128 HISTORY OF GREECE. similar to Pythagoras. 1 The same combination of rhetoric with physical speculation appears also in Gorgias of Leontini, whose celebrity as a teacher throughout Greece was both greater and ear lier than that of any one else. It was a similar demand for popular speaking in the assembly and the judicatures which gave encour- agement to the rhetorical teachers Tisias and Korax at Syracuse. In this state of material prosperity, popular politics, and intel lectual activity, the Sicilian towns were found at the breaking out of the great struggle between Athens and the Peloponnesian confederacy in 431 B.C. 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 to have never 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, 2 , were yet connected, by sympa- thy, and on one side even by alliances, with the two main streams of Hellenic politics. Among the allies of Spar f a were numbered all or most of the Dorian cities of Sicily, Syracuse, Kamarina. Gela, Agrigentum, Selinus, perhaps Himera and Messene, together with Lokri and Tarentum in Italy : among the allies of Athens, perhaps the Chalkidic or Ionic Rhegium in Italy.' Whether the Ionic cities in Sicily Naxos, Katana, and Leon- tini were at this time united with Athens by any special treaty, is very doubtful. But if we examine the state of politics prior 1 Diogen. Luert. viii, 64-71 ; Scyfert, Akragas und scin Gebiet, sect, ii, p. 70; Ritter, Gcschichte der Alton Philosophic, vol. i, ch. vi. p. 533,seqq. 2 Thucyd. iv. 61-64. This is the tenor of the speech delivered by Her mok rates at the congress of Gela in the eighth year of the Peloponnesian war. His language is remarkable : he culls all non-Sicilian Greeks U?.AO- 911/louf. 3 The inscription in Boeckh's Corpus Inscriptt. (No. 74, part i, p. 112) re- lating to the alliance between Athens and Rhegium, conveys little certain information. Boeckh refers it to a covenant concluded in the archonship ot Apseudes at Athens (Olymp. 86, 4, B.C. 433-432, the year before tha Poloponnesian war), renewing an alliance which was even then of old date But it appears to me that the supposition of a renewal is only his own con jecture ; and even the name of the archon, Apsendi-s, which he has restored
by a plausible conjecture, can hardly be considered as certain.
