In confirmation of my charge against Timaeus on this count also, besides that of his mistakes and his deliberate falsification of the truth, I shall give some short extracts from speeches acknowledged to be his, giving names and dates.
Of those who were in power in <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Sicily&groupId=973&placeId=1724">Sicily</a> after the elder Gelo, we have always accepted as a fact that the most capable rulers were Hermocrates, Timoleon, and Pyrrhus of Epirus, and these are the last to whom one should attribute childish and idle speeches.
But Timaeus in his twenty-first book says that at the time when Eurymedon came to <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Sicily&groupId=973&placeId=1724">Sicily</a> and was urging the towns to pursue the war against <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Syracuse&groupId=994&placeId=1753">Syracuse</a>, the Geleans, who were suffering by the war, sent to Camarina begging for a truce .
The people of Camarina gladly consented, and upon this both cities sent embassies to their allies begging them to dispatch trustworthy commissioners to Gela to discuss terms of peace and the general interests of all concerned.
When, on the arrival of these commissioners, a resolution was proposed in council he represents Hermocrates as speaking somewhat as follows.
This statesman, after praising the people of Gela and Camarina first of all for having themselves made the truce, secondly for being the originators of the negotiations, and thirdly for seeing to it that the terms of peace were not discussed by the multitude but by the leading citizens who knew well the difference between war and peace,
after this introduces one or two practical reflexions and then says that they themselves must now give ear to him and learn how much war differs from peace, and this after having just said that he was thankful to the Geleans for this very thing that the discussion was not held by the multitude but in a council well acquainted with such changes.
From this it appears that Timaeus was not only deficient in practical sense, but does not even attain the level of the themes we hear in schools of rhetoric.
For there all, I suppose, think they ought to give their hearers proofs of things wow they are ignorant or which they disbelieve, but that to exercise our wits in speaking of what our hearers already know is most foolish and childish . . .
Apart from his general mistake in devoting the greater part of the speech to a matter that does not require a single word, he employs such arguments as none could believe to have been used by,
I will not say that Hermocrates who took part with the Lacedaemonians in the battle of Aegospotami and captured the whole Athenian army with its generals in <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Sicily&groupId=973&placeId=1724">Sicily</a> but, by any ordinary schoolboy.
Walbank Commentary