below it, both
to the southwest and northwest.

The usual mode of assailing fortified towns in the time of the
Peloponnesian war was to build a double wall round them sufficiently
strong to check any sally of the garrison from within or any attack of a
relieving force from without. The interval within the two walls of the
circumvallation was roofed over, and formed barracks, in which the
besiegers posted themselves, and awaited the effects of want or
treachery among the besieged in producing a surrender; and in every
Greek city of those days, as in every Italian republic of the Middle
Ages, the rage of domestic sedition between aristocrats and democrats
ran high. Rancorous refugees swarmed in the camp of every invading
enemy; and every blockaded city was sure to contain within its walls a
body of intriguing malcontents, who were eager to purchase a party
triumph at the expense of a national disaster. Famine and faction were
the allies on whom besiegers relied. The generals of that time trusted
to the operation of these sure confederates as soon as they could
establish a complete blockade. They rarely ventured on the attempt to
storm any fortified post, for the military engines of antiquity were
feeble in breaching masonry before the improvements which the first
Dionysius effected in the mechanics of destruction; and the lives of
spearmen the boldest and most high-trained would, of course, have been
idly spent in charges against unshattered walls.

A city built close to the sea, like Syracuse, was impregnable save by
the combined operations of a superior hostile fleet and a superior
hostile army; and Syracuse, from her size, her population, and her
military and naval resources, not unnaturally thought herself secure
from finding in another Greek city a foe capable of sending a sufficient
armament to menace her with capture and subjection. But in the spring of
B.C. 414 the Athenian navy was mistress of her harbor and the adjacent
seas; an Athenian army had defeated her troops, and cooped them within
the town; and from bay to bay a blockading wall was being rapidly
carried across the strips of level ground and the high ridge outside the
city (then termed Epipolae), which, if completed, would have cut the
Syracusans off from all succor from the interior of Sicily, and have
left them at the mercy of the Athenian generals. The besiegers' works
were, indeed, unfinished; but every day the unfortified interval in
their lines