The Historians' History of the World 03

While Syracuse was beginning to plume itself upon its leadership and to dream of more definite control, the city of Athens was building an empire, not over one island but many. It was only natural that she should wish to stand well with the rich cities of Sicily. At first there could hardly have been any thought of conquest, and Grotef points out that Plutarch is mistaken and is contradicted by Thucydides, when he implies that even as late as the quarrel between Corinth and Corcyra, the Athenians had thought of dominion over Sicily. Professor Buryd however sees a distinct desire to have influence, if not conquest, from a very early day. He says:

“During the fifth century the eyes of Athenian statesmen often wandered to western Greece beyond the seas. We can surprise some oblique glances, as early as the days of Themistocles; and we have seen how under Pericles a western policy definitely began. An alliance was formed with the Elymian town of Segesta, and subsequently treaties of alliance (the stone records are still partly preserved) were concluded with Leontini and Rhegium. One general object of Athens was to support the Ionian cities against the Dorian, which were predominant in number and power, and especially against Syracuse, the daughter and friend of Corinth. The same purpose of counter-acting the Dorian predominance may be detected in the foundation of Thurii. But Thurii did not effect this purpose. The colonists were a mixed body; other than Athenian elements gained the upper hand; and, in the end, Thurii became rather a Dorian centre and was no support to Athens. It is to be observed that at the time of the foundation of Thurii, and for nigh thirty years more, Athens is seeking merely influence in the west, she has no thought of dominion. The growth of her connection with Italian and Sicilian affairs was forced upon her by the conditions of commerce and the rivalry of Corinth.” Adolph Holmb is equally positive in accusing the Athenians of an early desire to obtain a footing in Sicily.

[431-425 B.C.]

The outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 B.C. found Sicily in a high state of prosperity, political equality, and intellectual health. According as the various cities had been founded by Dorian or Ionian colonists their family prejudices inclined them towards Sparta or Athens. The war in fact, according to Müller,h was called by the oracles, the Doric War. The preponderance in Sicily was largely toward Sparta and Corinth, for Corinth had been the mother-city to Syracuse. Grotef thus discusses the feelings of the various cities at this time:

“In that struggle the Italian and Sicilian Greeks had no direct concern, nor anything to fear from the ambition of Athens; who, though she had founded Thurii in 443 B.C., appears never to have aimed at any political ascendency even over that town—much less anywhere else on the coast. But the Sicilian Greeks, though forming a system apart in their own island, from which it suited the dominant policy of Syracuse to exclude all foreign interference, were yet connected by sympathy, and one side even by alliances, with the two main streams of Hellenic politics. Among the allies of Sparta were numbered all or most of the Dorian cities of Sicily—Syracuse, Camarina, Gela, Agrigentum, Selinus, perhaps Himera and Messana—together with Locri and Tarentum in Italy; among the allies of Athens, perhaps, the Chalcidic or Ionic Rhegium in Italy. Whether the Ionic cities in Sicily—Naxos, Catana, and Leontini—were at this time united with Athens by any special treaty, is very doubtful. But if we examine the state of politics prior to the breaking out of the war, it will be found that the connection of the Sicilian cities on both sides with central Greece was rather one of sympathy and tendency, than of pronounced obligation and action. The Dorian Sicilians, though sharing the antipathy of the Peloponnesian Dorians to Athens, had never been called upon for any co-operation with Sparta; nor had the Ionic Sicilians yet learned to look to Athens for protection against Syracuse.”