Page:History of Greece Vol VII.djvu/242

224 22'1 UlSTom OF CHKECE. be surm >unf.ed in Sicily had been foreseen by himself and im- pressed upon the Athenians : in the first instance, as grounds against undertaking the expedition; but the Athenians, though unfortunately not allowing them to avail in that capacity, fully admitted their reality, and authorized him to demand whatever force was necessary to overcome them. 1 He had thus been allowed to bring with him a force calculated upon his own ideas, together with supplies and implements for besieging ; yet when arrived, he seems only anxious to avoid exposing that force in any serious enterprise, and to find an excuse for conducting it back to Athens. That Syracuse was the grand enemy, and that the capital point of the enterprise was the siege of that city, was a truth familiar to himself as well as every man at Athens : a upon the formidable cavalry of the Syracusans, Nikias had him- self insisted, in the preliminary debates. Yet, after four months of mere trifling, and pretence of action so as to evade dealing with the real difficulty, the existence of this cavalry is made an excuse for a farther postponement of four months until reinforce- ments can be obtained from Athens. To all the intrinsic dan- gers of the case, predicted by Nikias himself with proper dis cernment, was thus superadded the aggravated danger of his own factitious delay ; frittering away the first impression of his armament, giving the Syracusans leisure to enlarge their fortifica- tions, and allowing the Peloponnesians time to interfere against Attica as well as to succor Sicily. It was the unhappy weakness of this commander to shrink from decisive resolutions of every kind, and at any rate to postpone them until the necessity be- came imminent : the consequence of which was, to use an expression of the Corinthian envoy before the Peloponnesian war in censuring the dilatory policy of Sparta, that never acting, yet always seeming about to act, he found his enemy in double force instead of single, at the moment of actual conflict. 3 Great, indeed, must have been the disappointment of the Athe- 1 Thucyd. vi. 21-^fi. 2 Thucyd. vi, 20. ' Thiicyd. vi, 69. f/cvxtifrre yap povoi 'EA/.7/vwv, u AanESatftovtoi, ov rj twa^d nvu. uAAi TT [irf.fojcci fyvvojjtwoi, Kal povoi ov/e ri)v uv^t/aiv TUV &xp<jv, uhXu 6i TT A aa i ovptvr} v, OVT e<.