also in Gorgias of Leontini, whose celebrity as a teacher throughout Greece was both greater and earlier than that of any one else. It was a similar demand for popular speaking in the assembly and the judicatures which gave encouragement to the rhetorical teachers Tisias and Korax at Syracuse. [183] See Aristotle as cited by Cicero, Brut. c. 12; Plato, Phædr. p. 267, c. 113, 114; Dionys. Halic. Judicium de Isocrate, p. 534 R. and Epist. ii, ad Ammæum, p. 792; also Quintilian, iii, 1, 125. According to Cicero (de Inventione, ii, 2), the treatises of these ancient rhetoricians, “usque a principe illo et inventore Tisiâ,” had been superseded by Aristotle, who had collected them carefully, “nominatim,” and had improved upon their expositions. Dionysius laments that they had been so superseded (Epist. ad Ammæ. p. 722). [184] Diogen. Laërt. viii, 64-71; Seyfert, Akragas und sein Gebiet, sect. ii, p. 70; Ritter, Geschichte der Alten Philosophie, vol. i. ch. vi, p. 533, _seqq._ In this state of material prosperity, popular politics, and intellectual activity, the Sicilian towns were found at the breaking out of the great struggle between Athens and the Peloponnesian confederacy in 431 B.C. In that struggle the Italian and Sicilian Greeks had no direct concern, nor anything to fear from the ambition of Athens; who, though she had founded Thurii in 443 B.C., appears to have never aimed at any political ascendency even over that town, much less anywhere else on the coast. But the Sicilian Greeks, though forming a system apart in their own island, from which it suited the dominant policy of Syracuse to exclude all foreign interference,[185] were yet connected, by sympathy, and on one side even by alliances, with the two main streams of Hellenic politics. Among the allies of Sparta were numbered all or most of the Dorian cities of Sicily,—Syracuse, Kamarina, Gela, Agrigentum, Selinus, perhaps Himera and Messênê,—together with Lokri and Tarentum in Italy: among the allies of Athens, perhaps the Chalkidic or Ionic Rhegium in Italy.[186] Whether the Ionic cities in Sicily—Naxos, Katana, and Leontini—were at this time united with Athens by any special treaty, is very doubtful. But if we examine the state of politics prior to the breaking out of the war, it will be found that the connection of the Sicilian cities on both sides with Central Greece was rather one of sympathy and tendency than of pronounced obligation and action. The Dorian Sicilians, though doubtless sharing the antipathy of the Peloponnesian Dorians to Athens, had never been called upon for any coöperation with Sparta; nor had the Ionic Sicilians yet learned to look to Athens for protection against their powerful neighbor Syracuse. [185] Thucyd. iv. 61-64. This is the tenor of the speech delivered by Hermokratês at the congress of Gela in the eighth year of the Peloponnesian war. His language is remarkable: he calls all non-Sicilian Greeks ἀλλοφύλους.