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Updated: June 27, 2025
The Leontines, upon the departure of the Athenians from Sicily after the pacification, had placed a number of new citizens upon the roll, and the commons had a design for redividing the land; but the upper classes, aware of their intention, called in the Syracusans and expelled the commons.
These scouts took a galley of the enemy's, in which they found certain tablets, on which was set down a list of all the Syracusans, according to their tribes. These were wont to be laid up at a distance from the city, in the temple of Jupiter Olympius, but were now brought forth for examination to furnish a muster-roll of young men for the war.
That these fears were not unfounded was proved when, a few years afterwards, the Syracusans expelled the commons of Leontini, and took possession of their territory. The Leontine exiles sought refuge at Athens, but their appeal for help remained for a time unanswered, as the Athenians were then fully occupied in Greece.
During the engagement the cavalry attacked and routed the left wing of the Athenians, which was opposed to them; and the rest of the Athenian army was in consequence defeated by the Syracusans and driven headlong within their lines.
The same summer the Syracusans learned that the Athenians had been joined by their cavalry, and were on the point of marching against them; and seeing that without becoming masters of Epipolae, a precipitous spot situated exactly over the town, the Athenians could not, even if victorious in battle, easily invest them, they determined to guard its approaches, in order that the enemy might not ascend unobserved by this, the sole way by which ascent was possible, as the remainder is lofty ground, and falls right down to the city, and can all be seen from inside; and as it lies above the rest the place is called by the Syracusans Epipolae or Overtown.
In his account of the death of Nikias and Demosthenes, Timæus does not exactly follow the narrative of Thucydides and Philistus, as he informs us that while the assembly was still sitting, Hermokrates sent to their prison to inform them that they were condemned to death, and to afford them the means of dying by their own hands, while the other historians state that the Syracusans put them to death.
X. Nevertheless Timoleon met the ambassadors and the Carthaginian admirals, and mildly informed them that "he would accede to their proposals, for what could he do if he refused them? but that he wished, before they parted, to listen to them, and to answer them publicly before the people of Rhegium, a city of Greek origin and friendly to both parties; as this would conduce to his own safety, and they also would be the more bound to stand by their proposal about the Syracusans if they took the people of Rhegium as their witnesses."
This speech of Aristomache's brought tears from Dion, who with great affection embraced his wife, gave her his son, and desired her to retire to his own house, where he continued to reside when he had delivered up the castle to the Syracusans.
The intrigue, however, after all came to nothing: Alcibiades, who was in the secret, when he left his command upon the summons from home, foreseeing that he would be outlawed, gave information of the plot to the friends of the Syracusans in Messina, who had at once put to death its authors, and now rose in arms against the opposite faction with those of their way of thinking, and succeeded in preventing the admission of the Athenians.
Among these he divided the whole territory, and sold the houses for a thousand talents; by which method, he both left it in the power of the old Syracusans to redeem their own, and made it a means also for raising a stock for the community, which had been so much impoverished of late, and was so unable to defray other expenses, and especially those of a war, that they exposed their very statues to sale, a regular process being observed, and sentence of auction passed upon each of them by majority of votes, as if they had been so many criminals taking their trial: in the course of which it is said that while condemnation was pronounced upon all other statues, that of the ancient usurper Gelo was exempted, out of admiration and honor and for the sake of the victory he gained over the Carthaginian forces at the river Himera.
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