IN EXPLANATION OF THE PLAN OF SYRACUSE AND THE OPERATIONS DURING THE ATHENIAN SIEGE

In the description given of this memorable event by Thucydidês, there is a good deal which is only briefly and imperfectly explained. He certainly has left us various difficulties, in the solution of which we cannot advance beyond conjecture more or less plausible: though there are some which appear to me to admit of a more satisfactory solution than has yet been offered.

Dr. Arnold, in an Appendix annexed to the third volume of his Thucydidês (p. 265 seq.), together with two Plans, has bestowed much pains on the elucidation of these difficulties: also Colonel Leake, in his valuable Remarks on the Topography of Syracuse (the perusal of which, prior to their appearance in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, I owe to his politeness); Serra di Falco, in the fourth volume of his Antichità di Sicilia; and Saverio Cavallari (the architect employed in 1839, in the examination and excavation of the ground which furnished materials for the work of Serra di Falco) in a separate pamphlet—Zur Topographie von Syrakus—printed in the Göttinger Studien for 1845, and afterwards reprinted at Göttingen. With all the aid derived from these comments, I arrive at conclusions on some points different from all of them, which I shall now proceed shortly to state—keeping closely and exclusively to Thucydidês and the Athenian siege, and not professing to meddle with Syracuse as it stood afterwards.