Page:History of Greece Vol VII.djvu/211

193 GOOD ADVICE OF LAMACHUS. 193 have been approved and executed either by Brasidas or by De- mosthenes ; while the dilatory policy still advocated by Alkibi- ades, even after the suggestion of Lamachus had been started, tends to show that if he was superior in military energy to one of his colleagues, he was not less inferior to the other. Indeed, when we find him talking of besieging Syracuse, unless the Syra- cusans would consent to the reestablishment of Leontini, it seems probable that he had not yet made up his mind peremptorily to besiege the city at all ; a fact completely at variance with those unbounded hopes of conquest which he is reported as having con- ceived even at Athens. It is possible that he may have thought it impolitic to contradict too abruptly the tendencies of Nikias, who, anxious as he was chiefly to find some pretext for carrying back his troops unharmed, might account the proposition of Lam- achus too desperate even to be discussed. Unfortunately, the latter, though the ablest soldier of the three, was a poor man, of no political position, and little influence among the hoplites. Had he possessed, along with his own straightforward military energy, the wealth and family ascendency of either of his colleagues, the achievements as well as the fate of this splendid armament would have been entirely altered, and the Athenians would have entered Syracuse not as prisoners but as conquerors. Alkibiades, as soon as his plan had become adopted by means of the approval of Lamachus, sailed across the strait in his own trireme from Rhegium to Messene. Though admitted per- sonally into the city, and allowed to address the public assembly, he could not induce them to conclude any alliance, or to admit the armament to anything beyond a market of provisions without the walls. He accordingly returned back to Khegium, from whence he and one of his colleagues immediately departed with sixty triremes for Naxos. The Naxians cordially received the arma- ment, which then steered southward along the coast of Sicily to Kat an a. In the latter place the leading men and the general sentiment were at this time favorable to Syracuse, so that the Athenians, finding admittance refused, were compelled to sail farther southward and take their night-station at the mouth of the river Terias. On the ensuing day they made sail with their ships in single column immediately in front of Syracuse itself, VOL vfi. 9 13ew