According to the warfare of that time, Nikias could only take Syracuse by building a wall of circumvallation so as to cut off its supplies by land, and at the same time blockading it by sea. Now looking at the inner and outer city as above described, at the moment when he first reached Sicily, we see that—after defeating the Syracusans and driving them within their walls, which would be of course the first part of the process—he might have carried his blockading wall in a direction nearly southerly from the innermost point of the cleft of Santa Bonagia, between the city wall and the Temenitês so as to reach the Great Harbor at a spot not far westward of the junction of Ortygia with the main land. Or he might have landed in the Great Harbor, and executed the same wall, beginning from the opposite end. Or he might have preferred to construct two blockading walls, one for each city separately: a short wall would have sufficed in front of the isthmus joining Ortygia, while a separate wall might have been carried to shut up the outer city, across the unfortified space constituting the Nekropolis, so as to end not in the Great Harbor, but in the coast of the Nekropolis opposite to Ortygia. Such were the possibilities of the case at the time when Nikias first reached Rhegium. But during the many months of inaction which he had allowed, the Syracusans had barred out both these possibilities, and had greatly augmented the difficulties of his intended enterprise. They had constructed a new wall, covering both their inner and their outer city,—stretching across the whole front which faced the slope of Epipolæ, from the Great Harbor to the opposite sea near Santa Bonagia,—and expanding westward so as to include within it the statue and consecrated ground of Apollo Temenitês, with the cliff near adjoining to it known by the name of the Temenite Cliff. This was done for the express purpose of lengthening the line indispensable for the besiegers to make their wall a good blockade.[368] After it was finished, Nikias could not begin his blockade from the side of the Great Harbor, since he would have been obstructed by the precipitous southern cliff of Epipolæ. He was under the necessity of beginning his wall from a portion of the higher ground of Epipolæ, and of carrying it both along a greater space and higher up on the slope, until he touched the Great Harbor at a point farther removed from Ortygia. [368] Thucyd. vi, 75. Ἐτείχιζον δὲ καὶ οἱ Συρακόσιοι ἐν τῷ χειμῶνι τούτῳ πρός τε τῇ πόλει, τὸν Τεμενίτην ἐντὸς ποιησάμενοι, ~τεῖχος παρὰ πᾶν τὸ πρὸς τὰς Ἐπιπολὰς ὁρῶν, ὅπως μὴ δι’ ἐλάσσονος εὐαποτείχιστοι ὦσιν~, ἢν ἄρα σφάλλωνται, etc.