WE must now take the reader away from Greece, and ask him to turn his thoughts for a little while to Sicily. If an example were wanted of the effect of intestine quarrel, we need only point to Sicily at the time at which our story has arrived. That land, so fertile and so beautiful that a Holy Roman Emperor, who knew both countries, once irreverently declared that the Almighty would not have chosen Palestine for His peculiar people if He had first seen Sicily,—this island, which, more than any other, gives us a vision of those happy isles to which the heroes of the past were said to go,—this beautiful island, like many another fair spot on earth, was torn by its dissensions. There were the Siculi, the early, if not the original, inhabitants, and some small Phœnikian settlements, besides colonies from Ionian and Dorian Greece. Syrakuse, originally a colony from Korinth, became the leading city, and being so, began to dominate the others, and especially to trouble those which had been founded by the other portion of the Grecian race. Early in the Peloponnesian War the people of Leontini, to the north of Syrakuse, who were of Ionic origin, had called upon the Athenians for aid. For no reason apparently but the lust of plunder the Syrakusans had despoiled their city. The Leontines were old allies of Athens, and she was bound in honour to do all she could in their support. At that time all she could do was not much. But in the year 427 Laches was sent with a squadron of twenty ships, and he and his successors in command succeeded in reducing the power of Syrakuse so far that a peace was made, which left the Leontines and other peoples, whose liberties had been in like manner threatened, independent of their more powerful neighbour. The Athenians having retired, and the usual contest breaking out between democrats and oligarchs within the walls of Leontini more fiercely than before, the Syrakusans took advantage of the opportunity, and finally laid waste the city and drove the citizens into exile. The Leontines again appealed to Athens, but for some time without success. Athens was then too much taken up with her own immediate enemies. But although it had long been felt by the more patriotic of the Athenians, by all those who felt strongly for the honour of their country, that a wrong was being suffered by their old allies and kinsmen in Sicily at the hands of the descendants of their Korinthian rivals, it was some time before any practical steps could be taken to comply with the prayer of the outcasts.