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In Italy he devoted himself specially to a study of the doctrine of Pythagoras. It is said that at Syracuse he offended the tyrant Dionysius the elder by his freedom of speech, and was delivered up to the Spartans, who were then at war with Athens.

If it had not been Hieronymus who revolted to Hannibal, but the people and senate of Syracuse; if the body of the Syracusan people, and not their tyrants, Hippocrates and Epicydes, who held them in thraldom, had closed the gates against Marcellus; if they had carried on war with the Roman people with the animosity of Carthaginians, what more could Marcellus have done in hostility than he did, without levelling Syracuse with the ground?

Sometimes we met a black and rusty-looking vessel, laden with lumber, salt from Syracuse, or Genesee flour, and shaped at both ends like a square-toed boot, as if it had two sterns, and were fated always to advance backward.

In the third, the scene of war was shifted from Greece to Sicily, and it was there that the Athenian power really received its death-blow. The fourth and final period begins after the overthrow of the Athenians at Syracuse, and ends, nine years afterwards, with their final defeat at Aegospotami, and the downfall of the Athenian empire.

Nicias knew that, if he gave the word to retreat, in a few weeks he would have to stand before the bar of his countrymen, and give an account of the great trust which he had betrayed. It would be better, he thought, to perish under the walls of Syracuse, than to brave that stern tribunal, and read his doom on those angry, accusing faces.

I brought back minute descriptions of Napoleon's birthplace at Ajaccio, of his villa in Elba, of the tapestries, pictures and statues in the National Museum at Naples, of the Acropolis, of the monument of Lysicrates, of the Greek Theater and of the Roman Amphitheater at Syracuse, and of whatever else I was directed to observe. Mr. Pulitzer had had these things described to him a score of times.

The coldest days they had ever known in New York City and they had always believed that nothing could be colder were balmy when compared with that awful day on the outskirts of Syracuse that bleak, blighting day in the wind-swept graveyard where the mother of Thomas Bingle slept.

After sailing out for some distance in single file, the ships raced with one another as far as Ægina; thence they hastened onward to Corcyra, where the allies who formed the rest of the army were assembling. Meanwhile reports of the expedition were coming in to Syracuse from many quarters, but for a long time nobody gave credit to them. At length an assembly was held.

Of all its author's dramas the Alkestis is the most appropriate to the occasion, for it is the poem of a great deliverance from death, and here in effect it delivers from death, or worse, the fugitives from the pirate-bark, "at destruction's very edge," who are the suppliants to Syracuse.

But Nicias, despising him, allowed him to land at Himera, from whence he marched across Sicily to Syracuse. A Corinthian fleet, under Gorgylus, arrived only just in time to prevent the city from capitulating, and Gylippus entered Syracuse unopposed. The inaction of Nicias, who could have prevented this, is unaccountable.