47.
Nicias was of this opinion: that it was best to go presently with the whole fleet to Selinus, against which they were chiefly set forth, and if the Egestaeans would furnish them with money for the whole army, then to deliberate further upon the occasion;
if not, then to require maintenance for the sixty galleys set forth at their own request, and staying with them by force or composition to bring the Selinuntians and them to a peace;
and thence passing along by other of those cities, to make a show of the power of the Athenian state, and of their readiness to help their friends and confederates;
and so to go home, unless they could light on some quick and unthought-of means to do some good for the Leontines, or gain some of the other cities to their own league;
and not to put the commonwealth in danger at her own charges.
The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Thucydides. Thomas Hobbes. translator. London. Bohn. 1843.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.