speculations which he was himself recommending, is altogether fallacious. The Athenian empire took its rise from Athenian enterprise, working in concert with a serious alarm and necessity on the part of all the Grecian cities in or round the Ægean sea. Athens rendered an essential service by keeping off the Persians, and preserving that sea in a better condition than it had ever been in before: her empire had begun by being a voluntary confederacy, and had only passed by degrees into constraint; while the local situation of all her subjects was sufficiently near to be within the reach of her controlling navy. Her new career of aggression in Sicily, was in all these respects different. Nor is it less surprising to find Alkibiadês asserting that the multiplication of subjects in that distant island, employing a large portion of the Athenian naval force to watch them, would impart new stability to the preëxisting Athenian empire; to read the terms in which he makes light of enemies both in Peloponnesus and in Sicily, the Sicilian war being a new enterprise hardly less in magnitude and hazard than the Peloponnesian,[231] and to notice the credit which he claims to himself for his operations in Peloponnesus and the battle of Mantineia,[232] although it had ended in complete failure; restoring the ascendency of Sparta to the maximum at which it had stood before the events of Sphakteria! There is in fact no speech in Thucydidês so replete with rash misguiding, and fallacious counsels, as this harangue of Alkibiadês. [231] Thucyd. vi, 1. οὐ πολλῷ τινι ὑποδεέστερον πόλεμον, etc.: compare vii, 28. [232] Compare Plutarch, Præcept. Reipubl. Gerend. p. 804.