Polymnia   

answer, and thus addressed Gelo-
"King of the Syracusans! Greece sent us here to thee to ask for an
army, and not to ask for a general. Thou, however, dost not promise to
send us any army at all, if thou art not made leader of the Greeks;
and this command is what alone thou sticklest for. Now when thy
request was to have the whole command, we were content to keep
silence; for well we knew that we might trust the Spartan envoy to
make answer for us both. But since, after failing in thy claim to lead
the whole armament, thou hast now put forward a request to have the
command of the fleet, know that, even should the Spartan envoy consent
to this, we will not consent. The command by sea, if the
Lacedaemonians do not wish for it, belongs to us. While they like to
keep this command, we shall raise no dispute; but we will not yield
our right to it in favour of any one else. Where would be the
advantage of our having raised up a naval force greater than that of
any other Greek people, if nevertheless we should suffer Syracusans to
take the command away from us?- from us, I say, who are Athenians, the
most ancient nation in Greece, the only Greeks who have never
changed their abode- the people who are said by the poet Homer to have
sent to Troy the man best able of all the Greeks to array and
marshal an army- so that we may be allowed to boast somewhat."
Gelo replied- "Athenian stranger, ye have, it seems, no lack of
commanders; but ye are likely to lack men to receive their orders.
As ye are resolved to yield nothing and claim everything, ye had
best make haste back to Greece, and say that the spring of her year is
lost to her." The meaning of this expression was the following: as the
spring is manifestly the finest season of the year, so (he meant to
say) were his troops the finest of the Greek army- Greece,
therefore, deprived of his alliance, would be like a year with the
spring taken from it.
Then the Greek envoys, without having any further dealings with
Gelo, sailed away home. And Gelo, who feared that the Greeks would
be too weak to withstand the barbarians, and yet could not any how
bring himself to go to the Peloponnese, and there, though king of
Sicily, serve under the Lacedaemonians, left off altogether to
contemplate that course of action, and betook himself to quite a
different plan. As soon as ever tidings reached him of the passage
of the Hellespont by the Persians, he sent off three penteconters,
under the command of Cadmus, the son of Scythas, a native of Cos,
who was to go to Delphi, taking with him a large sum of money and a
stock of friendly words: there he was to watch the war, and see what
turn it would take: if the barbarians prevailed, he was to give Xerxes
the treasure, and with it earth and water for the lands which Gelo
ruled- if the Greeks won the day, he was to convey the treasure back.
This Cadmus had at an earlier time received from his father the
kingly power at Cos in a right good condition, and had of his own free
will and without the approach of any danger, from pure love of
justice, given up his power into the hands of the people at large, and
departed to Sicily; where he assisted in the Samian seizure and
settlement of Zancle, or Messana, as it was afterwards called. Upon
this occasion Gelo chose him to send into Greece, because he was
acquainted with the proofs of honesty which he had given. And now he
added to his former honourable deeds an action which is not the
least of his merits. With a vast sum entrusted to him and completely
in his power, so that he might have kept it for his own use if he
had liked, he did not touch it; but when the Greeks gained the
sea-fight and Xerxes fled away with his army, he brought the whole
treasure back with him to Sicily.
They, however, who dwell in Sicily, say that Gelo, though he
knew that he must serve under the Lacedaemonians, would nevertheless
have come to the aid of the Greeks, had not it been for Terillus,
the son of Crinippus, king of Himera; who, driven from his city by
Thero, the son of Aenesidemus, king of Agrigentum, brought into Sicily
at this very time an army of three hundred thousand men,