Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1887 edition. Excerpt: ...in the hope of retrieving past losses. The supposed conference vividly inforces this contrast; and although Thucydides nowhere mentions his name in connexion with this crime, the arguments put into the mouths of the Athenians are just those might have come from Alkibiades, who is said by Plutarch to have vehemently urged on the massacre. The conduct thus ascribed to him was a fitting prelude to the treasons of his after life. CHAPTER V. THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR--THE SICILIAN EXPEDITION. That the empire of Athens depended on the maintenance of her supremacy in the Egean sea, and inter-that this supremacy could not be maintained oflhe without a thorough hold on the Hellenic cities Athenians which studded its northern shores, and, therefore, that no efforts could be too great to reduce the towns that had revolted in that quarter, no sober-minded Athenian citizen could have doubted for a moment. It was the lesson which Perikles had preached throughout his political career; and his warnings against the folly of attempting distant conquests simply expressed his conviction that slackness in the recovery of a place like Amphipolis would be a crime or a blunder not less mischievous and ruinous. But for a long time there had been signs that for a certain class of politicians in Athens the idea of interference in the distant island of Sicily had special attractions. Twelve years had passed since the celebrated rhetorician Gorgias had headed an embassy from Leontinoi to ask the aid of Athens against the Syracusans, who were at open war not only with them but with Naxos and Katane. The argument on which he chiefly laid stress was that, if the Sicilian Dorians should be suffered to subdue their Ionian kinsfolk, the Spartans would not fail to receive from...