There had been earlier military incursions into Sicily back in the 420s, but nothing much came of them. After the limited successes in the Peloponnese, Alcibiades set his sights on what was for him an attainable target, the conquest of Sicily. The description on the screen comes form Plutarch (the title is mine; the translation is B. Perrin’s from Perseus 4.0). It perfectly captures the mood in Athens and the temptation that the conquest of Sicily must have represented. Sicily may well have seemed like the New World to the Athenians, a land of unlimited resources, ripe for the taking, the stepping stone to Carthage and possibly to Italy.