Summer 396: The Siege Fails
Whether the alleged naval battle took place or not; the strategic situation had not changed for the combatants when summer arrived in Sicily. Himilco had not been able to take Syracuse, Dionysius had failed to defeat the Punic forces, and both parties were reliant on overseas supplies. At this juncture a plague broke out among the Carthaginian troops, who had been suffering from the intense heat as well.
Read more about this topic: Siege Of Syracuse (397 BC)
Famous quotes containing the words summer, siege and/or fails:
“Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
First vague shadow of surmise
Flits across her bosom young,
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free;
Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“That hour in the life of a man when first the help of humanity fails him, and he learns that in his obscurity and indigence humanity holds him a dog and no man: that hour is a hard one, but not the hardest. There is still another hour which follows, when he learns that in his infinite comparative minuteness and abjectness, the gods do likewise despise him, and own him not of their clan.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)