DEFEAT OF THE ATHENIANS,

BATTLE AT SYRACUSE.
B.C. 413.

 Syracuse 
The Romans knew not, and could not know, how deeply the greatness of their own posterity, and the rate of the whole Western world, was involved in the destruction of the fleet of Athens, in the harbour of Syracuse. Had that great expedition proved victorious, the energies of Greece during the next eventful century would have found their field in the West, no less than in the East; Greece, and not Rome might have conquered Carthage; Greek Instead of Latin might have been at this day the principal element of the language of Spain, of France, and of Italy; and the laws or Athens, rather than of Rome, might we the foundation of the law of the civilized world - ARNOLD.

Few cities have undergone more memorable sieges during ancient and medieval times than has the city of Syracuse. Athenian, Carthaginian, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Saracen, and Norman, have in turns beleaguered her walls; and the resistance which she successfully opposed to some of her early assailants was of the deepest importance, not only to the fortunes of the generations then in being, but to all the subsequent current of human events.

To adopt the eloquent expressions of Arnold respecting the check which she gave to the Carthaginian arms, "Syracuse was a breakwater which God's providence raised up to protect the yet immature strength of Home." And her triumphant repulse of the great Athenian expedition against her was of even more widespread and enduring importance. It forms a decisive epoch in the strife for universal empire, in which all the great states of antiquity successively engaged and failed.

The present city of Syracuse is a place of little or no military strength, as the fire of artillery from the neighboring heights would almost completely command it. But in ancient warfare, its position, and the care bestowed on its 'walls, rendered it formidably strong against the means of offense which then were employed by besieging armies.

The ancient city, in its most prosperous times, was chiefly built on the knob of land which projects into the sea on the eastern coast of Sicily, between two bays; one of which, to the north, was called the Bay of Thapsus, while the southern one formed the great harbor of the city of Syracuse itself.

A small island, or peninsula (for such it soon was rendered, lies at the south-eastern extremity of this knob of land, stretching almost entirely across the mouth of the great harbor, and rendering it nearly landlocked. This island comprised the original settlement of the first Greek colonists from Corinth, who founded Syracuse two thousand five hundred years ago; and the modern city has shrunk again into these primary limits. But, in the fifth century before our era, the growing wealth and population of the Syracusans had led them to occupy and include within their city walls portion after portion of the main land lying next to the little isle, so that at the time of the Athenian expedition the seaward part of the land between the two bays already spoken of was built over, and fortified from bay to bay, and constituted the larger part of Syracuse.

The landward wall, therefore, of this district of the city, traversed this knob of land, which continues to slope upward from the sea, and which, to the west of the old, fortifications (that is toward the interior of Sicily \ rises rapidly for a mile or two, but diminishes in width, and finally terminates in a long narrow ridge, between which and Mount Hybla a succession of chasms and uneven low ground extends. On each flank of this ridge the descent is steep and precipitous from its summits to the stripe of level land that lie immediately below it, both to the southwest and northwest.

The usual mode of assailing fortified towns in the time of the Peloponnesian war was to bilk a double wall round them, sufficiently strong to cheek any sally of the garrison from within, or any attack of a relieving force from without. The interval within the two walls of the circumvallation was roofed over, and formed barracks, in-which the besiegers posted themselves, and awaited the effects of want or treachery among the besieged in producing a surrender; and, in every Greek city of those days, as in every Italian republic of the Middle Ages, the rage of domestic sedition between aristocrats and democrats ran high.

Syracuse