It's been a long time since I've seen anything by you and nodded my head in approval all the way through. If anything, you underrated the imperial power Athens achieved from its corner of Greece, reaching out to Cyprus and Egypt - the assault upon Syracuse did certainly NOT look like a mistake when it started, and could well have succeeded had chance not thrown up incompetent generals. Syracuse itself, in fact, was the only Greek city equal to Athens in territory, population and wealth, and, like Athens itself, ran an imperial foreign policy that at one point looked like it might achieve the conquest of the Italian peninsula before Rome. Only, unlike Athens, it had a bad habit of throwing up tyrants; and comparing the two cities, it seems clear that democracy worked better for AThens than irregular tyranny or monarchy for Syracuse.