History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides [best free ebook reader TXT] 📗
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their victory to your decision, but in their own name will reap the
honour, and will receive as the prize of their triumph the very men
who enabled them to gain it. On the other hand, if we are the
conquerors, you will have to pay for having been the cause of our
danger. Consider, therefore; and now make your choice between the
security which present servitude offers and the prospect of conquering
with us and so escaping disgraceful submission to an Athenian master
and avoiding the lasting enmity of Syracuse.”
Such were the words of Hermocrates; after whom Euphemus, the
Athenian ambassador, spoke as follows:
“Although we came here only to renew the former alliance, the attack
of the Syracusans compels us to speak of our empire and of the good
right we have to it. The best proof of this the speaker himself
furnished, when he called the Ionians eternal enemies of the
Dorians. It is the fact; and the Peloponnesian Dorians being our
superiors in numbers and next neighbours, we Ionians looked out for
the best means of escaping their domination. After the Median War we
had a fleet, and so got rid of the empire and supremacy of the
Lacedaemonians, who had no right to give orders to us more than we
to them, except that of being the strongest at that moment; and
being appointed leaders of the King’s former subjects, we continue
to be so, thinking that we are least likely to fall under the dominion
of the Peloponnesians, if we have a force to defend ourselves with,
and in strict truth having done nothing unfair in reducing to
subjection the Ionians and islanders, the kinsfolk whom the Syracusans
say we have enslaved. They, our kinsfolk, came against their mother
country, that is to say against us, together with the Mede, and,
instead of having the courage to revolt and sacrifice their property
as we did when we abandoned our city, chose to be slaves themselves,
and to try to make us so.
“We, therefore, deserve to rule because we placed the largest
fleet and an unflinching patriotism at the service of the Hellenes,
and because these, our subjects, did us mischief by their ready
subservience to the Medes; and, desert apart, we seek to strengthen
ourselves against the Peloponnesians. We make no fine profession of
having a right to rule because we overthrew the barbarian
single-handed, or because we risked what we did risk for the freedom
of the subjects in question any more than for that of all, and for our
own: no one can be quarrelled with for providing for his proper
safety. If we are now here in Sicily, it is equally in the interest of
our security, with which we perceive that your interest also
coincides. We prove this from the conduct which the Syracusans cast
against us and which you somewhat too timorously suspect; knowing that
those whom fear has made suspicious may be carried away by the charm
of eloquence for the moment, but when they come to act follow their
interests.
“Now, as we have said, fear makes us hold our empire in Hellas,
and fear makes us now come, with the help of our friends, to order
safely matters in Sicily, and not to enslave any but rather to prevent
any from being enslaved. Meanwhile, let no one imagine that we are
interesting ourselves in you without your having anything to do with
us, seeing that, if you are preserved and able to make head against
the Syracusans, they will be less likely to harm us by sending
troops to the Peloponnesians. In this way you have everything to do
with us, and on this account it is perfectly reasonable for us to
restore the Leontines, and to make them, not subjects like their
kinsmen in Euboea, but as powerful as possible, to help us by annoying
the Syracusans from their frontier. In Hellas we are alone a match for
our enemies; and as for the assertion that it is out of all reason
that we should free the Sicilian, while we enslave the Chalcidian, the
fact is that the latter is useful to us by being without arms and
contributing money only; while the former, the Leontines and our other
friends, cannot be too independent.
“Besides, for tyrants and imperial cities nothing is unreasonable if
expedient, no one a kinsman unless sure; but friendship or enmity is
everywhere an affair of time and circumstance. Here, in Sicily, our
interest is not to weaken our friends, but by means of their
strength to cripple our enemies. Why doubt this? In Hellas we treat
our allies as we find them useful. The Chians and Methymnians govern
themselves and furnish ships; most of the rest have harder terms and
pay tribute in money; while others, although islanders and easy for us
to take, are free altogether, because they occupy convenient positions
round Peloponnese. In our settlement of the states here in Sicily,
we should therefore; naturally be guided by our interest, and by fear,
as we say, of the Syracusans. Their ambition is to rule you, their
object to use the suspicions that we excite to unite you, and then,
when we have gone away without effecting anything, by force or through
your isolation, to become the masters of Sicily. And masters they must
become, if you unite with them; as a force of that magnitude would
be no longer easy for us to deal with united, and they would be more
than a match for you as soon as we were away.
“Any other view of the case is condemned by the facts. When you
first asked us over, the fear which you held out was that of danger to
Athens if we let you come under the dominion of Syracuse; and it is
not right now to mistrust the very same argument by which you
claimed to convince us, or to give way to suspicion because we are
come with a larger force against the power of that city. Those whom
you should really distrust are the Syracusans. We are not able to stay
here without you, and if we proved perfidious enough to bring you into
subjection, we should be unable to keep you in bondage, owing to the
length of the voyage and the difficulty of guarding large, and in a
military sense continental, towns: they, the Syracusans, live close to
you, not in a camp, but in a city greater than the force we have
with us, plot always against you, never let slip an opportunity once
offered, as they have shown in the case of the Leontines and others,
and now have the face, just as if you were fools, to invite you to aid
them against the power that hinders this, and that has thus far
maintained Sicily independent. We, as against them, invite you to a
much more real safety, when we beg you not to betray that common
safety which we each have in the other, and to reflect that they, even
without allies, will, by their numbers, have always the way open to
you, while you will not often have the opportunity of defending
yourselves with such numerous auxiliaries; if, through your
suspicions, you once let these go away unsuccessful or defeated, you
will wish to see if only a handful of them back again, when the day is
past in which their presence could do anything for you.
“But we hope, Camarinaeans, that the calumnies of the Syracusans
will not be allowed to succeed either with you or with the rest: we
have told you the whole truth upon the things we are suspected of, and
will now briefly recapitulate, in the hope of convincing you. We
assert that we are rulers in Hellas in order not to be subjects;
liberators in Sicily that we may not be harmed by the Sicilians;
that we are compelled to interfere in many things, because we have
many things to guard against; and that now, as before, we are come
as allies to those of you who suffer wrong in this island, not without
invitation but upon invitation. Accordingly, instead of making
yourselves judges or censors of our conduct, and trying to turn us,
which it were now difficult to do, so far as there is anything in
our interfering policy or in our character that chimes in with your
interest, this take and make use of; and be sure that, far from
being injurious to all alike, to most of the Hellenes that policy is
even beneficial. Thanks to it, all men in all places, even where we
are not, who either apprehend or meditate aggression, from the near
prospect before them, in the one case, of obtaining our intervention
in their favour, in the other, of our arrival making the venture
dangerous, find themselves constrained, respectively, to be moderate
against their will, and to be preserved without trouble of their
own. Do not you reject this security that is open to all who desire
it, and is now offered to you; but do like others, and instead of
being always on the defensive against the Syracusans, unite with us,
and in your turn at last threaten them.”
Such were the words of Euphemus. What the Camarinaeans felt was
this. Sympathizing with the Athenians, except in so far as they
might be afraid of their subjugating Sicily, they had always been at
enmity with their neighbour Syracuse. From the very fact, however,
that they were their neighbours, they feared the Syracusans most of
the two, and being apprehensive of their conquering even without them,
both sent them in the first instance the few horsemen mentioned, and
for the future determined to support them most in fact, although as
sparingly as possible; but for the moment in order not to seem to
slight the Athenians, especially as they had been successful in the
engagement, to answer both alike. Agreeably to this resolution they
answered that as both the contending parties happened to be allies
of theirs, they thought it most consistent with their oaths at present
to side with neither; with which answer the ambassadors of either
party departed.
In the meantime, while Syracuse pursued her preparations for war,
the Athenians were encamped at Naxos, and tried by negotiation to gain
as many of the Sicels as possible. Those more in the low lands, and
subjects of Syracuse, mostly held aloof; but the peoples of the
interior who had never been otherwise than independent, with few
exceptions, at once joined the Athenians, and brought down corn to the
army, and in some cases even money. The Athenians marched against
those who refused to join, and forced some of them to do so; in the
case of others they were stopped by the Syracusans sending garrisons
and reinforcements. Meanwhile the Athenians moved their winter
quarters from Naxos to Catana, and reconstructed the camp burnt by the
Syracusans, and stayed there the rest of the winter. They also sent
a galley to Carthage, with proffers of friendship, on the chance of
obtaining assistance, and another to Tyrrhenia; some of the cities
there having spontaneously offered to join them in the war. They
also sent round to the Sicels and to Egesta, desiring them to send
them as many horses as possible, and meanwhile prepared bricks,
iron, and all other things necessary for the work of
circumvallation, intending by the spring to begin hostilities.
In the meantime the Syracusan envoys dispatched to Corinth and
Lacedaemon tried as they passed along the coast to persuade the
Italiots to interfere with the proceedings of the Athenians, which
threatened Italy quite as much as Syracuse, and having arrived at
Corinth made a speech calling on the Corinthians to assist them on the
ground of their common origin. The Corinthians voted at once
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