History of the Peloponnesian War

The following winter the Athenians began at once to prepare for the advance upon Syracuse, and the Syracusans also, on their side, to go against them.

For when the Athenians did not, in accordance with their first alarm and expectation, at once attack them, with each successive day their courage revived; and when the Athenians sailed along the opposite coast of Sicily and showed themselves only at a distance from Syracuse, and going against Hybla failed in the attempt to take it by storm, the Syracusans had still greater contempt for them, and, as a crowd is wont to do when it has become elated, demanded that their generals should lead them against Catana, since the Athenians would not come against them.

Moreover, mounted Syracusan scouts constantly rode up to the Athenian army and amongst other insults asked them: “Are you come to settle yourselves here with us, on land which belongs to other people, instead of resettling the Leontines on their own?”

The Athenian generals were aware of all this and purposed to draw the whole of the Syracusan force as far as possible away from the city, and themselves meanwhile to sail down under cover of night and undisturbed to occupy a camp at a suitable place, knowing that they would not be able to do this so well if they should disembark from their ships in the face of an enemy prepared to meet them, or should be detected going by land. For being without horsemen themselves, their own light-armed troops and their mob of camp-followers would, they thought, suffer great harm at the hands of the numerous Syracusan cavalry; but in the way proposed they would take a position where they would not suffer any harm worth mentioning from the cavalry; and certain Syracusan exiles who were with them gave them information as to the position close to the Olympieium, which in fact they subsequently occupied. So then, in furtherance of their plan, the generals devised some such scheme as this:

They sent a man loyal to themselves, but in the opinion of the Syracusan generals no less a friend of theirs. The man was a Catanaean, and said that he had come from men at Catana whose names they recognized and whom they knew to be the remnant of those who were still loyal to them in the city.