Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/407

PROBITY OF HERMOKRATKS 385 the Peloponnesian cause with ardor. The feeling of reaction at Thurii, and of vengeance at Syracuse, stimulated the citizens of both places to take active part in an effort promising to be easy and glorious, for the destruction of Athens and her empire. And volunteers were doubtless the more forward, as the Persian satraps of the sea-board were now competing with each other in invitations to the Greeks, with offers of abundant pay. Accordingly, in the summer of the year 412 B. c. (the year fol- lowing the catastrophe of the Athenian armament,) a Sicilian squadron of twenty triremes from Syracuse and two from Selinus, under the command of Hermokrates, reached Peloponnesus and joined the Lacedemonian fleet in its expedition across the ^Egean to Miletus. Another squadron of ten triremes from Thurii, under the Rhodian Dorieus, and a farther reinforcement from Tarentum, and Lokri, followed soon after. It was Hermokrates who chiefly instigated his countrymen to this effort. 1 Throughout the trying months of the siege, he had taken a leading part in the defence of Syracuse, seconding the plans of Gylippus with equal valor and discretion. As commander of the Syracusan squadron in the main fleet now acting against Athens in the -ZEgean (events already de- scribed in my sixty-first chapter), his conduct was not less dis- tinguished. He was energetic in action, and popular in his behavior towards those under his command ; but what stood out most con- spicuously as well as most honorably, was his personal incorrupti- bility. While the Peloponnesian admiral and trierarchs accepted the bribes of Tissaphernes, conniving at his betrayal of the com- mon cause and breach of engagement towards the armament, with indifference to the privations of their own unpaid seamen, Hermokrates and Dorieus were strenuous in remonstrance, even to the extent of drawing upon themselves the indignant displeasure of the Peloponnesian admiral Astyochus, as well as of the satrap himself. 2 They were the more earnest in performing this duty, because the Syracusan and Thurian triremes were manned by freemen in larger proportion than the remaining fleet. 3 The sanguine expectation, however, entertained by Hermokra- tes and his companions in crossing the sea from Sicily, that one ' Thucyd. viii, 26, 35, 91. * Thucyd. viii, 29, 45, 78, 84. 3 Thucyd. viii, 84. VOL. x. 17 25oc.