In the preceding chapters, I have brought down the general history of the Peloponnesian war to the time immediately preceding the memorable Athenian expedition against Syracuse, which changed the whole face of the war. At this period, and for some time to come, the history of the Peloponnesian Greeks becomes intimately blended with that of the Sicilian Greeks. But hitherto the connection between the two has been merely occasional, and of little reciprocal effect: so that I have thought it for the convenience of the reader to keep the two streams entirely separate, omitting the proceedings of Athens in Sicily during the first ten years of the war. I now proceed to fill up this blank: to recount as much as can be made out of Sicilian events during the interval between 461-416 B.C., and to assign the successive steps whereby the Athenians entangled themselves in ambitious projects against Syracuse, until they at length came to stake the larger portion of their force upon that fatal hazard. The extinction of the Gelonian dynasty at Syracuse,[168] followed by the expulsion or retirement of all the other despots throughout the island, left the various Grecian cities to reorganize themselves in free and self-constituted governments. Unfortunately, our memorials respecting this revolution are miserably scanty; but there is enough to indicate that it was something much more than a change from single-headed to popular government. It included, farther, transfers on the largest scale both of inhabitants and of property. The preceding despots had sent many old citizens into exile, transplanted others from one part of Sicily to another, and provided settlements for numerous emigrants and mercenaries devoted to their interest. Of these proceedings much was reversed, when the dynasties were overthrown, so that the personal and proprietary revolution was more complicated and perplexing than the political. After a period of severe commotion, an accommodation was concluded, whereby the adherents of the expelled dynasty were planted partly in the territory of Messêne, partly in the reëstablished city of Kamarina in the eastern portion of the southern coast, bordering on Syracuse.[169] [168] See above, vol. v, ch. xliii, pp. 204-239, for the history of these events. I now take up the thread from that chapter. [169] Mr. Mitford, in the spirit which is usual with him, while enlarging upon the suffering occasioned by this extensive revolution both of inhabitants and of property throughout Sicily, takes no notice of the cause in which it originated, namely, the number of foreign mercenaries whom the Gelonian dynasty had brought in and enrolled as new citizens (Gelon alone having brought in ten thousand, Diodor. xi, 72), and the number of exiles whom they had banished and dispossessed.