These propositions wore accepted by the Syracusans, who treated
Hermokrates with contempt when he urged that to be merciful in victory
would be more honourable to them than the victory itself. Gylippus
too, when he begged that he might carry the Athenian generals alive to
Sparta, was shamefully insulted by the excited Syracusans, who had
long disliked the irritating Spartan airs of superiority natural to
Gylippus, and now, flushed with victory, no longer cared to conceal
their feelings. Timaeus tells us that they accused him of avarice and
peculation, a hereditary vice, it appears, in his family since his
father Kleandrides was banished from Sparta for taking bribes, while
he himself afterwards stole thirty of the hundred talents which
Lysander sent home to Sparta, and hid them under the roof of his
house, but was informed against, and exiled in disgrace. This will be
found described at greater length in the Life of Lysander.
In his account of the death of Nikias and Demosthenes, Timaeus does not
exactly follow the narrative of Thucydides and Philistus, as he
informs us that while the assembly was still sitting, Hermokrates sent
to their prison to inform them that they were condemned to death, and
to afford them the means of dying by their own hands, while the other
historians state that the Syracusans put them to death.[4] Be this as
it may, their dead bodies were exposed before the gates of Syracuse as
a spectacle for the citizens.
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