Page:Thucydides, translated into English Vol 2.djvu/288

 28o PROGRESS OF THE SECOND EXPEDITION [vil water ; and no vessel could safely come near. They were like a sunken reef, and a pilot, not seeing them, might easily catch his ship upon them. Even these were sawn off by men who dived for hire ; but the Syracusans drove them in again. Many were the contrivances employed on both sides, as was very natural, when two armies confronted each other at so short a distance. There were continual skirmishes, and they practised all kinds of stratagems. The Syracusans also sent to the Siciliot cities Corin- A second embassy, thian, Ambraciot, and Lacedaemonian asking for help, is sent ambassadors announcing the taking of from Symeuse to the Plemmyrium, and explaining that in cities of Sicily. . „, , , , , the sea-fight they had been defeated not so much by the superior strength of the enemy as through their own disorder. They were also to report their great hopes of success, and to ask for assistance both by land and sea. They were to add that the Athenians were expecting reinforcements ; if they could succeed in destroying the army then in Sicily before these arrived, there would be an end of the war. Such was the course of events in Sicily, 26 Demosthenes, when the reinforcements which he was Devastation of Lac- ^o take to Sicily had all been collected, onia and erection of a sailed from Aegina to Peloponnesus second Pvlos opposite ^„j;^:„jr-i ■ ^ ii- .i- Cythera. 'Demosthenes, ^"^ J°^"^^ Chancles and hlS thirty having assisted in these ships". Hc embarked the Argive operations, sails for- hoplitcs, and, proceeding to Laconia, orcyta. first devastated some part of the lands of Epidaurus Limera. Next the Athenians landed in the district of Laconia opposite Cythera, where there is a temple of Apollo. They ravaged various parts of the country, and fortified a sort of isthmus in the neighbour- hood, that the Helots of the Lacedaemonians might desert and find a refuge there, and that privateers mfght make " Cp. vii. 20 init.