But, in 416, a deputation from Egesta, an ancient colony said to have been founded by Philoktetes in the North-West of Sicily, which had made a treaty of alliance with Laches ten years before, came to seek assistance. They poured out the story of the wrongs they were suffering from the people of Selinous before the Senate and the Ekklesia, appealed to the treaty that had been made with them by Laches, and declared, if they were not aided soon, these enemies of theirs and the Syrakusans would crush them utterly, as the Syrakusans had crushed the Leontines, and would become together masters of the whole of Sicily. They were seconded in their prayers by the exiles from Leontini, who were still in Athens, and who had never ceased to urge their petition for redress on the Athenians. The Egestæans not only asked for help, but undertook to help themselves, and promised to defray a large part of whatever expense their allies might be put to in assisting them. The Athenians before deciding sent ambassadors to Egesta to find out whether their suppliants were able to do, in their own defence, what their envoys had promised. The ambassadors returned to Athens early in April, 415, and assured the people of the wealth of Sicily in general, and particularly of the city of Egesta. Athens again was up in arms. This time it was not to repel invasion of the Spartans, or to assist allies in the Peloponnesos; it was to decide upon an armed voyage of discovery to a land of fabulous resources. Of those resources they could form some notion from that which the ambassadors reported they had seen at Egesta. ‘Why, even in that remote town the temples shone with gold, with silver shrines and precious vessels.’ The ambassadors, and even the sailors, were served at every banquet on plates of gold and silver wonderfully wrought. They told how, on leaving Egesta, ingots of fine silver had been put on board their trireme—here the ingots were borne into the Ekklesia—of value to maintain a fleet of sixty triremes for a month. And in that month what might not be done? Something like the wild enthusiasm which led the English in Elizabethan times to sail for Eldorado seized on the Athenians. Little was heard in the gymnasia but the glory of this quest; and the old men talked of the wealth and the material support which the conquest of Sicily would bring them in their contest with hostile Grecian states, and of the advantage of Syrakuse as a strategic base, whence, at will, they could issue forth to spread their empire in Italy, in Africa, in all the world.