The news of the disaster which had befallen the Athenian arms in Sicily, was no doubt soon conveyed by many channels to Greece; but, if we may believe an anecdote preserved by Plutarch, it did not reach Athens until it was generally known elsewhere. He relates, that a foreigner who had landed at Piræus, as he took his seat in a rber's shop, happened to mention the event of the Sicilian expedition as a subject of conversation which he supposed to be commonly notorious; and the barber, having hastened to the city to convey the intelligence to the archons, was immediately brought before an assembly of the people, which they summoned to hear his report but as he was unable to give any account of his informer, he was put to the rack, as the author of a false alarm, until the truth was confirmed by other witnesses. According to another story, in itself not more improbable, the multitude was assembled in the theatre, listening with unusual delight to a burlesque poem of the Thasian Hegemon, the client of Alcibiades, which by a singular coincidence turned on the overthrow of the Giants, when the sad tidings arrived, and soon spread through the spectators: yet, though almost each had some private loss to bewail, beside the public calamity, they both kept their seats, and hid their tears, that their grief might not be observed by the foreigners present, and would not even suffer the poet to leave off.