lines into the besieged town, and joining his troops with the Syracusan
forces, after some engagements with varying success, gained the mastery
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.
Larger reinforcements 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 pressing 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 be 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