dorian Sicilians, though doubtless sharing the antipathy of the Peloponnesian Dorians to Athens, had never been called upon for any cooperation with Sparta ; nor lia* 3 the Ionic Sicilians yet learned to look to Athens for protec- iir against their powerful neighbor Syracuse. It was the memorable quarrel between Corinth and Korkyra, aul the intervention of Athens in that quarrel (B.C. 433-432), which brought the Sicilian parties one step nearer to cooperation in the Peloponnesian quarrel, in two different ways ; first, by exciting the most violent anti- Athenian war spirit in Corinth, with whom the Sicilian Dorians held their chief commerce and sympathy, next, by providing a basis for the action of Athe- nian maritime force in Italy and Sicily, which would have been impracticable without an established footing in Korkyra. But Plutarch whom most historians have followed is mistaken, and is contradicted by Thucydides, when he ascribes to the Athe- nians at this time ambitious projects in Sicily of the nature of those which they came to conceive seven or eight years after- wards. At the outbreak, and for some years before the outbreak, of the war, the policy of Athens was purely conservative, and that of her enemies aggressive, as I have shown in a former chapter. At that moment, Sparta and Corinth anticipated large assistance from the Sicilian Dorians, in ships of war, in money, and in provisions ; while the value of Korkyra as an ally of Athens consisted in affording facilities for obstructing such rein- forcements, far more than from any anticipated conquests. 1 If we could believe the story in Justin iv, 3, Rhegium must have ceased to be Ionic before the Peloponnesian war. He states, that in a sedition at Rhegium, one of the parties called in auxiliaries from Himera. Theso Kimeraean exiles having first destroyed the enemies against whom they were invoked, next massacred the friends who had invoked them. " ausi fao'inus nulli tyraimo comparandum." They married the Rhcgine women, and seized the city for themselves. I do not know what to make of this story, which neither appears noticed ia Thutydides, nor seems to consist with what he does tell us. 1 Thucyd. i, 36. VOL. vii. 6* 9oc