[186] The inscription in Boeckh’s Corpus Inscriptt. (No. 74, part i, p. 112) relating to the alliance between Athens and Rhegium, conveys little certain information. Boeckh refers it to a covenant concluded in the archonship of Apseudês at Athens (Olymp. 86, 4, B.C. 433-432, the year before the Peloponnesian war), renewing an alliance which was even then of old date. But it appears to me that the supposition of a renewal is only his own conjecture; and even the name of the archon, _Apseudês_, which he has restored by a plausible conjecture, can hardly be considered as certain. If we could believe the story in Justin iv, 3, Rhegium must have ceased to be Ionic before the Peloponnesian war. He states, that in a sedition at Rhegium, one of the parties called in auxiliaries from Himera. These Himeræan exiles having first destroyed the enemies against whom they were invoked, next massacred the friends who had invoked them: “ausi facinus nulli tyranno comparandum.” They married the Rhegine women, and seized the city for themselves. I do not know what to make of this story, which neither appears noticed in Thucydidês, nor seems to consist with what he does tell us. It was the memorable quarrel between Corinth and Korkyra, and the intervention of Athens in that quarrel (B.C. 433-432), which brought the Sicilian parties one step nearer to coöperation in the Peloponnesian quarrel, in two different ways; first, by exciting the most violent anti-Athenian war spirit in Corinth, with whom the Sicilian Dorians held their chief commerce and sympathy,—next, by providing a basis for the action of Athenian maritime force in Italy and Sicily, which would have been impracticable without an established footing in Korkyra. But Plutarch—whom most historians have followed—is mistaken, and is contradicted by Thucydidês, when he ascribes to the Athenians at this time ambitious projects in Sicily of the nature of those which they came to conceive seven or eight years afterwards. At the outbreak, and for some years before the outbreak, of the war, the policy of Athens was purely conservative, and that of her enemies aggressive, as I have shown in a former chapter. At that moment, Sparta and Corinth anticipated large assistance from the Sicilian Dorians, in ships of war, in money, and in provisions; while the value of Korkyra as an ally of Athens consisted in affording facilities for obstructing such reinforcements, far more than from any anticipated conquests.[187] [187] Thucyd. i, 36.