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hung with the captured suits of armour, and then the victors crowned themselves with wreaths, adorned their own horses splendidly while they sheared and cropped the horses of their conquered foes, and so marched into the city. They had brought to suc- cessful end a struggle which was the most brilliant ever made by Hellenes against Hellenes, and had won the completest of victories by the most over- whelming and impetuous display of zeal and valour. XXVIII. At a general assembly of the Syracusans and their allies, Eurycles, the popular leader, brought in a motion, first, that the day on which they had taken Nicias be made a holy day, with sacrifices and abstention from labour, and that the festival be called Asinaria, from the river Asinarus (the day was the twenty-sixth of the month Carneius, which the Athenians call Metageitnion) ; and second, that the serving men of the Athenians and their imme- diate allies be sold into slavery, while the freemen and the Sicilian Hellenes who had joined them be cast into the stone quarries for watch and ward,—all except the generals, who should be put to death. These propositions were adopted by the Syracusans. When Hermocrates protested that there was some- thing better than victory, to wit, a noble use of victory, he was met with a tumult of disapproval ; and when Gylippus demanded the Athenian generals as his prize, that he might take them alive to the Lacedaemonians, the Syracusans, now grown insolent with their good fortune, abused him roundly. They were the more ready to do this because, all through the war, they had found it hard to put up with his harshness and the Laconian style with which he