[1][2] When Athens sent an armada to conquer Sicily in 415, Hermocrates called for expanding the anti-Athens coalition, and sent ambassadors to Sparta, Corinth, Carthage, and Italy seeking allies.

Due to his lack of success in the battlefield, he was dismissed from this position as strategoi, but he later became one of the most important advisers to the Spartan general Gylippus after he had arrived in Sicily.

[5] While he remained in exile, tensions between the Sicilian city Selinunte and their Athenian allied rival Segesta, broke out into war.

Segesta, unable to call on Athens for help, instead asked Carthage for assistance and in 410 BC, Hannibal Mago launched an invasion of Sicily.

It is curious to reflect that, while Critias is to recount how the prehistoric Athens of nine thousand years ago had repelled the invasion from Atlantis and saved the Mediterranean peoples from slavery, Hermocrates would be remembered by the Athenians as the man who had repulsed their own greatest effort at imperialist expansion.