city (then termed Epipolae), which, if completed, would have cut the
Syracusans off from all succor from the interior of Sicily, and have
left them at the mercy of the Athenian generals. The besiegers' works
were, indeed, unfinished; but every day the unfortified interval in
their lines grew narrower, and with it diminished all apparent hope of
safety for the beleaguered town.

Athens was now staking the flower of her forces, and the accumulated
fruits of seventy years of glory, on one bold throw for the dominion of
the western world. As Napoleon from Mount Coeur de Lion pointed to St.
Jean d'Acre, and told his staff that the capture of that town would
decide his destiny and would change the face of the world, so the
Athenian officers, from the heights of Epipolae, must have looked on
Syracuse, and felt that with its fall all the known powers of the earth
would fall beneath them. They must have felt also that Athens, if
repulsed there, must pause forever from her career of conquest, and sink
from an imperial republic into a ruined and subservient community.

At Marathon, the first in date of the great battles of the world, we
beheld Athens struggling for self-preservation against the invading
armies of the East. At Syracuse she appears as the ambitious and
oppressive invader of others. In her, as in other republics of old and
of modern times, the same energy that had inspired the most heroic
efforts in defence of the national independence soon learned to employ
itself in daring and unscrupulous schemes of self-aggrandizement at the
expense of neighboring nations. In the interval between the Persian and
the Peloponnesian wars she had rapidly grown into a conquering and
dominant state, the chief of a thousand tributary cities, and the
mistress of the largest and best-manned navy that the Mediterranean had
yet beheld. The occupations of her territory by Xerxes and Mardonius, in