When Gelo promised to send to the assistance of the Greeks twenty thousand infantry and two hundred warships, if they would grant him the command either on land or at sea, they say that the representatives of Greece sitting in council at <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Corinth&groupId=493&placeId=928">Corinth</a> gave a reply to Gelo\'s envoys which was much to the point.
They bade Gelo with his forces come as an auxiliary, but as for the command actual circumstances would of necessity invest the most capable men with it.
These are by no means the words of men resting their whole hope on <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Syracuse&groupId=994&placeId=1753">Syracuse</a>, but of men relying on themselves and inviting anyone who wished to do so to join in the contest and win the prize of valour.
But Timaeus, in commenting on all this, is so long-winded and so obviously anxious to manifest that <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Sicily&groupId=973&placeId=1724">Sicily</a> was more important than all the rest of Greece — the events occurring in <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Sicily&groupId=973&placeId=1724">Sicily</a> being so much more magnificent and more noble than those anywhere else in the world, the sagest of men distinguished for wisdom coming from <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Sicily&groupId=973&placeId=1724">Sicily</a> and the most capable and wonderful leaders being those from <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Syracuse&groupId=994&placeId=1753">Syracuse</a> —
that no boy in a school of rhetoric who is set to write a eulogy of Thersites or a censure of Penelope or anything else of the sort could surpass him in the paradoxes he ventures on.
Walbank Commentary