328 NICIAS.

the Sicilian auxiliaries be kept and employed in the quarries, except the generals, who should be put to death. The Syracusans favored the proposal, and when Hermoc- rates said, that to use well a victory was better than to gain a victory, he was met with great clamor and out- cry. When G3'lippus, also, demanded the Athenian gen- erals to be delivered to him, that he might carry them to the Lacedaemonians, the Syracusans, now insolent with their good fortune, gave him ill words. Indeed, before this, even in the war, they had been impatient at his rough behavior and Lacedaemonian haughtiness, and had, as Timaaus tells us, discovered sordidness and avarice in his character, vices which may have descended to him from his father Cleandrides, who was convicted of bribery and banished. And the very man himself, of the one thousand talents which Lysander sent to Sparta, embez- zled thirty, and hid them under the tiles of his house, and was detected and shamefully fled his country. But this is related more at large in the life of Lysander. Timaeus says that Demosthenes and Nicias did not die, as Thucydides and Philistus have written, by the order of the Syracu- sans, but that upon a message sent them from Hermocra- tes, whilst yet the assembly were sitting, by the conni- vance of some of their guards, they were enabled to put an end to themselves. Their bodies, however, were thrown out before the gates and offered for a public spectacle. And I have heard that to this day in a tem- ple at Syracuse is shown a shield, said to have been Nio ias's, curiously wrought and embroidered with gold and purple intermixed. Most of the Athenians perished in the quarries by diseases and ill diet, being allowed only one pint of barley every day, and one half pint of water. Many of them, however, were carried off by stealth, or, from the first, were supposed to be servants, and were sold as slaves. These latter were branded on their fore-