Then he bethought him of his power over the Assembly. Had he ever appealed to them in vain? Had he ever failed to move them? Could he fail now? Was he not more popular than ever? Was not his cause more just? Should he not go before them, throw himself upon their sense of right; expose and destroy their enemies and his; tell them what he had done already for them in Sicily against the cowardly advice of Nikias; ask them who was their true friend, he or Nikias; and then—why, then, if need be, die, and let them find out, when it was too late, when Nikias brought back the fleet with nothing to show for all their great expenditure, who it was that had been done to death through their advisers? What a noble retaliation! Yet, after all, he would be tried, not by the Assembly of the people; they had but voted for his trial. He would be tried by a limited number of dikastai, many of them his enemies, and if the rest had been so influenced, in his absence, by those who were conspiring together to destroy him, would he be listened to? Would he get justice from them? He saw the depth of the malice of Pythonikos—to get rid of him so that he might work out his machinations without hindrance. He remembered, too, the fickleness of the people—how they had turned on Perikles, after all he had done for them. And religious frenzy! who can stem that when once it rages in its delirious course let loose from rational control? While here he was, as Kolyphôn had said, master of the situation. The whole of the fleet friendly. Most of the soldiers his own. The Argives and Mantineians cared more for him than for all the rest of the Athenians put together. They had come upon the expedition mainly on his account, while they of Korkyra and the Ionians who had joined the fleet at Korkyra, and made up between them more than half the army, had learnt to look on him as the genius of the enterprise, and knew that the plans they had at heart against Syrakuse could only be carried out under his direction. As for the other generals, they soon had seen that one was a traitor to the cause, the other of no weight, and perfectly incompetent. These were the thoughts which chased each other through his brain as he paced the _Eros_, waiting for the news his friends might bring him from the _Salaminia_.