History of the Peloponnesian War

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;

and they resorted to skirmishing and to stratagems of every sort. The Syracusans also sent to the Sicilian cities Corinthian, Ambraciot and Lacedaemonian envoys, to report the capture of Plemmyrium and to explain in regard to the sea-fight that they had been defeated, not so much by the strength of the enemy, as by their own confusion; and in general they were to declare that they were full of hope and to beg the cities to give them aid against the enemy with both ships and land-forces, seeing that the Athenians on their part were expecting another army, and, if the Syracusans could forestall them by destroying the present army before the new one came, the war would be at an end. The forces in Sicily were thus occupied.

But as for Demosthenes,[*](Resuming the narrative at 7.20.3.) when the army was collected with which he was to bring aid to Sicily, he set out from Aegina, and sailing to the Peloponnesus effected a junction with Charicles and the Athenian fleet of thirty ships. Then taking on board some Argive hoplites, they sailed against Laconia, ravaging first a part of Epidaurus Limera;

then landing on the coast of Laconia opposite Cythera, where the sanctuary of Apollo is, they ravaged portions of the land and fortified a place shaped like an isthmus, in order that the Helots of the Lacedaemonians might desert thither and that at the same time marauders might make it, as they had made Pylos, a base for their operations.