History of the Peloponnesian War

After this the Syracusans sent out twelve ships under the command of Agatharchus, a Syracusan. One of these headed for the Peloponnesus, having on board some envoys who were to explain the situation in Sicily, that they were full of hope, and to urge the still more vigorous prosecution of the war on the continent of Greece. The other eleven ships sailed to Italy,[*](In Thucydides the term is used only of the part of the peninsula south of the river Laüs and Metapontum.) since they heard that boats laden with supplies for the Athenians were approaching. And falling in with these boats, they destroyed most of them;

and they also burned some timber in the territory of Caulonia, which was lying there ready for the Athenians to use in ship-building.

After this they went to Locri, and while they were lying there at anchor, one of the merchant-ships that had sailed from the Peloponnesus arrived in port, bringing some Thespian hoplites.

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;

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.