214. HISTORICAL TALES.

of foes. These walls it was that enabled Athens to
survive and flourish when all the soil of Attica lay
in the hands of the Spartan enemy. But the time
came when these walls were to fall, and Athens to
lic helpless in the hands of her mortal foe.

The Peloponnesian war was full of incident, vic-
tories and defeats, marches and countermarches,
making and breaking of truces, loss of provinces
and fleets, triumphs of one side and the other, and
still the years rolled on, and neither party became
supreme. Athens had its ill-advisers, who kept it
at war when it could have won far more by con-
cluding peace, and who induced it to forget the
advice of Pericles and make war on land when its
great strength lay in its fleet.

Its great error, however, was an attempt at foreign
conquest, when it had quite enough to occupy it at
home. War broke out between Athens and Sicily,
and a strong fleet was sent to blockade and seek to
capture the city of Syracuse. This expedition
fatally sapped the strength of the Athenian empire.
Ships and men were supplied in profusion to take
part in a series of military blunders, of which the
last were irreparable. The fleet, with all on board,
was finally blocked up in the harbor of Syracuse,
defeated in battle, and forced to yield, while of forty
thousand Athenian troops but a miserable remnant
survived to end their lives as slaves in Syracusan
quarries. It was a disaster such as Athens in its
whole career had not endured, and whose conse-
quences were inevitable. From that time on the
supremacy of Athens was at an end.