their
kindred and other allies in the island. But they were especially incited
by envoys from Egesta, who had come to Athens and invoked their aid more
urgently than ever. The Egestaeans had gone to war with their neighbours
the Selinuntines upon questions of marriage and disputed territory,
and the Selinuntines had procured the alliance of the Syracusans, and
pressed Egesta hard by land and sea. The Egestaeans now reminded the
Athenians of the alliance made in the time of Laches, during the former
Leontine war, and begged them to send a fleet to their aid, and among a
number of other considerations urged as a capital argument that if
the Syracusans were allowed to go unpunished for their depopulation of
Leontini, to ruin the allies still left to Athens in Sicily, and to get
the whole power of the island into their hands, there would be a danger
of their one day coming with a large force, as Dorians, to the aid
of their Dorian brethren, and as colonists, to the aid of the
Peloponnesians who had sent them out, and joining these in pulling down
the Athenian empire. The Athenians would, therefore, do well to unite
with the allies still left to them, and to make a stand against the
Syracusans; especially as they, the Egestaeans, were prepared to furnish
money sufficient for the war. The Athenians, hearing these arguments
constantly repeated in their assemblies by the Egestaeans and their
supporters, voted first to send envoys to Egesta, to see if there was
really the money that they talked of in the treasury and temples, and
at the same time to ascertain in what posture was the war with the
Selinuntines.

The envoys of the Athenians were accordingly dispatched to Sicily.
The same winter the Lacedaemonians and their allies, the Corinthians
excepted, marched into the Argive territory, and ravaged a small part
of the land, and took some yokes of oxen and carried off some corn. They
also settled the Argive exiles at Orneae, and left them a few soldiers
taken from the rest of the army; and after making a truce for a certain
while, according to which neither Orneatae nor Argives were to injure
each other's territory, returned home with the army. Not long afterwards
the Athenians came with thirty ships and six hundred heavy infantry, and
the Argives joining them with all their forces, marched out and besieged
the men in Orneae for one day; but the garrison escaped by night, the
besiegers having bivouacked some way off. The next da