than the Syracusans, he reminds them that they will not often have an opportunity of securing such powerful auxiliaries. And if, he says, you dismiss them now, "one day yet you will long to see even the least part of them, when their succour can no more avail you[1]." A few years later (405 B.C.), the Carthaginians, already victorious over Selinus, Himera, and Agrigentum, advanced against Gela and Camarina. Dionysius, who had become tyrant of Syracuse, failed to relieve Gela. The inhabitants of Camarina, like those of Gela, were forced to abandon their city; and when the conclusion of peace between Dionysius and the invaders allowed them to return, they returned as tributaries of Carthage[2]. The protection of Syracuse, in which Camarina had trusted, proved a broken reed. Thucydides must have been at work on his History for some years after the end of the Peloponnesian war, perhaps as late as 396 B.C.[3] When he put that
- ↑ vi. 86, ἣν εἰ τῷ ὑπόπτῳ ἢ ἄπρακτον ἐάσετε ἀπελθεῖν ἢ καὶ σφαλεῖσαν, ἔτι βουλήσεσθε καὶ πολλοστὸν μόριον αὐτῆς ἰδεῖν, ὅτε οὐδὲν ἔτι περανεῖ παραγενόμενον ὑμῖν· (For ἔτι thus used in menace or presage, cf. Soph. El. 471. In Aesch. Eum. 812, Shilleto conjectured ὑμεῖς δ' ἔτ' [for ἐς] ἀλλόφυλον ἐλοῦσαι χθόνα | γῆς τῆσδ' ἐρασθήσεσθε.
- ↑ Diod. xiii, 108—114; Xen. Hellen. ii. 3.
- ↑ Thucydides mentions an eruption of Aetna in 426 B.C. as the third on record (iii. 116)—implying ignorance of that in 396 B.C., noticed by Diodorus, xiv. 59. On the probability that Thucydides was at work on his History for at least some years after 403, cp. Classen, Einl. xxx. I cannot, however, accept Ullrich's ingenious suggestion that the reference to Antiphon—ἄριστα τῶν μέχρι ἐμοῦ θανάτου δίκην ἀπολογησάμενος (viii. 68)—points to a tacit comparison with the defence of Socrates (399 B.C.).
