as in
it; the Aeginetans who were not slain in action they took with them to
Athens, with Tantalus, son of Patrocles, their Lacedaemonian commander,
who had been wounded and taken prisoner. They also took with them a
few men from Cythera whom they thought it safest to remove. These the
Athenians determined to lodge in the islands: the rest of the Cytherians
were to retain their lands and pay four talents tribute; the Aeginetans
captured to be all put to death, on account of the old inveterate feud;
and Tantalus to share the imprisonment of the Lacedaemonians taken on
the island.

The same summer, the inhabitants of Camarina and Gela in Sicily first
made an armistice with each other, after which embassies from all
the other Sicilian cities assembled at Gela to try to bring about a
pacification. After many expressions of opinion on one side and the
other, according to the griefs and pretensions of the different
parties complaining, Hermocrates, son of Hermon, a Syracusan, the
most influential man among them, addressed the following words to the
assembly:

"If I now address you, Sicilians, it is not because my city is the least
in Sicily or the greatest sufferer by the war, but in order to state
publicly what appears to me to be the best policy for the whole island.
That war is an evil is a proposition so familiar to every one that it
would be tedious to develop it. No one is forced to engage in it by
ignorance, or kept out of it by fear, if he fancies there is anything to
be gained by it. To the former the gain appears greater than the danger,
while the latter would rather stand the risk than put up with any
immediate sacrifice. But if both should happen to have chosen the
wrong moment for acting in this way, advice to make peace would not be
unserviceable; and this, if we did but see it, is just what we stand
most in need of at the present juncture.

"I suppose that no one will dispute that we went to war at first in
order to serve our own several interests, that we are now, in view
of the same interests, debating how we can make peace; and that if
we separate without having as we think our rights, we shall go to war
again. And yet, as men of sense, we ought to see that our separate
interests are not alone at stake in the present congress: there is also
the question whether we have still time to save Sicily, the whole of
which in my opinion is menaced by Athenian ambition; and we ought to
find in the name of that peo