318 HISTORY 01- GREECE. was now widened, and the value of the stake before them em hanced. It was not merely to rescue their own city from siege, nor even to repel and destroy the besieging army, that they were now contending. It was to extinguish the entire power of Athens, and liberate the half of Greece from dependence ; for Athens could never be expected to survive so terrific a loss as that of the entire double armament before Syracuse. 1 The Syracusans exulted in the thought that this great achievement would be theirs, that their city was the field, and their navy the chief instrument of victory : a lasting source of glory to them, not merely in the eyes of contemporaries, but even in those of posterity. Their pride swelled when they reflected on the Pan-Hellenic importance which the siege of Syracuse had now acquired, and when they counted up the number and variety of Greek warriors who were now fighting, on one side or the other, between Euryalus and Plemmyrium. With the exception of the great struggle between Athens and the Peloponnesian confederacy, never before had combatants so many and so miscellaneous been engaged under the same banners. Greeks, continental and insular, Ionic, Doric, and ^Eolic, autonomous and dependent, volunteers and mercena- ries, from Miletus and Chios in the east to Selinus in the west, were all here to be found ; and not merely Greeks, but also the barbaric Sikels, Egestaeans, Tyrrhenians, and lapygians. If the Lacaedemonians, Corinthians, and Boeotians were fighting on the side of Syracuse, the Argeians and Mantineians, not to mention the great insular cities, stood in arms against her. The jumble of kinship among the combatants on both sides, as well as the cross action of .different local antipathies, is put in lively antithesis by Thucydides. 2 But amidst so vast an assembled number, of which they were the chiefs, the paymasters, and the centre of combination, the Syracusans might well feel a sense of personal aggrandizement, and a consciousness of the great blow which they were about to strike, sufficient to exalt them for the time above the level even of their great Dorian chiefs in Pelo- ponnesus. It was their first operation, occupying three days, to close up the mouth of the Great Harbor, which was nearly one mile
1 Thucyd. vii, 56. * Thucj i. vii, 57, 58.
