for Catana, and fell to work at their camp immediately upon
their arrival.

Meanwhile word was brought them from Camarina that if they went there
the town would go over to them, and also that the Syracusans were
manning a fleet. The Athenians accordingly sailed alongshore with all
their armament, first to Syracuse, where they found no fleet manning,
and so always along the coast to Camarina, where they brought to at the
beach, and sent a herald to the people, who, however, refused to receive
them, saying that their oaths bound them to receive the Athenians only
with a single vessel, unless they themselves sent for more. Disappointed
here, the Athenians now sailed back again, and after landing and
plundering on Syracusan territory and losing some stragglers from their
light infantry through the coming up of the Syracusan horse, so got back
to Catana.

There they found the Salaminia come from Athens for Alcibiades, with
orders for him to sail home to answer the charges which the state
brought against him, and for certain others of the soldiers who with
him were accused of sacrilege in the matter of the mysteries and of the
Hermae. For the Athenians, after the departure of the expedition, had
continued as active as ever in investigating the facts of the mysteries
and of the Hermae, and, instead of testing the informers, in their
suspicious temper welcomed all indifferently, arresting and imprisoning
the best citizens upon the evidence of rascals, and preferring to sift
the matter to the bottom sooner than to let an accused person of good
character pass unquestioned, owing to the rascality of the informer. The
commons had heard how oppressive the tyranny of Pisistratus and his sons
had become before it ended, and further that that had been put down at
last, not by themselves and Harmodius, but by the Lacedaemonians, and so
were always in fear and took everything suspiciously.

Indeed, the daring action of Aristogiton and Harmodius was undertaken
in consequence of a love affair, which I shall relate at some length, to
show that the Athenians are not more accurate than the rest of the world
in their accounts of their own tyrants and of the facts of their own
history. Pisistratus dying at an advanced age in possession of the
tyranny, was succeeded by his eldest son, Hippias, and not Hipparchus,
as is vulgarly believed. Harmodius was then in the flower of youthful
beauty, and Aristogiton, a citizen in the middle rank of life,