t succeed in taking
it.

Summer was now over. The winter following, the Athenians at once began
to prepare for moving on Syracuse, and the Syracusans on their side
for marching against them. From the moment when the Athenians failed to
attack them instantly as they at first feared and expected, every day
that passed did something to revive their courage; and when they saw
them sailing far away from them on the other side of Sicily, and going
to Hybla only to fail in their attempts to storm it, they thought less
of them than ever, and called upon their generals, as the multitude is
apt to do in its moments of confidence, to lead them to Catana, since
the enemy would not come to them. Parties also of the Syracusan horse
employed in reconnoitring constantly rode up to the Athenian armament,
and among other insults asked them whether they had not really come to
settle with the Syracusans in a foreign country rather than to resettle
the Leontines in their own.

Aware of this, the Athenian generals determined to draw them out in mass
as far as possible from the city, and themselves in the meantime to sail
by night alongshore, and take up at their leisure a convenient position.
This they knew they could not so well do, if they had to disembark from
their ships in front of a force prepared for them, or to go by land
openly. The numerous cavalry of the Syracusans (a force which they were
themselves without) would then be able to do the greatest mischief to
their light troops and the crowd that followed them; but this plan would
enable them to take up a position in which the horse could do them no
hurt worth speaking of, some Syracusan exiles with the army having told
them of the spot near the Olympieum, which they afterwards occupied. In
pursuance of their idea, the generals imagined the following stratagem.
They sent to Syracuse a man devoted to them, and by the Syracusan
generals thought to be no less in their interest; he was a native of
Catana, and said he came from persons in that place, whose names the
Syracusan generals were acquainted with, and whom they knew to be among
the members of their party still left in the city. He told them that
the Athenians passed the night in the town, at some distance from their
arms, and that if the Syracusans would name a day and come with all
their people at daybreak to attack the armament, they, their friends,
would close the gates upon the troops in the city, and set fire to the
vess