Page:History of Greece Vol VII.djvu/157

139 PACIFICATION IN SICILY. 13S The Ionic cities stipulated that Athens should be included in the pacification ; a condition agreed to by all, except the Epizephy rian Lokrians. 1 They then acquainted Eurymedon and his col- leagues with the terms ; inviting them to accede to the pacification in the name of Athens, and then to withdraw their fleet from Sicily. Nor had these generals any choice but to close with (he proposition. Athens thus was placed on terms of peace with all the Sicilian cities, with liberty of access reciprocally to any single ship of war, but no armed force to cross the sea between Sicily and Peloponnesus. Eurymedon then sailed with his fleet home. 2 On reaching Athens, however, he and his colleagues were received by the people with much displeasure. He himself was fined, and his colleagues Sophokles and Pythodorus banished, on the charge of having been bribed to quit Sicily, at a time when the fleet so the Athenians believed was -strong enough to have made important conquests. Why the three colleagues were differently treated we are not informed. 3 This sentence was harsh and unmerited ; for it does not seem that Eurymedon had it in his power to prevent the Ionic cities from concluding peace, while it is certain that without them he could have achieved nothing serious. All that seems unexplained in his conduct, as recounted by Thucydides, is, that his arrival at Rhegium with the entire fleet in September, 425 B.C., does not seem to have been attended with any increased vigor or success, in the pros- ecution of the war. But the Athenians besides an undue depreciation of the Sicilian cities, which we shall find fatally mis- leading them hereafter were at this moment at the maximum of extravagant hopes, counting upon new triumphs everywhere, impatient of disappointment, and careless of proportion between the means intrusted to, and the objects expected from, their commanders. Such unmeasured confidence was painfully cor- rected in the course of a few months, by the battle of Delium had in his twenty-first book described the congress of Gela at considerable li^gth, and had composed an elaborate speech for Hermokrates : which speech Polybius condemns, as a piece of empty declamation. 1 Thucyd. v, 5. 8 Thncyd. vi, 13-52 3 Thucyd. iv, 65.