ravaged the land and set fire to the tents and encampment
of the Athenians, and so returned home. Learning also that the Athenians
were sending an embassy to Camarina, on the strength of the alliance
concluded in the time of Laches, to gain, if possible, that city, they
sent another from Syracuse to oppose them. They had a shrewd suspicion
that the Camarinaeans had not sent what they did send for the first
battle very willingly; and they now feared that they would refuse to
assist them at all in future, after seeing the success of the Athenians
in the action, and would join the latter on the strength of their
old friendship. Hermocrates, with some others, accordingly arrived at
Camarina from Syracuse, and Euphemus and others from the Athenians; and
an assembly of the Camarinaeans having been convened, Hermocrates spoke
as follows, in the hope of prejudicing them against the Athenians:

"Camarinaeans, we did not come on this embassy because we were afraid of
your being frightened by the actual forces of the Athenians, but rather
of your being gained by what they would say to you before you heard
anything from us. They are come to Sicily with the pretext that you
know, and the intention which we all suspect, in my opinion less to
restore the Leontines to their homes than to oust us from ours; as it
is out of all reason that they should restore in Sicily the cities that
they lay waste in Hellas, or should cherish the Leontine Chalcidians
because of their Ionian blood and keep in servitude the Euboean
Chalcidians, of whom the Leontines are a colony. No; but the same policy
which has proved so successful in Hellas is now being tried in Sicily.
After being chosen as the leaders of the Ionians and of the other allies
of Athenian origin, to punish the Mede, the Athenians accused some of
failure in military service, some of fighting against each other, and
others, as the case might be, upon any colourable pretext that could
be found, until they thus subdued them all. In fine, in the struggle
against the Medes, the Athenians did not fight for the liberty of the
Hellenes, or the Hellenes for their own liberty, but the former to make
their countrymen serve them instead of him, the latter to change one
master for another, wiser indeed than the first, but wiser for evil.

"But we are not now come to declare to an audience familiar with them
the misdeeds of a state so open to accusation as is the Athenian, but
much rather to blame our