History of the Peloponnesian War

Himera[*](648 B.C.) was colonized from Zancle by Eucleides, Simus and Sacon. Most of the colonists were Chalcidians; but there settled with them also fugitives from Syracuse who had been vanquished in a factional quarrel, the Myletidae as they were called. Their language was a mixture of Chalcidic and Doric, but Chalcidic institutions prevailed. Acrae and Casmenae were colonized by the Syracusans:

Acrae[*](664 B.C.) seventy years after Syracuse, Casmenae[*](644 B.C.) nearly twenty years after Acrae.

Camarina[*](599 B.C.) was first colonized by the Syracusans, just about one hundred and thirty-five years after the foundation of Syracuse, its founders being Dascon and Menecolus. But the Camarinaeans were driven out by the Syracusans in a war which arose from a revolt, and some time later Hippocrates, tyrant of Gela,[*](Dates 498-491.) receiving the territory of the Camarinaeans as ransom for some Syracusan prisoners of war, himself became founder and recolonized Camarina. And again the place was depopulated by Gelon, and was then colonized for the third time by the Geloans.

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.