While the customary sacrifices were being performed, the slingers and bowmen on both sides became engaged in skirmishing. But presently the trumpets sounded, and Nikias ordered his first division of hoplites to charge at once rapidly, before the Syracusans expected it. Judging from his previous backwardness, they never imagined that he would be the first to give orders for charging; nor was it until they saw the Athenian line actually advancing towards them that they lifted their own arms from the ground and came forward to give the meeting. The shock was bravely encountered on both sides, and for some time the battle continued hand to hand with undecided result. There happened to supervene a violent storm of rain, with thunder and lightning, which alarmed the Syracusans, who construed it as an unfavorable augury, while to the more practised Athenian hoplites, it seemed a mere phenomenon of the season,[331] so that they still farther astonished the Syracusans by the unabated confidence with which they continued the fight. At length the Syracusan army was broken, dispersed, and fled; first, before the Argeians on the right, next, before the Athenians in the centre. The victors pursued as far as was safe and practicable, without disordering their ranks: for the Syracusan cavalry, which had not yet been engaged, checked all who pressed forward, and enabled their own infantry to retire in safety behind the Helôrine road.[332] [331] Thucyd. vi, 70. Τοῖς δ’ ἐμπειροτέροις, τὰ μὲν γιγνόμενα, καὶ ὥρᾳ ἔτους περαίνεσθαι δοκεῖν, τοὺς δὲ ἀνθεστῶτας, πολὺ μείζω ἔκπληξιν μὴ νικωμένους παρέχειν. The Athenians, unfortunately for themselves, were not equally unmoved by eclipses of the moon. The force of this remark will be seen in the next chapter but one. [332] Thucyd. vi, 70. So little were the Syracusans dispirited with this defeat, that they did not retire within their city until they had sent an adequate detachment to guard the neighboring temple and sacred precinct of the Olympian Zeus, wherein there was much deposited wealth, which they feared that the Athenians might seize. Nikias, however, without approaching the sacred ground, contented himself with occupying the field of battle, burnt his own dead, and stripped the arms from the dead of the enemy. The Syracusans and their allies lost two hundred and fifty men, the Athenians fifty.[333] [333] Thucyd. vi, 71. Plutarch (Nikias, c. 16) states that Nikias refused from religious scruples to invade the sacred precinct, though his soldiers were eager to seize its contents. Diodorus (xiii, 6) affirms erroneously that the Athenians became masters of the Olympieion. Pausanias too says the same thing (x, 28, 3), adding that Nikias abstained from disturbing either the treasures or the offerings, and left them still under the care of the Syracusan priests.