History of the Peloponnesian War

About the same time the Camarinaeans[*](cf. 6..1, 2.) also arrived with reinforcements, consisting of five hundred hoplites, three hundred javelin-men, and three hundred bowmen. The Geloans[*](cf . 6.67.2; 7.1.4.) also sent a squadron of five ships and four hundred javelin-men and two hundred cavalry.

For already almost the whole of Sicily—except the Agrigentines, who were neutral, but the rest without exception who had before been watching the course of events—had united with the Syracusans and was giving them aid against the Athenians. As for the Syracusans, after the disaster that happened to them in the country of the Sicels they put off their project of attacking the Athenians immediately;

but Demosthenes and Eurymedon, the army being now ready which they had gathered from Corcyra and the mainland, sailed with all their forces across the Ionian Sea to the Iapygian promontory. Proceeding from there, they touched at the Choerades, which are islands of Iapygia, and took on board their ships some Iapygian javelin-men, one hundred and fifty in number, belonging to the Messapian tribe;

and after they had renewed an old alliance of friendship with Artas, who being a chieftain there had furnished them with the javelin-men, they arrived at Metapontum in Italy. There they persuaded the Metapontines to send with them, in accordance with the terms of their alliance, three hundred javelin-men and two triremes, and taking up these they sailed along the coast to Thuria.[*](The city, not the country. Steph. Byz. says that the name of the city was written θουρία and θούριον as well as θοίριοι.)

At Thuria they found that the faction opposed to the Athenians had recently been expelled in a revolution;

and as they were desirous, after collecting their whole armament at that place, to hold a review of it, on the chance that anyone had been left behind, and also to persuade the Thurians both to take part with them in the expedition with all zeal and, in view of the Athenians' present good fortune, to regard the same persons foes and friends as the Athenians did, they waited at Thuria and dealt with these matters.