WARS and BATTLES
From Ancient Greece - to modern day.

Crossing the Straits of Messina, which the culpable negligence of Nicias had left unguarded, Gylippus landed on the northern coast of Sicily, and there began to collect from the Greek cities an army, of which the regular troops that he brought from Peloponnesus formed the nucleus. Such was the influence of the name of Sparta and such were his own abilities and activity, that he succeeded in raising a force of about two thousand fully-armed infantry, with a larger number of irregular troops. Nicias, as if infatuated, made no attempt to counteract his operations, nor, when Gylippus marched his little army toward Syracuse, did the Athenian commander endeavor to cheek him.

The Syracusans marched out to meet him; and while the Athenians were solely intent on completing their fortifications on the southern side toward the harbor, Gylippus turned their position by occupying the high ground in the extreme rear of Epipolae. He then marched through the unfortified interval of Nicias's lines into the sieged town, and joining his troops with the Syracusan forces, after some engagements with varying success, gained the master;' over Nicias, drove the Athenians from Epipolae, and hemmed them into a disadvantageous position in the low grounds near the great harbor.

The attention of all Greece was now fixed on Syracuse; and every enemy of Athens felt the importance of the opportunity now offered of checking her ambition, and, perhaps, of striking a deadly blow at her power. Large re-enforcements from Corinth, Thebes, and other cities now reached the Syracusans, while the baffled and dispirited Athenian general earnestly besought his countrymen to recall him, and represented the further prosecution of the siege as hopeless.

But Athens had made it a maxim never to let difficulty or disaster drive her back from any enterprise once undertaken, so long as she possessed the means of making any effort, however desperate

For its accomplishment. 'With indomitable pertinacity, she now decreed, instead of recalling her first armament from before Syracuse, to send out a second, though her enemies near home had now renewed open warfare against her, and by occupying a permanent fortification in her territory had severely distressed her population, and were premising her with almost all the hardships of an actual siege.

She still was mistress of the sea, and she sent forth another fleet of seventy galleys, and another army, "which seemed to drain almost the last reserves of her military population, to try if Syracuse could not yet be won, and the honor of the Athenian arms be preserved from the stigma of a retreat. Hers was, indeed, a spirit that might lie broken, but never would bend. At the head of this second expedition she wisely placed her best general, Demosthenes, one of the most distinguished officers that the long Peloponnesian war had produced, and who, if he had originally held the Sicilian command, would soon have brought Syracuse to submission.

The fame of Demosthenes the general had been dimmed by the (superior lustre of his great countrymen, Demosthenes the orator. When the name of Demosthenes is mentioned, it is the latter alone that is thought of. The soldier has found no biographer. Yet out of the long list of great men whom the Athenian republic produced, there are few that deserve to stand higher than this brave, though finally unsuccessful leader of her fleets and armies in the first half of the Peloponnesian war.

In his first campaign in Aetolia, he had shown some of the rashness of youth and had received a lesson of caution by which he profited throughout the rest of his career, but without losing any of his natural energy in enterprise or in execution. He had performed the distinguished service of rescuing Naupactus from a powerful hostile armament in the seventh year of the war; he had then, at the request of the Acarnanian republics, taken on himself the, office of commander-in-chief of all their forces, and at their head he had gained some important advantages over the enemies of Athens in Western Greece.

His most celebrated exploits had been the occupation of Pylos on the Messenian coast, the successful defense of that place against the fleet and armies of Lacedaemon, and the subsequent capture of the Spartan forces on the isle of Sphacteria, which was the severest blow dealt to Sparta throughout the war, and which had mainly caused her to humble herself to make the truce with Athens. Demosthenos was as honorably unknown in the war of party politics at Athena as lie was eminent in the war against the foreign enemy. "We read of no intrigues of his on either the aristocratic or democratic side. He was neither in the interest of Nicias nor of Cleon.