The recent stratagem of Nikias, followed by the movement into the harbor of Syracuse, and the battle, had been ably planned and executed. It served to show the courage and discipline of the army, as well as to keep up the spirits of the soldiers themselves, and to obviate those feelings of disappointment which the previous inefficiency of the armament tended to arouse. But as to other results, the victory was barren; we may even say, positively mischievous, since it imparted a momentary stimulus which served as an excuse to Nikias for the three months of total inaction which followed, and since it neither weakened nor humiliated the Syracusans, but gave them a salutary lesson which they turned to account while Nikias was in his winter quarters. His apathy during these first eight months after the arrival of the expedition at Rhegium (from July 415 B.C. to March 414 B.C.), was the most deplorable of all calamities to his army, his country, and himself. Abundant proofs of this will be seen in the coming events: at present, we have only to turn back to his own predictions and recommendations. All the difficulties and dangers to be surmounted in Sicily had been foreseen by himself and impressed upon the Athenians: in the first instance, as grounds against undertaking the expedition; but the Athenians, though unfortunately not allowing them to avail in that capacity, fully admitted their reality, and authorized him to demand whatever force was necessary to overcome them.[335] He had thus been allowed to bring with him a force calculated upon his own ideas, together with supplies and implements for besieging; yet when arrived, he seems only anxious to avoid exposing that force in any serious enterprise, and to find an excuse for conducting it back to Athens. That Syracuse was the grand enemy, and that the capital point of the enterprise was the siege of that city, was a truth familiar to himself as well as every man at Athens:[336] upon the formidable cavalry of the Syracusans, Nikias had himself insisted, in the preliminary debates. Yet, after four months of mere trifling, and pretence of action so as to evade dealing with the real difficulty, the existence of this cavalry is made an excuse for a farther postponement of four months until reinforcements can be obtained from Athens. To all the intrinsic dangers of the case, predicted by Nikias himself with proper discernment, was thus superadded the aggravated danger of his own factitious delay; frittering away the first impression of his armament, giving the Syracusans leisure to enlarge their fortifications, and allowing the Peloponnesians time to interfere against Attica as well as to succor Sicily. It was the unhappy weakness of this commander to shrink from decisive resolutions of every kind, and at any rate to postpone them until the necessity became imminent: the consequence of which was,—to use an expression of the Corinthian envoy before the Peloponnesian war in censuring