History of the Peloponnesian War

Such were the nations, Hellenic and barbarian,[*](416 B.C.) that inhabited Sicily; and such was the magnitude of the island which the Athenians were bent upon invading. To give the truest explanation, they were eager to attain to empire of the whole of it, but they wished at the same time to have the fair pretext of succouring their own kinsmen and their

old allies.[*](Or, reading προσγεγενημένοις,—“the allies they had acquired besides”—the Camarinaeans and Agrigentines (5.4.6) and some of the Sicels (3.103.1).) But most of all they were instigated by envoys of the Egestaeans who were present and invoked their aid more earnestly than ever. For bordering as they did on the Selinuntians they had got into war with them about certain marriage rights and about disputed territory; and the Selinuntians, bringing in the Syracusans as allies, were pressing them hard in the war both by land and by sea. And so the Egestaeans, reminding the Athenians of their alliance which had been made with the Leontines in the time of Laches and the former war,[*](cf. 2.86.1.) begged them to send ships to their relief; saying many other things but chiefly this, that if the Syracusans should go unpunished for depopulating Leontini, and by destroying those of their allies that were still left should get the whole of Sicily into their power, there was danger that some time, lending aid with a great force, both as Dorians to Dorians on account of kinship, and at the same time as colonists to the Peloponnesians that had sent them out, they might help to pull down the power of

the Athenians. It would be wise, therefore, with their allies that were still left, to oppose the Syracusans, especially as the Egestaeans would furnish money sufficient for the war. And the Athenians, hearing in their assemblies these arguments of the Egestaeans and their supporters, who constantly repeated them, voted first to send envoys to Egesta to see whether the money was on hand, as they said, in the treasury and in the temples, and at the same time to ascertain how matters stood with reference to the war with the Selinuntians.

Accordingly the Athenian envoys were despatched to Sicily. But during the same winter the Lacedaemonians and their allies, except the Corinthians, invaded the Argive territory, ravaged a small part of the land and carried off some corn in wagons which they had brought with them; then having settled the Argive fugitives at Orneae, leaving with them also a small body of troops, after they had made a truce for a certain time, on condition that the Orneates and Argives were not to injure one another's land, they went home with the rest of their force.

When the Athenians came not long afterwards with thirty ships and six hundred hoplites, the Argives, in company with the Athenians, went out in full force and besieged the garrison at Orneae for a single day; but under cover of night, when the besieging army had bivouacked at a distance, the garrison of Orneae escaped.

The next day the Argives, on learning this, razed Orneae to the ground and withdrew, and later the Athenians also went home with their ships. The Athenians also conveyed by sea some of their own cavalry and the Macedonian exiles that were with them to Methone, which borders on Macedonia, and ravaged the country of Perdiccas.