In these two remarkable speeches, we find Hermokratês renewing substantially the same line of counsel as he had taken up ten years before at the congress of Gela, to settle all Sicilian differences at home, and above all things to keep out the intervention of Athens; who if she once got footing in Sicily, would never rest until she reduced all the cities successively. This was the natural point of view for a Syracusan politician; but by no means equally natural, nor equally conclusive, for an inhabitant of one of the secondary Sicilian cities, especially of the conterminous Kamarina. And the oration of Euphêmus is an able pleading to demonstrate that the Kamarinæans had far more to fear from Syracuse than from Athens. His arguments to this point are at least highly plausible, if not convincing: but he seems to lay himself open to attack from the opposite quarter. If Athens cannot hope to gain any subjects in Sicily, what motive has she for interfering? This Euphêmus meets by contending that if she does not interfere, the Syracusans and their allies will come across and render assistance to the enemies of Athens in Peloponnesus. It is manifest, however, that under the actual circumstances of the time, Athens could have no real fears of this nature, and that her real motives for meddling in Sicily were those of hope and encroachment, not of self-defence. But it shows how little likely such hopes were to be realized, and therefore how ill-advised the whole plan of interference in Sicily was,—that the Athenian envoy could say to the Kamarinæans, in the same strain as Nikias had spoken at Athens when combating the wisdom of the expedition: “Such is the distance of Sicily from Athens, and such the difficulty of guarding cities of great force and ample territory combined, that if we wished to hold you Sicilians as subjects, we should be unable to do it: we can only retain you as free and powerful allies.”[345] What Nikias said at Athens to dissuade his countrymen from the enterprise, under sincere conviction, Euphêmus repeated at Kamarina for the purpose of conciliating that city; probably, without believing it himself, yet the anticipation was not on that account the less true and reasonable. [345] Thucyd. vi, 86. ἡμεῖς μέν γε οὔτε ἐμμεῖναι δυνατοὶ μὴ μεθ’ ὑμῶν· εἴ τε καὶ γενόμενοι κακοὶ κατεργασαίμεθα, ἀδύνατοι κατασχεῖν, διὰ μῆκός τε πλοῦ καὶ ἀπορίᾳ φυλακῆς πόλεων μεγάλων καὶ παρασκευῇ ἠπειρωτίδων, etc. This is exactly the language of Nikias in his speech to the Athenians. vi, 11.