History of the Peloponnesian War

Taking these on board their ships, the Syracusans sailed along the coast toward home. But the Athenians, who were watching for them at Megara with twenty ships, captured one ship together with its crew, but they could not take the rest, which escaped to Syracuse. Skirmishing also occurred in the harbour about the piles which the Syracusans drove down in the sea in front of their old dockyards with the object that the ships might lie moored inside the piles and the Athenians might not sail up and ram their ships.

The Athenians brought up against the piles a ship of ten thousand talents[*](About 250 tons.) burden on whose deck were wooden towers and bulwarks;

then from small boats they attached ropes to the piles and pulled them up with windlasses or broke them off, or else they dived down and sawed them off. Meanwhile the Syracusans kept hurling missiles at them from the dockyards, and they returned the fire from the merchant-ship; and finally the Athenians destroyed most of the piles. But the most troublesome part of the stockade was that which was out of sight;

for there were some of the piles which they had driven down so that they did not project above the surface of the water, and consequently it was dangerous to approach the stockade, for any one if he did not look out might impale his ship as on a sunken rock. But these also were disposed of by divers, who dived down and sawed them off for pay. But nevertheless the Syracusans drove their piles down again.

And they contrived many other devices against one another, as might be expected when the two armies were in hostile array so near to each other;